If every entity in sports decided its champion the way the Football Bowl Subdivision does:

The Seattle Mariners would have a world championship banner flapping in the breeze at Safeco Field, their 2001 campaign widely recognized as the greatest baseball season in history.

Eli Manning would have been home watching the New England Patriots hoist two additional Lombardi Trophies. And probably would have witnessed his big brother, Mr. September, win a couple more, too.

There would be no Jimmy V Week on ESPN, no annual replaying of his “don’t ever give up” speech, no financial benefit from his courageous fight with cancer more than two decades later, because Jim Valvano would be Fran Fraschilla.

Basically every Stanley Cup since Queen Victoria was still vertical would have been engraved differently.

The NBA … OK, bad example.

Point being, every sport makes hullabaloo over its postseason because, frankly, any of us who have even a faint suspicion about sports understand that at any level above YMCA, the postseason is all that matters.

You get it. I get it. Our buddies in every fantasy league and beer league across America get it. Why don’t the doctorates, master’s degrees and polyester suits that inhabit the inner sanctum of the NCAA get it?

When the question is framed that way, perhaps the answer is so self-evident as to be laughable.

And so we get what we had Saturday, on what was essentially the penultimate meaningful day of the college football season.

Three stakeholders in the quest to curry enough favor to participate in a man-made championship game, and none of them playing each other. Three opponents with nothing to gain, really, other than perhaps a bowl game in Florida or California instead of Louisiana.

In the very definition of anticlimax, the best team in the bunch — rated third, of course, by the lazy, ignorant buffoons whose rhymeless and reasonless ranking are the foundation for this foolishness — won its late afternoon game. By doing so, they implored millions of us to engage in that oh-so-American activity of rooting for another team to lose so that the “system” would work “properly.”

Seriously, folks, a 4-year-old child can see the absurdity of this.

We got what we wanted, I suppose, and what years of watching this flawed formula at work told us is the superior matchup: Florida State vs. Auburn for the B(C)S championship.

Of course, the game will be played a month from now on a Monday night. If it weren’t for the 24-hour news cycle, most of us would forget it was happening. Safe to say the person who coined the word “buzzkill” was probably inspired by the greasy-palmed smarm-balls who oversee NCAA Division I-A football.

I know, I know. They changed the name. Call me a rebel, but I’m going to stick with the label that we all used for a century until those clowns redefined everything.

And yes, I’m also aware that a “playoff” system is being implemented at some point between now and the apocalypse. I’d strongly recommend that you file that one in the “believe it when it happens” category.

Also, four teams, randomly selected in a way that allows everyone involved to gobble up their slice of a gazillion-dollar pie, do not a playoff make.

Playoffs are what the Football Champi — er, I-AA — do. They pick two dozen teams, ensuring that any team with even a remote beef gets invited. Then they seed them geographically, so that we are blessed with what we were given Saturday in Orono: Two rivals bashing in one another’s brains in front of 8,000 bipartisans.

Make it 100,000 and you would have seen Michigan State traveling to Ohio State with a real prize at stake for both teams. Or the Cinderella du jour (Central Florida? Fresno State? Bowling Green?) traveling to Alabama, which would have been rewarded, not penalized, for missing a 57-yard field goal at the end of an otherwise spotless season.

That is, after all, what makes the playoffs so magical in, well, every other sport under every other sanctioning body known to man. The big tent. The potential of colossal upsets. The idea that improving throughout a season and playing your best at the end actually mean something.

It’s a celebration of excellence, which is something the monuments to mediocrity that run the NCAA, BCS and their corporate partners wouldn’t recognize if it bit them in the behind.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.

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