AC See Ya

Just to go over this weekend's mishaps:

• Georgia Tech, already guaranteed a shot in the conference title game, #16 Georgia Tech laid an egg against a sleepwalking Georgia team and lost.
• Boston College, needing a win to keep their ACC championship game hopes alive, took on a reeling Miami team with a lame-duck coach, and lost. Miami, however, is now going to a bowl, because Virginia wasn't able to assert its own claim to mediocrity.
  
• Maryland, needing a win to control its destiny, laid a turtle egg at Wake Forest, a team with the modus operandi of "if we just let the rest of the conference play their game, we're bound to end up 10-2". Sadly, they were right.
• Florida State, once the titan of the conference, took the weekend off and let Florida off the hook, Houndini-like, once again.
• #24 Clemson couldn't seal the deal against classically underachieving South Carolina, and lost.
• N.C. State lost to C-USA mid-lister East Carolina.
• And in the best game of the day, 3-9 UNC was taken to the wire by winless Duke.

All in all, it was as pathetic a Golden Corral buffet of college football as you are ever likely to see. That being said, I'm quite certain that whoever staggers out of the ACC championship game is going to get a sudden, nandro-like boost in the coach's polls, based primarily on the fact that Boise State gets a better chance of crashing the BCS party if they're ranked ahead of a BCS conference champion.

Not to put it too bluntly, but putting the rules of the game out in the open invites gaming the system. And with this much money on the line - and with rules that are this easily exploitable - the system will be gamed. In my chosen profession, we call these "exploits". In the BCS, it's business as usual.