Choosing football teams to play in the major January bowl games is hardly an issue up there with Iraq or looming international financial crises. Nevertheless, the perennial controversy over selection of schools for “the national championship game” may suggest some contradictions and limits in the ideals that guide not only our sporting lives but even the broader culture.

For many years, bowl games had commitments to particular conferences. The Rose Bowl always paired the Midwest Big Ten winner with the West Coast Pac Ten champion. Such a system increasingly frustrated a sporting public that wanted to know which university “really” had the best football team. To advance this objective, university administrators, bowl game committees and major athletic conferences established a complex system, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), to select the two best teams and send them to one of the major bowls each year.

As with much of modern life, no perspective on this topic could be deemed adequate without invoking science and computers. The BCS has established a convoluted index of college football supremacy based on the surveys of college football coaches, football writers and computer rankings. The computer assessment is itself an amalgamation of six separate computer models of football excellence devised from such measures as strength of opponents’ schedules and margins of victory.

This year BCS proponents took pride in a system where sports writers, coaches and all computer models ranked Southern California and Oklahoma as one and two. Much of the sporting public, however, has cried foul. Auburn managed to go 12-0 in the South Eastern Conference, where football, God and country (in that order) constitute the Holy Trinity.

There is something a little odd about letting computers – or even coaches and sports writers – rank teams for this purpose. Part of the beauty of sports lies in the eccentricities of individual matchups and the sheer unpredictability of the encounter. Notre Dame lost to hapless Brigham Young and yet overwhelmed my childhood favorite, mighty Michigan. The BCS amounts to pseudo science in the interest of an utterly flawed and largely arbitrary system.

Most fans would like to see a college playoff system where the winners of each conference would be matched in an elimination format similar to the National Football League. But here is where the most absurd myths intervene. University presidents have thus far vetoed any playoff system. They contend that playoffs would lengthen the season and thereby impose too severe a burden on the scholar athletes.

These same presidents apparently think very little about what big time football is already doing to their campuses and their scholar athletes. Except in a very few cases, like Notre Dame and Michigan with their high-profile programs and enormous TV revenues, football costs more than it brings in. Recent studies also indicate that these big programs may attract alumni donations to sports, but they do not enhance the larger university budget. (I suspect that a full and fair cost accounting would show that the University of Maine’s football program costs the university, perhaps even with the payoffs from a game at Nebraska.)

Nor are these student athletes thriving even under the current system. Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson writes an annual column assessing the academic accomplishments of the major bowl teams. The bowl games may not be predictable, but once again most of the top contenders have graduation rates well below 50 percent. (Southern Cal is a commendable exception.) If university presidents were serious about scholarship, the enormous expenditures on football would be trimmed, practice times curbed, and programs axed if graduation rates comparable to the university averages could not be maintained. Football could remain an intercollegiate sport, but more along the lines of Division III programs like Bowdoin, Bates and Colby.

Such a revolution would, of course, inhibit college football’s ability to send stars into the NFL. And it runs contrary to the prevailing image that scholarship, the camaraderie of the college campus, and professional sporting excellence can coexist. That image seems vital to many alumni, and many university presidents seem reluctant to puncture that bubble. Indeed, they are often part of the problem.

Donna Shalala, who was president of the University of Wisconsin before serving as President Clinton’s secretary of Health and Human Services, fired a football coach and athletic director because the school wasn’t winning enough football games. Presidents at Texas and Ohio State have fired coaches who managed to win “only” three-quarters of their games.

With many university presidents devoting inordinate time and resources to the success of their football teams, it is hard to take expressions of concern for scholarship seriously.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net