An SAT question: Sports is to Politics as Oil is to BLANK.

I’m constantly baffled by the complete and utter stupidity of the people around me. But what’s incredibly frustrating — and not particularly baffling, at all — is our ability to pick leaders and elected officials who are even fucking stupider than we are.

Case in point: The Bowl Championship Series debacle.

Q: Why in the unholy fuck do we need politicians to get involved in this shit? Don’t we have anything better to do?

A: Refer to the opening paragraph.

President-elect Barack Obama is now President Obama (ending the hyphen’s 15 minutes of punctuation fame) and he has at least 700 billion things more important to worry about than the way college football hands out its national championship trophy.

Taking a shit in a bag, lighting that bag on fire and placing the flaming bag of human shit on Rush Limbaugh’s porch should be a higher priority than the BCS.

For once, I actually have faith Obama may be able to figure that out — and there’s recent evidence to prove that the BCS/playoff debate isn’t high on his list. Kudos to him for being an anomaly in the political story problem: What do you get when you have 100 million idiots pick someone to rule them (hint: Use the formula, stupid^9)?

In the grand scheme of things, college football don’t mean shit. And that’s coming from someone who loves the game — a person so incapacitated by college and professional football that he rarely leaves the couch to eat during fall weekends.

Although I love football, I’d also still like to have a place to live and something in my fridge to eat — since I occasionally muster the energy to remove myself from my couch during halftime or one of the 65 booth reviews during the game. It just seems like something a little more crucial to the survival of society — not even “society as we know it,” just the fucking survival of the American Experiment — should take precedence over spread offenses and nickel defenses.

Here in Utah, our attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, apparently has nothing better to do than follow up a fucking great victory by the University of Utah Utes with the potential of bullshit anti-trust litigation against the BCS.

Fuck budget crunches, we have to avenge the Utes. No amount of money will be too much to bring home what is rightfully ours. Shurtleff should be placed in stocks in a public square so people can throw old dog shit at him — and I want to see bruises.

And, as much as I’d like to see the Utes be the National Champions — or at least have the chance to play for it — we need to face some facts, namely, Florida is a better team. They just are. In a head-to-head matchup, Florida wins. Maybe not by 20, but probably by 19.

All that aside, what the fuck does Shurtleff think he’s going to accomplish, besides wasting a shitload of taxpayer time and money? Tear the BCS down? Singlehandedly create a playoff system? It still doesn’t change the fact that the big, stupid, crystal football was handed to the Gators.

I understand we live in an entirely too litigious society. Maybe by throwing around words like ‘anti-trust,’ they are trying to make this whole thing seem legitimate. But I don’t buy it. It smells akin to the other festering, fecal lawsuits that regularly filed against fast food restaurants by the morbidly obese. I’d usually say it’s bullshit, but I think hogshit works better, in this case.

We shouldn’t be surprised, though. Sports has leaked into the political arena in the not-so-distant past. Remember the steroids hearings? I sure as hell do.

Congress wasted its time, and ours, trying to ascertain if human bobble head dolls like Mark McGwire, Rodger Clemens, Barry Bonds — although he wasn’t present, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t on trial — and other purveyors of our national pastime took steroids. My profane refrain from those hearings still reverberates — at lest in my head — Goddamnit, who the fuck cares? So what if these bastards took steroids? In hindsight, wouldn’t an investigation of predatory lending practices have been a much more meaningful use of congressional time and energy?

Those questions are the same ones I asked earlier — the only difference being a larger ball and not as much talk of asses getting stuck with hypodermic needles.

Could all of this be a little funny? Sure, if it wasn’t so fucking stupid. And serious. This situation is rife with potential parodies. I’m just a little too pissed to write one, at the moment — I’m sure one will come to me.

Don’t get me wrong, though, sports are awesome, and I’m a fanatic. Without it, I’d probably have to get into American Idol or develop some sort of game-show watching habit. But we’re just talking about sports. Sometimes, we have bigger things to worry about.