USC would've played in the Rose Bowl against Penn State. Texas would have played Notre Dame somewhere else. And all we would've had were questions.

For years, I've seen the BCS get shit on and, absent of allowing just-romped Oklahoma into the 2003 national championship game against LSU, I never saw it as a worse alternative to the old-school assignments of Pac-10 vs. Big Ten in the Rose Bowl, SEC champ in the Sugar, Big Eight in the Orange, etc.

Hope for a playoff all you want, you ain't getting it. These top-flight bowl games are first-rate events for sponsors and vacations for alumni. You ain't getting 40,000 Va. Tech fans to travel for three weeks straight. On-campus playoff games are even worse: Why should Texas and USC each have had to defend their home field twice more to face each other? They already combined to beat Ohio State and Notre Dame in the regular season.

So we have a system that tries, with genuinity, to match the No. 1 and 2 teams in the sport's penultimate game. And it's done a pretty good job of it.

Now, About That 41-38 Texas Win Over USC:

• Maybe that Texans-49ers game last week was really the Young Bowl.

• Considering the stage, Vince Young's 200 yards rushing, 267 yards passing and three scores was the greatest college football performance I've seen. The greatest season ever, without a hint of uncertainty, belongs to Barry Sanders in 1988, as I wrote more than two years ago.

• Guess that USC-Notre Dame game wasn't the game of the century, just as I said three months ago, when I wrote "There have been a number of games in recent years with even more at stake. In fact, we'll have a few more before this season is through." Chalk another one up to the myth that is Notre Dame football, a program that's 0-8 in bowls since the 1993 Cotton Bowl, which pre-dated the arrival of Ron Powlus on campus.

• If you're a Texas fan and, after the game's been over for an hour, you're chanting in front of the ESPN GameDay set, while Fowler, Corso and Herbstreit re-hash the events, you're one of the biggest losers on Earth. Go party, you moron!

• Some score-a-thons are considered ugly, while others are regaled as classic, and here's why this one was the latter: There were few home runs, stumbling defenders, blown coverages, fluke returns, etc. This was simply the mastery of sweeps, screens and drags by pro-level athletes. Who says great defense always beats great offense?

• I read in the New York Post on Tuesday that 21 different Longhorns scored touchdowns this season. Figured it had to be a misprint. You can't even do that in a video game on walk-on level.

• There's make-up sex and rebound sex and vacation sex. Is there national-championship sex? Are those Austin hotties partying with their socks in the air, or are they just barfing on some street corner?

• In other college news, the Syracuse Orange defeated the Texas-El Paso Miners, 69-56, in front of a crowd of 15,799 at the Carrier Dome in a college hoops game of the century.