By Travis Bremner

Staff Writer

The other night I began to wonder whatever happened to Sean Salisbury. You remember him, right? The highly touted USC quarterback turned NFL backup turned ESPN television analyst. It turns out I picked a good time find out about him, his been in the news recently.

In February of 2008, Salisbury’s ESPN contract was not renewed allegedly because he took a picture of his gonads on his iPhone and sent it to a female intern. He was suspended for a couple of weeks for this act of sexting, and later let go. He jumped on with sports radio 105.3 The Fan in Dallas but was fired this month, September.

He is now threatening to sue a sports blog website, Deadspin, saying they tarnished his reputation by leaking the alleged sent picture of his manhood, as well as ESPN and CBS themselves. Deadspin has posted multiple messages, supposedly from Salisbury and a good guess says it is, throwing tantrums in an attempt to rebuild his ‘once great’ stature. Here is an excerpt from one:

“This is salisbury and I just want u to know ur guys lies and carelessness about CBS and espn stories has not only ruined my reputation but has cost me jobs so prepare urself for a lawsuit so big
I will own deadspin u will be asked to give up ur sources so since u guys have cost me more than alot of money my only goal in my career is to ruin u like u have me. Sadly I tried to be honest with you and you have continually written lies.”

The only question to ask now is; does USC offer English courses?

Since its inception in 1998, the Bowl Championship Series has ruined what they call the ‘playoff’ system in college football.

I’ve been trying to fathom why the university presidents, who have the ability to make a playoff happen, continue the same old song and dance with this system. It’s funny, an argument is sometimes made for the BCS that any system we have will be flawed. Maybe so, but why then does every other major or minor sport have a playoff? There is nothing flawed about the BCS, the BCS is the flaw.

The presidents, or really they should be called the con artists for robbing us of a great postseason, want to keep their money and power while passing down the burden. They reap benefits but won’t take the blame for all that is wrong with this sketchy system. They lay the fault on the voters, pollsters or computers, while collecting the cash.

The Harris Interactive Poll, one third of the voting system, is comprised of retired coaches, players and administrators and some members of the media. Boomer Esiason among them, he does a the NFL Today every Sunday, or Kirk Herbstreit, who is also a voter, does a College Gameday as well as broadcast a game on TV, he can’t possibly watch all the games. That’s not to say he’s not intelligent, he’s knows a lot about college football but you can’t expect him to have enough research, which is more than just looking at box scores.

The Coaches’ Poll, another third of the system, is filled with some of the great minds of college football; they watch all the games and see who’s playing well. Yea, I’m sure Mack Brown watches Boise State play UC Davis. No, because he has no time. The coaches do not have time to do research for their ballots, they will often give their ballot offs to another staffer, who, in most cases, have no time. It comes down to a popularity contest.

Last year multiple voters in the Harris Poll admitted that they had not watch a single minute of Utah’s 12-0 season. It should seem logical that when considering a team inside the top 5 you should, at the bare minimum, watch them once. But then again, when has the BCS ever been logical? What’s worse, the voters didn’t think it was necessary to watch Utah.

The presidents then show you that they will take all the bias that may be infected in the human polls by using six computers. They factor in many things, but when they disagree with the human polls, the presidents tell the computer operators to restructure the formulas so that it won’t happen again. Also, the computers have final score as a means of ranking the teams, so last season when Texas thoroughly dominates Kansas 35-7, they aren’t scored as high as when Oklahoma puts up 66 on Texas A&M. Both teams showed they were far superior to their opponent; does 31 points really make you better?

See, the NCAA men’s basketball committee has it figured out. They give schools opportunities to get automatic bids with conference tournaments. They have a 10-person committee of people who watch and study games all season, scouting, looking at statistics and anything imaginable to choose team A over team B or vice versa. Obviously on a much smaller scale being that the football committee would only have to choose 4 teams, as opposed to 32 for the basketball selection group.

By having a playoff system, they would just be creating more seasons for more teams. The presidents simply reject that as a possibility, they keep feeding this idea that by having a bowl system we can preserve the best regular season in all of sports.

Well why can’t we just have 1 versus 2, 3 versus 4 and so on? The BCS has contracts, TV contracts with Fox and ESPN. The bowls have contracts with conferences, for instance, the Pac-10 and the Big Ten have a deal where the #1 team from each of those conferences will play against each other in the

If it’s a tournament you want, and I think I speak for the majority when I say, that’s what we want, don’t expect it any time soon.