One of my favorite moments in sports is, against all odds, the "deuce" in tennis. Not for the physical act of hitting a fluorescent ball over a net, which I find about as exciting as a city zoning meeting, but for the competitive purity of the concept. You can't win the game until you've won it decisively, by two points — no flukes, no games determined by a bad call or a single sketchy bounce. A one-point difference may be a lucky coincidence. A two-point difference leaves no doubt.

Not only is that kind of certainty practically impossible in almost any other sport; in practice, it's often directly contradicted, sometimes in the most fundamental, big-picture ways. Which is how, as an unabashed playoff advocate in a sport that is finally on the verge of making a playoff a reality, I find myself once again grappling with the problem of the thoroughly mediocre New York Giants in the Super Bowl.

Yes, I do mean problem, from the perspective of ever getting a functional playoff up and running on the college level. The BCS and its apologists have trotted out a chorus line of excuses over the years for keeping an FBS playoff at bay — it makes the season too long, it interferes with finals, it requires too much travel, etc. — all of them easily refuted by the ongoing success of playoffs in literally every other team sport on every level of American athletics, including college football on the FCS, Division II and Division III levels. Only one defense has managed to stick: The notion that, when there is no playoff after the regular season, the regular season itself is a playoff. At this point, the BCS' existence — or at least its ability to justify its existence — is so dependent on this idea that it's adopted the cliché "Every Game Counts" as a kind of unofficial creed.

It's a patently ridiculous creed, as proven (again) by the mulligan Alabama was just granted after losing its winner-take-all showdown against LSU last November. (To be clear, it would have been equally ridiculous if the mulligan had been granted to Oklahoma State after its loss at Iowa State, the point being that a mulligan for anyone obviously refutes the claim that "every game counts.") But for the second time in five years, the New York Giants' presence in the Super Bowl is an anti-playoff argument incarnate: Here is a 9-7 mediocrity that spent the entire regular season barely treading water, was outscored over the course of the season and finished behind 28 percent of the league in terms of final record. And this is your potential champion?

Even if New York knocks off New England, it will finish the season with a lower winning percentage (.650) than six other teams — New England, Green Bay, New Orleans, San Francisco, Baltimore and Pittsburgh — that happened to suffer one of their rare losses at the wrong point on the calendar. In the context of a 16-game schedule, the gap between New York at 9-7 and the top three teams in the NFC (all of which beat New York head-to-head in the regular season, en route to finishing 13-3 or better) was enormous.

But of course, thanks to the inviolable sanctity of the playoffs, the only streak that matters in the end is the Giants' three-game run in January. So here they are, and almost no one blinks. What a story!

Perhaps the "problem" here is not so obvious — after all, I'm for playoffs, right? So shouldn't I just shut up, admit that wow, yeah, the Giants are a pretty great story and take solace in the fact that the system worked? I mean, the system always works, doesn't it? Isn't the point to settle it on the field? Well, it's settled.

And I admit, conveniently rhetorical voice in my head, compared to the alternatives, you have a point. It's just that I can't help thinking that it had already been settled on the field over the previous four months. And the Giants came up short.

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