No, Utah, you can't have a playoff (not yours). But it appears the Utes' perfect season, culminating in a Sugar Bowl beatdown over Alabama, has caught the BCS' attention in a positive way.
To that end, there was an interesting nugget in Tony Barnhardt's AJC column on Friday. It looks like, per the new ESPN-BCS contract, the days of USC beating up on a 3-loss BXI team might be coming to an end:
Rose Bowl Going Non-Traditional
↵But in the new contract, I’m told, there is an interesting clause: The first time in the deal that the Rose loses one of its champions to the BCS title game, that opening will be automatically filled by a Coalition (non-BCS conference) team if one has qualified.
For example: Let’s say Southern Cal wins the Pac-10 and qualifies for the BCS championship game in 2010. And let’s say Utah or Boise State goes undefeated again the wins the Mountain West or WAC. That team, if it doesn’t get into the big game, would automatically go to the Rose, where no Coalition team has played before.↵It’s not clear whether the “first time” part means that this is a one-time allowance or a new policy going forward; either way, it’s a radical departure from the culture of “tradition” that the Rose Bowl had been so steeped in. Something’s terribly wrong with having Texas in Pasadena, so drasticlly wrong that it better serves the Rose Bowl to have a Big Ten also-ran instead... but what the hell, let’s get Boise State in there and see what happens.
(H/T: The Hlog.)
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