If elected, Auburn should serve as 2004 national champs

BY Kevin Scarbinsky
23 May 2010

The race for the 2004 national championship in college football is about to get interesting.

Say the NCAA hammers USC, and the BCS and the AP take away the national titles they awarded the Trojans and their semi-pro tailback, Reggie Bush.

Say the BCS revisits its policy on the subject and the AP re-votes, and one or both of those organizations decides to correct the greatest injustice of the BCS era by crowning, as the rightful champs, the Auburn Tigers.

What should Auburn do six years later? Please. That’s easy. Accept it. Celebrate it. And never, ever apologize for it.

In other words, Auburn should follow Alabama’s lead. After all, the Crimson Tide has a lot more experience with the national championship thing.

Alabama hasn’t filled a trophy case and built a statue for every national title that everyone from the Dunkel Index to Dunkin’ Donuts has tried to throw at it, but the school has said yes more often than not.

And why not?

These things are decided, to a greater or lesser degree, on the hard drives of computers and in the thick skulls of voters as much as they are on the field. Unless and until there’s a bona fide playoff, if someone wants to give you a national championship, say thank you, take it and run with it.

USA Today first noticed last week that three years ago, with the USC investigation gaining speed, the BCS instituted a policy for just this kind of eventuality. A quick read of the BCS website reveals that the policy contains the following provisions:

You win a BCS game.

The NCAA Infractions Committee later finds you guilty of violations that provided a competitive advantage or involved an ineligible player.

One of your sanctions forces you to forfeit or vacate victories.

Those victories include games that allowed you to reach the BCS game or the BCS game itself.

In that case, the BCS will vacate your participation in its bowl game. If that game was for the national championship, the BCS will take away your national championship.

But that’s only half the equation. The BCS policy does not say if or how a new champion will be crowned.

If the NCAA blasts USC – and a ruling should be imminent; shouldn’t it? – the BCS won’t act until the appeal process is complete. At that point, it’ll be an interesting dilemma, whether to leave that 2004 championship vacant or to choose between unbeaten Auburn and Oklahoma, which was unbeaten itself until getting undressed by the Trojans.

Yes, I know, Utah finished without a loss too, but only Orrin Hatch thinks the Utes belong in this conversation.

If the BCS decides to pick a winner, with the Orange Bowl wiped from the record books, OU could argue that it was ranked ahead of Auburn in the final BCS standings after the regular season.

Auburn could argue that you can’t erase its Sugar Bowl victory over Virginia Tech.

Advantage: Auburn.

Someone at the BCS would have to make the call. It probably wouldn’t be executive director Bill Hancock, since he’s an administrator and not a policy-maker, and lucky for Auburn.

Hancock is an Oklahoma native and a 1972 journalism graduate of the University of Oklahoma, where he later worked as an assistant sports information director.

If the decision gets kicked upstairs to the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, you’ll never guess who could have a voice in it.

Alabama president Robert Witt.

Something tells me Witt didn’t sign up for this kind of duty when he became one of the 12 members of that committee.

Of course, fairness would demand that he recuse himself. And then Oklahoma would demand that committee chairman Harvey Perlman recuse himself because he’s the chancellor at rival Nebraska.

Sooner or later, the title would have to be decided by a game of rock, paper, scissors between Bob Stoops and Tommy Tuberville.

Remember Tuberville’s defiant prediction after Jetgate, the year before ’04? ‘‘We are gonna win the national championship,” he vowed. ‘‘And you can write that.”

He might be right after all.