It's that time of year...

...when traditional football powers can shrug off one loss as a fluke, while Cinderella teams taking one in the shorts are viewed as exposed, justifying their banishment from the BCS into the nether reaches of [Corporate Sponsor][Useless product] Bowl-bound misery.

Personally, I'm hoping against hope for a Kansas-Hawaii BCS championship game, in part because I cannot imagine a freakier collision of coaches than June Jones and Mark Mangino, and in part because I want to hear heads exploding from Baton Rouge to SoCal. It won't happen, of course - even if those two teams win out and every other team ahead of them loses every game on the schedule, enough writers for the Lower Sasquatch Times-Picayune will find a reason to rub his pen up against Tim Tebow's silky uniform pants to make sure we get OSU-LSU come hell or high water.

Which leads me to the BCS system. The favorite complaint around this time of year is that "the computers" are screwing up the rankings. Said complaints generally come from aged knights of the keyboard who don't know anything about computer other than that you can push the buttons and make porn come out, but hey, they've got airtime and column inches to fill, and facts are boring.
Fact 1 - The computers may spit out the numbers, but it's not like R2-D2 is sitting in there figuring out the best way to jigger things to screw over Auburn again. Yes, the formulae produce results, but all of those forumlae - not to mention all of those computers - had to be programmed by somebody. Somebody like...people. You know, human beings? Not computers? Right.
Fact 2 - 2/3 of the BCS formula comes from, you guessed it, voter polls. You know, the things that coaches have their caffeine-crazed assistants fill out for them at 3 AM Sunday morning because the gosh-darn thing's gotta get done somehow and hey, who has time to actually watch the games. In other words, if you don't like the numbers coming out of the BCS computers, that's probably because the numbers going in weren't too pretty either - and those polls are 100% human response. Well, except for Tom O'Brien's.
So the idiots complaining about "the computers" can kindly shut up and take their complaints where they belong, namely, to the offices of the poor bastard last-string assistant coaches who draw the short straw marked "ballot filler outer" each week.
That is, if they're not too busy hitting the button and waiting for the porn.