COMPUTERS NO BETTER THAN HUMANS IN PICKING NO. 1.

Byline: Rob Asghar  Local View

LIFE'S not fair. Let's get over it.

I say this even as a fanatic Trojan, bothered by the fact that the Bowl Championship Series formula has moved a struggling Ohio State football team ahead of an excellent University of Southern California team into position to play for a national championship.

For decades, of course, it was left to human beings to pick a champion. As the only major sport to resist a playoff, college football used journalistic and coaching polls, occasionally resulting in more than one official champion. Rarely did the two best teams have the chance to prove their worth head-to-head in a season-ending bowl game.

Such silliness demanded a remedy, and the Bowl Championship Series formula was born, combining the best wisdom of eight computer rankings with polls and other measures. The BCS would match the top two teams annually for an undisputed championship game; and best of all, the matchup would be determined not solely by fickle, moody and prejudiced human beings, but with the aid of the utter objectivity that only the digital age could supply.

There was just one problem: Computers are programmed by fickle, moody and prejudiced human beings.

And the results have been evident now for a few years. In 2001, Colorado was passed by for a Nebraska team it had squashed a few days earlier, and Miami the previous year was passed by for a Florida State team it had defeated. In both cases, the computer used a consistent logic, but it defied good, old-fashioned human common sense.

College football officials have tried tinkering with the formula. They reduced victory margins when that seemed unfair, but now it's unfair to a USC team that outscores everyone by bucketfuls of points. Some argue for a playoff system, some argue for creating a human oversight committee that could overrule computer blindness, and some argue for other measures. But we can't agree, and maybe we shouldn't.

That's, after all, what makes us human - our ability to disagree on almost everything.

We've learned that fairness isn't a science. It's more of an art. And there's great murkiness in the assessment of art. We all try to assess the worth of art, and we zealously refuse to be denied the opportunity to assess that worth; but we also don't pretend to expect everyone to agree with us.

So it is with many things that we sometimes pretend can be quantified. As Albert Einstein once observed, ``A lot of what can be counted doesn't count, and a lot of what counts can't be counted.''

In 1978, the last time USC earned a portion of the college football national championship, it won the top ranking in the poll of coaches, but lost to Alabama in the poll of sportswriters.

We Trojans were cardinal red about this, since USC had spanked Alabama on Alabama's own field that season. Crimson Tide fans countered that the game was early in the season, and Alabama improved more over the course of the season than USC did. Both were right. No computer could solve such a controversy, and frankly, no humans could either.

That's human nature. We may love computers, but we can't trust them. We can't pretend they'll ever be able to establish winners and losers, administer justice, legislate morality as well as those fickle, moody and prejudiced masses of bone and flesh who created them.

And frankly, we don't need a ``fair'' college football playoff system to ``prove'' who's No. 1. Even in last season's official national championship game, Miami still thought the referees cheated them out of a victory. So let every other sport have a ``fair'' playoff. College football is proving that life isn't fair, but it's a helluva ride.