Who should be college football's national champion?

Kellen Holtzman-Florida

Florida earned the right to be on top. The system may not be fair, but it was set up to crown one national champion. And it did.

The issue goes beyond whether or not Utah is deserving of a stake as national champions. Did Utah do everything that was asked of it? Yes. The Utes beat every team on their schedule, including six bowl participants. They won the Mountain West Conference title and beat an Alabama team in the Sugar Bowl that spent about half of the season as the country's top team.

But that doesn't mean Utah deserves the distinction of being named champions or co-champions. Nor does any team have the right to be called a co-champion.

College football is unique in lacking a tournament or playoff to crown national champions. Proponents of the BCS system cite the emphasis that the system places on winning in the regular season.

However, the BCS National Championship Game was created for a reason: to determine a single winner. Florida and Oklahoma earned the right to play for a title and no other team, whether it is Utah, Texas, or USC, should interfere with it.

A joint championship between Florida and Utah would not only defeat the purpose of the BCS National Championship, but it wouldn't be fair to Oklahoma OR Florida.

Utah would get a national championship when it didn't even have to play Florida. In hindsight, Oklahoma would be better off participating in a different BCS game if that were the case, so it could stake a claim as champion.

Despite each having a loss, Texas and USC are as deserving as Utah is. It's hard to compare a team (Utah) from the MWC to teams from two "BCS" conferences, especially the Big 12.

With teams like BYU and TCU, an argument can be made that the MWC had a better season than the PAC-10. But there is a reason why the Pac-10 has an automatic bid to BCS games and the MWC does not.

Critics will point to Utah's regular season win over Pac-10 member Oregon State. Utah knocked off the Beavers 31-28 at home, while the Trojans went on the road to Corvallis, OR and lost 27-21.

That's great, but Utah didn't play all of the other teams that USC did, making the Oregon State match-ups hard for me to use as justification over the Trojans.

Utah also boasts three wins over top-15 teams (No. 12 TCU, No. 14 BYU, No. 4 Alabama) this season. But USC has wins over two top-10 teams (No. 5 Ohio State, No. 8 Penn State) on its side, as well as wins over No. 21 California and No. 23 Oregon.

Texas beat three top-10 teams (No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 6 Oklahoma State, No. 10 Ohio State) as well as No. 11 Missouri. And the Longhorns played in one of the top-two conferences in the country. So if you're going to make an argument for Utah, don't forget about Texas and USC.

Utah coach Kyle Whittingham stated that he believes it is about how good of a season a team has and not whom it beats. Whittingham's point is that his team won every game on its schedule, earning the right, in his mind for a national title.

What if Ball State hadn't stumbled towards the end of the season and finished undefeated? Would they too, deserve a stake at the title because it was about the games it won and not whom they defeated?

Any loyal follower of college football can see Utah is a far more talented team than Ball State, but where is the line being drawn for this logic?

These arguments will never stop until there is a playoff. Utah should have the right to prove it is worthy of a national championship.

But for now, the winner of the BCS National Championship Game, Florida, remains my champion.

This writer can be contacted at sports@theeastcarolinian.com.

Jared Jackson-Utah

Today marks the one-week anniversary of the Florida's so-called national championship but the fact of the matter is the championship was really won on Jan. 2 by Utah.

It's common knowledge in the world of sports that if you finish a season undefeated then you should be considered the champion. But, in the world of college football there is an exception.

In Cincinnati, as I was returning home from covering the Liberty Bowl, I passed by Utah fans while in the airport. All of them were wearing "Sugar Bowl Champions" T-shirts but I wondered to myself how it felt to take in the reality that even though you just destroyed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl and finished the season undefeated, there would be no national championship banner to raise in Salt Lake City.

Utah, in my opinion, is the undisputed champion in college football for the 2008 season. That's right, not co-champions along with Florida, but the undisputed No.1 team in the land.

I mean, no disrespect towards the Gators with that statement. The Utes did something that Florida could not do in finishing the season without a loss. Oh that's right, other teams such as Texas and USC who bicker about being the best team in the country also finished with a loss. Sorry guys, but a certain team out west has a big, fat zero in the loss column.

Besides beating Alabama, who was No.1 for all of November and up until Florida defeated them in the SEC Championship Game in early December; the Utes had quite an impressive resume. Along the way, Utah defeated four top-25 teams in TCU, Oregon State, BYU and the aforementioned Alabama.

The Utes didn't just beat the Crimson Tide - they destroyed them. Utah scored 21 points in the first quarter while Alabama was only able to muster out 17 in the entire contest. I cannot think of another instance in which a perennial power like the Crimson Tide were defeated by a team in the first quarter or by a non-BCS program at that.

When you take a look at the body of work Utah compiled this season, is there any clear reasoning as to why Utah was left out of the national championship game?

Oh yeah, they don't play in a conference that has an automatic BCS bid such as the ACC, SEC, Big East, PAC-10, Big 10 or Big 12.

The BCS conferences compile 66 teams of the 119 programs in Division 1. That is substantial because it simply means that half of the programs in the nation are ruled out of the national championship game- before the regular season even begins.

Over the last decade, the BCS has strived to produce a "true" national championship by using mathematical formulas that serve to pit the so-called No.1 and No.2 ranked teams against each other at the end of the season and produce a "true" national champion.

But while the system sounds like a good idea in premise, it has been an utter failure since it was implemented and has instead produced controversy instead of a clear-cut national champion almost every year.

So while Florida will go down in history as the national champion of the 2008 season, Utah will always be the team that I recognize as the true champion.

After all, they did what they were supposed to- beat everyone they lined up against and even the big bad boys of Alabama in the Deep South, the very team that Florida beat just to get the chance to play for the national title.

Talk about injustice.

This writer can be contacted at sports@theeastcarolinian.com.