The 2008 college football season comes to a close tonight as Oklahoma and Florida face off in the BCS National Championship Game. As usual, the only major sport that has no playoff system has followed up a thrilling season with a seemingly arbitrary matchup, leaving several equally deserving teams out of the running for the championship. The Bowl Championship Series uses a combination of “Top 25” polls and so-called “computer rankings” that grade teams on factors such as strength of schedule, quality of wins, etc. to determine the two teams that will compete in the title game. Rarely does the college football community agree on who the two best teams are, and of the 11 seasons of the BCS, seven have ended with disagreement over who should play for the title: Florida State/Miami in 2000, Colorado/Nebraska/Oregon in 2001, LSU/Oklahoma/USC in 2003, Auburn/LSU/USC in 2004, Florida/Michigan in 2006, Georgia/Ohio State/LSU/Oklahoma/Virginia Tech in 2007, and now Florida/Oklahoma/Texas/USC/Utah in 2008.

In each of these years, angry pundits and fans – particularly fans of those schools left out of the title game – condemn the BCS as an unjust, biased system that fails to achieve its most basic objective of determining a true “best team” in college football. Despite all this, the BCS lands one major TV contract after another. Fox picked up broadcast rights in 2006, and ESPN recently inked a deal worth 50% more than Fox’s, which will start with the 2010 season. On the surface, the TV deals sound outrageous to fans, given the unpopularity of the current system. But have the BCS’s problems translated into problems for the sport in general?

Hardly. For all the controversy it creates, the BCS certainly knows how to spark a good conversation, and all the arguing over which one-loss team is better than all the other one-loss teams has only served to put more eyeballs in front of the TV and in front of the computer during the season.

Whether in spite of, because of, or irrespective of the BCS, online interest in the college football season has continued to rise year after year. FoxSports.com has seen substantial growth in its college-football viewership since Fox began its partnership with the BCS in 2006, despite the TV network’s dearth of regular-season broadcasts. The ESPN brand is obviously the most recognizable in the sports landscape, and their season-long TV, radio, and magazine coverage has naturally contributed to ESPN.com’s growth in recent years. But the biggest gainer has been Yahoo! Sports – the true leader in sports on the web – which has actually doubled its college football traffic in the past four years, thanks in part to its acquisition last year of Rivals.com, a top source for college sports and recruiting news.

Each new season generates a new controversy, and each new controversy generates more traffic across the interwebs. ESPN’s new deal to keep this horrible system festering for four more years will likely ensure that all those angry eyeballs stay tuned. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare to curse this system for the entire four-hour telecast tonight that I will, of course, watch intently

With Memorial Day behind us, the summer driving season is officially underway. You probably heard that AAA estimated a decrease in motor traffic over the holiday weekend for the first time since 2002. But even if gas prices, which climbed another four cents while you were reading the last sentence, are finally beginning to impact leisure travel, millions of Americans who cannot cut back on driving to and from work are being forced to either absorb the high prices or find more creative ways of cutting consumption.

Some people have tried cutting out driving altogether, but most are turning to more fuel-efficient vehicles, including new hybrid models, decade-old Geo Metros and, increasingly, motor scooters with triple-digit MPGs. But heavyweight motorcycles, which still get two to three times the gas mileage of a typical sedan, aren’t enjoying the same sales bump, so one would expect there to be less interest in the heavyweights on the web. Au contraire!

Traffic to motorcycle companies’ websites typically increases through the first few months of a calendar year as weather improves, starting around February’s Bike Week in Daytona Beach and going right through the Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Rally in D.C. during Memorial Day weekend. The pattern certainly holds true this year, but what’s interesting about this graph is that most of the companies shown, despite being major scooter producers, had fewer visitors to their sites in April 2008 than in the same month in 2007. In fact, only Honda Powersports and Harley-Davidson posted year-over-year increases in traffic. Harley’s 22% rise in traffic is particularly impressive because of its premium-brand status and its absence from the bustling small-scooter market.

Harley-Davidson also leads the pack in keeping visitors on its site. The average stay per visit was just over 10 minutes for Harley-Davidson in April, 25% higher than its closest competitor, Kawasaki. So interest in the Harley brand is obviously still present, but that interest isn’t being converted to sales. (Harley-Davidson sales for Q1 2008 were down 5.6% compared to Q1 2007 and down 12.8% from Q4 2007.) With fuel efficiency on consumers’ minds and difficult economic conditions around for the immediate future, could Harley begin to position itself as a practical vehicle and still maintain its high-end brand image? Would Americans who are in market for a new vehicle buy into the idea that the hog they’ve always wanted is an increasingly sensible purchase? What do you think?