Who are most deserving to play for the Mythical National Championship? Ohio State? LSU? Georgia? Oklahoma? Virginia Tech? Hawaii?

The bottom line is, there’s no good answer to the puzzle. Ohio State and LSU are both acceptable choices for a title game, but each has its flaws and either team might come out and lay an egg—and there are plenty of similarly-acceptable pretenders to the throne. This has been a great year of college football for so many reasons, but it is a horrible year to try to crown a national champion.

Division I-A college football is unique in American sport, in that it seeks to give the title to the team that has been the best all year long. For this to work well in a 119-team universe—no matter what permuation of the bowls/BCS system you’re working with—there needs to be a clearly dominant team. (Or, even better, two of them.) This year there was not one.

The problem disappears if you switch to a full-fledged playoff system, but then so does the sport’s character as well. It would no longer be about being the best all year long, but about getting hot and lucky at the right time for the games that really matter.

My team, Georgia, would be the perfect playoff team this year: we’ve finished strong enough to be included in even a 4-team playoff field, and are peaking at exactly the right time. But that’s not how you win a championship in college football. You win it by being the best all year long, and we stunk up the joint against South Carolina and Tennessee. As tempting as it would be to consign those losses to the memory hole, I don’t want college football to become a sport where those losses become irrelevant so long as you get the wild card.

With baseball having sold its soul for a wild card, Division I-A now stands alone. Long may it do so. There are reasons that I watch vastly more college football than NFL football, and the supremacy of the regular season is chief among them.