Football is so interwoven into the culture of Oklahoma one is quick to forget what it's like when the state's college teams have so little to offer. While we are the state of Will Rogers, Carl Albert, Jim Thorpe, several astronauts and - late pun - a galaxy of country music stars, most Oklahomans would just as soon identify themselves with the quality of our collegiate gridironing from year to year.

Oklahoma University is, it seems needless to say, the first team that comes to mind on this. Oklahoma fans have had it good since the Sooners started winning again in 1999, but all of us surely cannot forget the doom and gloom of the John Blake years. While such doom and gloom years were going on, state fans had Oklahoma State to fall back on. While my beloved Pokes were not winning national championships, we could at least be expected to go to a bowl game every now and then and we could certainly be expected to beat the Sooners on occasion.

This year, it's a tad bit different. Oklahoma State started out a phantom 3-0 before dropping to, by my count, 3-4. The Pokes followed the Bill Snyder Rule of Scheduling, scheduling three nobodies to warm them up for conference play in the Big 12, a conference definitely not composed of nobodies. I've seen exactly one OSU game this year, and in that game I could see it would be a long year for the pokes.

I've followed the season via news account spariningly, but it looks as though we're now on our third-string quarterback, a quarterback who tossed four interceptions and lost a fumble in Saturday's game against the collossal B12 powerhouse, Iowa State.

When does roundball season start again?

The emails I've received from OSU fans who actually bother to go to the games have only reinforced the doomsday scenario that the Pokes are slipping into a badness not seen since the fabled last year of Pat Jones' tenure, when the Pokes piled up double-digit losses and reconciled themselves to the fact that they could not win without recruiting violations.

Things haven't been much more sunny in Norman, the state's football capitol. The Sooners, who I've watched several times this year, play a particularly painful style of football, one consisting primarily of two-yard passes and attempting to run a gimp AD Peterson up the middle. To invoke a cliche, is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? The Sooners are a great lab experience for this, since the mighty have fallen quite quickly. Two national championship appearances have been followed by a team that was outplayed by Tulsa, a team that needed overtime to defeat a resurgent Baylor squad, a team that didn't show up against arch-rival Texas, and a team that, until Saturday's game against the Baptist Bears, refused to integrate any form of a vertical passing game.

All of this paints the backdrop of an abysmal college football season, one that has put me in the awkward position of not only rooting for Notre Dame, but rooting for the hated 'Horns as well.

Technically, I'm not rooting for Texas until their inevitbale matchup against USC in the Big Kahuna Game. But in the back of my mind, I know that Texas is probably the only team that can beat USC, a team that has been outplayed in virutally every one of their games this year but continues to win. Watching USC, as I have in all but one of their games this year, I think it's comprable to having Christmas Eve every Saturday, only to wake up on Christmas morning with a coal in my stocking and a scorching case of herpes.

This week, the Trojans faced possibly the worst team in major college football, the Washington Huskies. The Huskies played them point-for-point throughout most of the game and managed to score 24 points, none of which came in garbage time. The Trojans are either stealing Prada suits out of the emperor's closet, or they're the most underachieving undefeated team in the history of college football. I pray for them to lose.

Still, though, what is a college football fan like myself to do? Rooting for Notre Dame and Texas are heresy to me. It would be like taking acid and coming out on the other side supporting both Communism and the political return of Albert Gore. Even worse, I'm more interested in the season of USC than I am of the seasons of either the Pokes or the Gooners. I could probably name more startes for the Trojans than I could for either of my state teams, and that is saying something.

(Come to think of it so detached am I from Stillwater, other than belligerently shouting out the name "Woods!" and our two quarterbacks, I couldn't name a soul on OSU's team this year. Added to that was watching Oklahoma play Baylor, where the Sooners have actually dipped into their FIFTH STRING and, better yet, are no worse for the wear - the Sooners have been crippled by ankle injuries and have finally been forced to field scrubs who actually look like they take being in the game seriously.)

And then, to add insult to injury, there is the Heisman Talk, which started in earnest this week. The only two people it seems possible to win the Heisman play for two of my three least-favorite teams: Reggie Bush of USC and Vince Young of Texas. Kirk Herbstreit of ESPN's College GameDay (whose opinions I normally respect) had the audacity to imply that Reggie Bush is, in fact, THE BEST COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYER EVER. Aside from the immediate allusions to The Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, I began wondering if Herbstreit and Corso were playing some kind of drinking game only they knew about, the point of which being to see what type of over-the-top rhetoric they actually could get away with.

For the record, Reggie Bush is the best college football player operating this season. However, Reggie Bush is no better then freshman Maurice Clarett was in 2001, not nearly the back that O.J. Simpson, Earl Campbell and Herschel Walker were, and certainly not nearly the back/return-guy that Barry Sanders was.

