‘Best’ and ‘Champion’ aren’t exactly the same things. To me, ‘best’ is about quality, ability, past performance and likely future performance; it’s inheritably difficult definitively decide. ‘Champion’ is indeed purely about getting the (right) wins; it’s a more quantitative fact, and comparatively simple. In almost every circumstance the two are the same. I’ll try to give some examples when they aren’t:

First, a hypothetical: Team A wins all of its games in the regular season, all by 50 points, while playing the toughest schedule. Every other team loses at least 4. But it plays in a conference with a conference championship game, and stumbles in the 10th overtime when its running back can’t quite edge the ball over the goal line on a two point conversion. The two teams also played in the regular season, with Team A winning by 100. I contend (a) that Team A is still the ‘best’ team in its conference, probably in the country, and (b) that it should play in the national championship game. It is better than any other team: it has won more, scored more, and clearly has better players.

Reality is never that extreme, but there are a few somewhat similar instances. In 2003, USC won the AP National Championship, and was widely believed to be the ‘best’ team, hence winning the poll. But it was not the ‘champion’ in another system (one which it agreed to), which chose a matchup for the championship of two teams thought to be not as good as USC. LSU, then, was ruled ‘champion’ while not being the best team. Last year in the NFL, I think it’s hard to say the Patriots weren’t the best team; compare their one loss to the Giants’ six. In baseball in 2006, the Cardinals probably weren’t the best team, barely winning more than half their games (83-78), while the Mets and Yankees each won nearly 60% of theirs (97-65). We can look at college basketball too. Were a 16 seed to manage the 6 straight wins, that wouldn’t suddenly make it the ‘best’ team. In 1985 Villanova was 25-10 at the end of the tournament; ‘champion’ but not necessarily the ‘best’ team of the year.

I’m not trying to say that tournaments aren’t legitimate, just that they don’t always result in the best collection of talent, record, results, or resume winning the championship. And that’s alright. You need a tournament when the teams don’t play an equal schedule, because there’s no other way judge between two teams with similar records. That scheduling problem has been solved satisfactorily in every league and body except for Division 1-A college football. In all those other groups, there is a playoff between the teams that might be presumed to be the ‘best’ teams, champions and non-champions of smaller leagues. The overall, national, champion wins from among those ‘best’ teams. In college football, there is also a sort of playoff, only it’s between just two teams. IMHO, that ‘playoff’ has the most legitimacy when it’s between the qualitatively ‘best’ teams, not necessarily between a pair of ‘champions’.

If we look at the Big 12 this year, it’s difficult to say that there is a ‘best’ team in my terms of quality, ability, etc. When one of the South teams is chosen, it will be primarily based on the idea of ‘best’ as determined by the combination of polls and computers of the BCS. That team will be chosen ‘champion’ of the Big 12 South at the expense of the other two, but it won’t really change who is ‘best’, and it won’t have been decided purely by wins. Assuming each wins out, there’ll be an argument no matter who is chosen. Let’s say Missouri wins the Big 12 title. Would you pick them to beat either of the teams left out from the South? I probably wouldn’t, so I would say the other teams are “better” than Missouri. In that case, the ‘champion’ isn’t the ‘best’.