If you’re a Missouri Tigers football fan, it’s a good bet you’re as baffled as you are angry.

Just over a week ago, Missouri vaulted to the top of the Bowl Championship Series heap after an impressive victory over then-No. 2 Kansas.

The 11-2 Tigers fell to No. 6 in the standings Sunday, their penalty for a not-so-impressive loss Saturday to Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game.

Missouri lost its shot at the BCS championship game. But at No. 6, it still looked like a good bet to play in one of the four other mega-million-dollar BCS bowl games.

Then the BCS bowl bids came out. No. 8 Kansas landed a spot in the Orange Bowl against Virginia Tech. Missouri, which was ranked two spots higher than Kansas and had defeated the 11-1 Jayhawks, was left out of the BCS bowl mix. Missouri settled for the Cotton Bowl.

Don’t look for logic here. This is what you get when you cross the utterly flawed BCS, which arrived eight seasons ago to torment us, with an antiquated bowl system that was spawned when most people still believed the world was flat – or at least when football players wore leather helmets.

If Tigers fans are looking for someone to blame, then blame it on Orange Bowl committee members wearing those hideous orange blazers.

They’re the ones who chose Kansas over Missouri. That’s the way the system works. Bowl committee members call the shots on the handful of coveted BCS at-large spots.

Is this any way to run a major-college football business?

Instead of having one impartial, independent selection committee – see NCAA basketball – you have multiple committees. And you have to believe that many of those committee members are more concerned with selling game tickets, boosting television ratings and packing the local hotels and restaurants with out-of-towners than they are with being fair to players and teams.

Apparently nothing’s too embarrassing for major college football. No playoffs? No problem here. Polls, computers, bowl fiefdoms, quirky rules, outdated traditions and a rainbow coalition of gaudy blazers are good enough for those who rule the sport.

Arizona State, runner-up to USC in the Pac-10, got shut out of the BCS bowl mix because of a strange brew of rules and tradition.

Rose Bowl committee members chose Illinois, a three-loss team ranked 13th, to face USC because they wanted to embrace their Big Ten vs. Pac-10 tradition.

This would have been a good year for the Rose Bowl to end that tradition. In truth, this is more like tradition lite because the Rose Bowl traditionally features the Big Ten and Pac-10 champs. Illinois finished second in the Big Ten behind Ohio State, which finished No. 1 in the BCS standings and will play No. 2 LSU in the title game.

If the Rose Bowl had taken, say, No. 9 West Virginia, that would have opened a potential spot for ASU in the Fiesta Bowl. As it turned out the Fiesta Bowl had to pick either West Virginia or Hawaii to face Oklahoma.

By winning the Big East, West Virginia was guaranteed a BCS bowl game. And as a team from a non- BCS conference that finished in the top 12, No. 10 Hawaii, by rule, was guaranteed a berth.

So the Fiesta Bowl took West Virginia, the Sugar Bowl chose Hawaii, and ASU settled for the Holiday Bowl against Texas.

It’s all too confusing and too strange. It all needs to give way to something more rational. Something called playoffs.