Every year, lazy American college football sports columnists trot out the same old, same old.

For American college football, this “write” of passage is the column railing against the BCS.  The BCS was a group/system created a little over 10 years ago to ensure the “best” team played the “second best” team for Division 1 American football.  Before that, there were various bowls that had traditional bids .  For example, the winner of the Pac 10 division played the winner of the Big 10 division in the Rose Bowl, played in Pasadena.

These traditional winners playing traditional bowls often meant the top two teams did not play each other at the end of the year.  Thus, the BCS was created to resolve this issue.  Through a combination of human and computer polls weighted in some arcane fashion, the two best teams meet each other in the national championship.

Except there are all sorts of scenarios where things don’t work out.  For example, what happens if there are more than two undefeated teams?  Or if there is one undefeated team and three one-loss teams?  The BCS still picks the top two, but there are legitimate gripes from teams that fail to make the championship game.

This year, there are four undefeated teams.  Oregon is number 1.  Auburn is number 2.  TCU is number 3.  Boise State is number 4.  Perhaps never in history have 2 teams from so-called “mid-majors” done so well and yet are, again, unlikely to play in the national championship because their conferences are weak.  It helps that teams like Boise State have upset powerhouses like Oklahoma in past bowls to legitimize the strength of their otherwise perceived weak conference.  Even so, critics of the BCS claim that the BCS protects its own, meaning unless you belong to a power conference, you aren’t playing for the national championship.

To be fair, if Oregon and Auburn lose, and TCU and Boise State win out, it seems TCU and Boise State will play one another for the national title.

The solution, every sportswriter agrees, is a playoff.  Have 4 or 8 or even 16 teams play for the title.  This would mean ending the season by about December, or having a playoff that runs much of January.  College presidents think it would devalue other bowls as everyone focused on this playoff.  They say these are student-athletes that need to worry about academics (a bit laughable).  Sports columnists point to Division 2 football that does have a playoff.

The point is not to ascribe who is right or who is wrong, it’s to say that if you write sports columns, you can write this article every single year.  Every year.  The BCS and college presidents haven’t budged any closer to providing a playoff, so each year, rather than think of anything original to write, you can always write about the need for a bowl.  Heck, it’s hard to come up with a good column.  Why not write about this?

Tennis, alas, is way down the pecking order when it comes things to complain about (that anyone cares to read about).  There are usually about 3 things tennis writers complain about.  The seasons is too long (in particular, they don’t care about tennis after the US Open because, well, don’t you know, they’ve always loved football, of the American variety longer, and if push came to shove, they’d give up tennis than football-shame on you, so-called tennis experts!).  Davis Cup is a bad format because it doesn’t cater to the best players in the world and isn’t held in one spot and isn’t run like World Cup.   And, I suppose, for women’s tennis, it’s that number 1 players become number 1 without a Slam win.

Peter Bodo, a writer for Tennis magazine and its online cousin, recently wrote an article about getting rid of the Paris Masters, the event that runs late in the calendar year, so late that it is the last regular competition of the year, with only the ATP World Tour Finals left and Davis Cup.  He says “get rid of it”.  He doesn’t explain why they shouldn’t get rid of Delray Beach or Memphis or Indianapolis or all these podunk American tournaments as if the entire tour focused on just 3 players.  Let’s not forget that players like Sam Querrey and John Isner feast on the tiny titles because they struggle mightily to be relevant in a Masters 1000 event.

Maybe Peter Bodo should write an article about why Querrey and Isner are irrelevant to American tennis.  But he can’t.  Even in today’s tennis, bad as it may be for Americans, it is, well, un-American not to support your boys even if the odds they are in the top 10 are pretty low.  But American writers can poo-poo the rest of the world because we’re Americans, and we don’t care about the rest of the world.  Thanks, Peter, for that highly enlightened view.  We’ll remember what good buddies you were with Borg!

Although Bodo has had a history with tennis dating back four decades, his writing, as much of tennis writing goes, is not exactly must-read.  Surely, Gael Monfils nor Michael Llodra have even heard of the man, and they decided to show that a couple of local boys can raise the roof on a mostly Parisian crowd.  Llodra had match points against the hard-hitting Swede, while Monfils fought off 5 match points to beat the best (by some definition of best) player on the planet, Roger Federer.

Both Frenchman went the distance.  In 6 sets played on Saturday, 5 went to tiebreak, including both third sets.  The sole remainder was a second set that went 7-5 to Soderling.

The partisan Parisians were treated to the equivalent of Isner and Querrey going deep in, well, I suppose neither Miami, nor Indian Wells, nor Cincy carry nearly the same importance as Paris Indoors does to France.  It isn’t Roland Garros, to be sure, but the fans were rocking the house.

So next time you want to diss the Paris Masters, Peter Bodo, have a seat with a Frenchman playing to reach the finals, when they see the last true serve-and-volleyer try to topple the only Swede in the top 100, when they see the athletic Gael Monfils try to say “Non” to the “great one”, Roger Federer, and tell the crowd that their tournament doesn’t deserve to be.