Don’t be too dazzled by the new-and-improved model of the Bowl Championship Series coming to a newspaper or TV outlet near you. It will have to go back to the dealer soon enough.

If not in the coming months, then in the not-too-distant future. And it will be going back over and over until there is a playoff.

The BCS model unveiled Monday is the fifth version from the guys who hijacked college football’s postseason in 1998. Even though they took over the business promising to reduce the human element, this latest version does just the opposite.

Yet, no sooner did the BCS take the wraps off than the first disagreement between man and machines popped up. Oklahoma, a clear No. 2 behind Southern Cal in both human polls so far this season, failed to impress the computers and slipped to No. 3 behind Miami.

All that proves is that like the “Windows” program on most computers, the BCS has become a work forever in progress. The system is still flawed, and always will be. And the latest somebody to say so has already done the math.

His name is Bradley P. Carlin, and he is a professor of biostatistics and Mayo professor in public health at the University of Minnesota. Suffice it to say that Carlin can crunch numbers, and this is what he concludes in an op-ed piece Sunday in The New York Times:

“No matter how you arrange the formula, the BCS remains nothing more than an elaborate seeding system for a two-team tournament. Its sole benefit is to create one game that precludes all but two powerful contenders from a legitimate title shot. More to the point, it will always run a high risk of crowning the wrong champion.”

What Carlin did was take the top 16 teams from last season, based on the ranking of one of the BCS-approved computers, and seeded them like an NCAA basketball tournament regional bracket. Then, anticipating the argument of presidents that the season is too long, he cut the field to eight, finding it reduced the probability of anybody in the field winning the national championship by only 18 percent.

Finally, he proposed using seven existing bowl games to play out an eight-team tournament.

But there’s almost no chance of it happening until the end of the decade. The guys in charge of the BCS already have ABC, the major bowl games and the commissioners of the six power conferences in their back pockets, and a contract extending through the 2005 season.

One sure sign that they expect to renew the deal for a few more years: Beginning in 2006, a planned fifth game will be added to the BCS series, with the championship game played a week later at the site of one of the BCS bowls. The only thing encouraging about that, Carlin notes, is it “sounds a lot like a four-team tournament, which would be a modest yet clear improvement on the current two-team approach.”