It may be a disgrace to the sport, but for all the equations, math and attendant scorn, the BCS is not that complicated: The score is the average of three numbers, two determined by separate human polls and the third by averaging the scores of six separate computer polls. It can be a pretty dense exercises for the wonks, but it will never be complicated enough to change the strategies or goals of actual teams on the field: Win every game as convincingly as possible against the best possible competition.

However convoluted the specifics, it's still a straightforward mandate for the people who matter. So I'm not sure what Mack Brown is really going to learn by plumbing the mysteries of the Series:

"As a staff we're planning to bring in BCS gurus and the computer guys and talking to them," Brown said. "We want to find out where we fell short in those areas. Is it margin of victory? Was it not scoring more because if it doesn't matter to the computers it does to the human vote? We're looking at all those things now."

In my mind, the main reasons Texas fell short in the BCS are that a) It lost a game, and b) Oklahoma, by complete accident, wound up with a tougher nonconference schedule. (It helped that the Sooners also accidentally rolled up 63 points on Texas Tech three weeks after the Raiders knocked off Texas, at which point OU hopped the Longhorns in both human polls. But UT has no control over that once the "losing to Tech" part is done.) The solutions then, are a) Don't lose, and b) Avoid Florida Atlantics, UTEPs and Rices like the plague in non-conference scheduling. If you must go mid-major, try to land a TCU, Boise State or, at worst, Tulsa, teams voters have heard of but that you're still likely to beat soundly, and that won't crater the strength of schedule numbers.

And, yes, don't hesitate to run up the score a little to cater to the human voters. The biggest difference in Texas and Oklahoma, again, was that the Sooners obliterated Tech on national television, just as Florida beat the customized eyeblack off Georgia, LSU, South Carolina and Florida State in front of the entire country. UT walloped Missouri, but merely "survived" against Oklahoma and Oklahoma State and of course came up short in Lubbock during its high profile run in October/early November; at no point except at halftime of the Mizzou win did the Longhorns seem like a really dominant team.

Structurally, blowouts and "dominance" aren't supposed to matter, since writers are constantly wagging their fingers at coaches who run up the score and computers aren't even allowed to account for margin of victory -- and with the machines, at least, Texas had nothing to worry about: They finished ahead of Florida in five of the six computer polls (and the one that liked Florida, the ridiculous product of Richard Billingsley, was tossed from both teams' final averages as the high for the Gators and the low for the 'Horns) and would have played Oklahoma for the championship if the algorithms were all that mattered.

But computers and humans don't necessarily care about the same things, or at least not in the same ratios. This time, it was the human voters that put Florida and Oklahoma over the top, and -- being the numbers-averse intuitivists they are -- it wasn't by crunching the minor variances in strength of schedule rankings. It was because, at the end of the year, Florida and Oklahoma looked more dominant than Texas. This is a logical (if hypocritical) conclusion: UF and OU won by 30-plus points per game in the regular season, and if Texas didn't put up the ungodly margins the Sooners and Gators managed over good teams, it was most likely because Texas didn't have the option. After all, Brown didn't hesitate to run up 50 points per game and trash Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas Tech and Colorado (twice) by a combined 191 points en route to the mythical championship in 2005; the average 34-point advantage that year was dramatically better the 23-point margin UT averaged last year.

That '05 team had Vince Young, true, but also a killer instinct to grind also-rans into dust. If "To Crush or Not to Crush" is a question at all -- and for the most deserving teams, it always is -- the best chance of conquering the vagueries of the system is to embrace the Dark Side and blow the vagueries to hell.