ESPNMAG.com - BCS Formula No. 5

Roy Kramer, the godfather of the Bowl Championship Series, waves goodbye to college football during a Friday retirement reception in Atlanta. That's great. He gets the big sendoff, we get stuck with the permanently flawed BCS.

For the fourth time in as many years, the BCS boys are doing a nip-and-tuck on the formula. Many more of these nips and tucks and it's going to look like Jerry Jones.

The latest version became public Tuesday. Next year about this time -- after once again some team has been semi-jobbed by the BCS standings (Oregon and Colorado last season, Miami the season before that) -- there will be another announcement regarding a new tweak to the five-component formula.

This isn't necessarily any one person's fault. Without a playoff, this is what the newest guardian of the BCS -- smart guy Mike Tranghese of the Big East Conference -- is stuck with. He has to make 12-year-old Macallan Scotch whiskey out of 10-minute-old dishwater. Good luck.

Joey Harrington
Was it the BCS or the East Coast bias that did in the Ducks?

So I humbly offer my own services. Introducing the BCS/GW formula:

You take the East Coast bias that Oregon athletic director Bill Moos bitched about last year and ...

Divide it by the number of NCAA investigators presently on SEC campuses and ...

Multiply it by the number of AP voters who actually watch enough games to produce an informed Top 25 poll.

Next you take the number of coaches who: A) Do their own weekly voting and, B) Are willing to have their names and votes made public (in other words, zero) and ...

Add the media guide budgets of Texas, Florida, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, Oklahoma and Nebraska and ...

Subtract this total from the number of black head coaches in Division I-A.

That done, you take the coefficient of illegal SUVs being driven by star players and ...

Divide it by the number of Gary Barnett T-shirt slogans and ...

Add it to the number of calls made to Duke requesting a home-and-home against the 0-23 (and counting) Blue Devils.

Now you take the number of players run off by a new coach and ...

Multiply it by Tom Lemming's top 1,100 long-snapper prospects and ...

Add it to the number of times new Florida coach Ron Zook will be reminded he's no Steve Spurrier.

From here, you want to take the number of luxury boxes at Neyland Stadium and ...

Subtract it from the number of woofers, tweeters, mids and sub-bass speakers in the players parking lot and ...

Divide it by the number of mistakes AD Kevin White made before hiring Tyrone Willingham as Notre Dame's new coach.

As the piece of chalk slowly becomes a stub, we take the number of Bowdens in coaching and ...

Add it to number of academic frauds perpetrated by dimwitted tutors and ...

Multiply it by the number of Ben Franklin handshakes to players by agent runners.

Okay, we're getting close. Now you take the approximate weight of bling-bling worn by Big East players and ...

Subtract it from zero (the amount Florida's Rex Grossman will earn from the school's retail sale of his replica jerseys) and ...

Add it to the number of times Bill Parcells was approached or offered head coaching jobs from at least two prominent programs.

And finally, you take the number of times BYU complained about being frozen out of the BCS loop and ...

Add the number of points scored by Hawaii against the Cougars and ...

Divide it by the number of times MAC teams beat the so-called "power" conferences and ...

Multiply it by the number of times Beano Cook said Ron Powlus was going to win multiple Heismans and ...

Divide it by the number of times Ohio State fans blamed John Cooper for losses, bear markets and gasoline price hikes.

Now if my math is right, this means Navy is the new BCS/GW preseason No. 1. Then again, the whole formula might need a little nip-and-tuck.

Gene Wojciechowski is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at gene.wojciechowski@espnmag.com.