Still drunk from Herbstreit's bizarre pronouncement, I watched Texas Tech get castrated by Texas and listened to Gary Danielson pronounce that Texas' Vince Young is, and I quote, "too good for college football." I was unsure what Danielson meant by that, or at least I pretended to be unsure of what he meant by that, and then I realized that Zeus, Hera, et al must be on Mount Olympus playing human chess for a chance to see these two immortal football stars play each other in The Big Game.

This type of hyperbole is fine for fans on their schools' message boards, but it's rather annoying coming from the people who comment nationally on college football and shape the opinions of others. One is reminded of the, were we to be fair, much more deserving hyperbole heaped on Oklahoma two years ago, when they were "the best team ever" until they were gashed by Kansas State as nothing more than a sheep in wolf's clothing. Darren Sproles, whose pro career in San Diego consists of not catching punts and kick-offs, scorched the Sooners for a Herculean amount of yards and showed that they were not only not the best team ever two years ago, they weren't even the best team in the Big 12.

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All of this leads to why college football needs a tournament of some kind, one consisting of eight or sixteen teams. People in the media are so over-the-top in love with USC and so equally in love with Vince Young and vis-a-vis Texas that there is no way Virginia Tech, Georgia, Alabama or UCLA are going to crash that titanic party. (I say Vince Young vis-a-vis Texas, because the media love VY, so they love Texas as well; actually watching the Texas game and cringing at how many times Young's name was called, I asked my dad if he could name one other player from Texas - again, while the game was on! - and, the point is, neither of us could.)

No matter how much USC struggles, they're going to remain number one, and the way the system is set up, that's only fair. They're the returning champion and someone should have to knock them off. But beyond that, who's to say that Texas is better than Alabama, or that UCLA is worse than Texas? Anyone who watches the games knows that Texas is damn good, but were the top eight teams pitted against each other in a tournament, I would put a good bottle of Scotch on the fact that the odds would be slim that both Texas and USC would be playing for the title, because frankly, they would not.

Watching the, er, thrilling Alabama-Tennessee game I was telling my father how furious Tide fans would be if they're dormant-for-a-decade program went undefeated yet failed to play for the National Title. It was bad enough last year when Auburn got left out of the party, but Alabama? We're talking Football Royalty here (The Royal Court of Football includes Notre Dame, Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, USC and Miami - apologies to Texas, Florida State, Penn State et al). If Alabama goes undefeated (it won't, since Auburn will beat the Tide in the Iron Bowl) and wins the SEC Championship Game, there will be Senate hearings if they are left out of the title game. Alabama, like the other seven teams included in College Football Royalty, by common law, cannot be left out of the title game. It would be bad enough to leave Georgia out of the game, but Alabama! Preposterous.

But, since the doyens of college football deemed Texas and USC as the best two teams before a down had ever been played, Texas and USC will play for the title if both go undefeated.

If I, The Great Oz, were ranking teams, I would put Texas first, Georgia second, and USC third. My rankings would be affected this week by the fact that Georgia's quarterback hurt his knee Saturday and may be out for the season, but they still have to lose. Again, I have seen all but one USC game this year, and they are not - I repeat, not - the best team in college football. They have the best players and arguably the best coach, but if they are the best team, there is nothing being shown on the field to prove it. They beat Notre Dame, yes, in what was the Game of the Year in college football, but Notre Dame is a good-but-not-great team. USC plays in the weakest major conference this side of The Big East and they're needing fourth quarter heroics to beat teams like Arizona, Arizona State and Washington. Some of the teams they are struggling against won't even go to bowls, and by bowls, I don't mean Major Bowls. I mean bowls that teams like OU and OSU would be happy to go to this year.

And this isn't anti-USC bias. I hate Texas scores more than I hate USC, and I saw Texas demolish previously unbeaten and eigth-ranked Texas Tech. Texas has put its money where it's ranking is. To put it another way over here in Fantasyland, if Texas Tech played Notre Dame, Tech wins eight out of 10 games on a neutral field. Period.

In suma, this college football season sucks, precisely for the reason it should be so good. For all the nail-biters and classics that God has blessed the season with, the whole thing is fixed. No matter how good Va-Tech, Alabama, Georgia and UCLA play this year, it matters not (wait - if UCLA beat USC in the last game of the year, it will definitely matter). The Football Gods have deemed that USC and Texas are the best two teams irregardless of much in the way of often overwhelming objective evidence to the contrary, and so it will be that they will play for the title.

Cruelly, this could be the year that - drumroll please - the system changes. If Alabama is left out of the party, the system will change. How powerful is Alabama in the world of college football? Recall that several years ago, Alabama was put on the probation. Their violations were even more severe than the violations that led to SMU getting the so-called death penalty. The younger among you might not realize that SMU was once a football powerhouse, then they cheated, then they paid a price that gave them the SMU all football fans know today. Because of what the death penalty did to SMU's program, the NCAA would not give it to Alabama, becasue ruining the Alabama football program would be akin to granting permanant asylum to every illegal immigrant in the country on the sole basis that they move to Alabama. It would, in a word or two, be devastating.

Roll Tide!