Bowl Championship Series, the potential for your biggest nightmare touches down today in New Orleans.

That would be the University of Hawai'i football team.

The 12-0 Warriors, who left Honolulu last night, are precisely the kind of riff-raff the BCS was designed to keep out of the big bowl, big bucks January lineup. They are everything the BCS fears. And they are spending the week in New Orleans, site of their Jan. 1 Sugar Bowl game with Georgia.

The Warriors are the school from the other side of the tracks or, in this case, ocean. A relative Who Dat from outside the six power conferences that have automatic berths in the five-bowl BCS. Somebody that you don't see on television until November and whose games don't play host to ESPN's Game Day crew. Somebody whose birthright doesn't include a Top 20 berth at the start of the season.

They are the guys in green and black. Or, for the purposes of the Sugar Bowl, visiting white.

If the BCS isn't nervous that the Warriors have gotten this far, it should be. Boise State last year barged into the lucrative private party, the only school from a non-guaranteed conference to crash it. Then, the Broncos trashed the concept of top drawer football being the exclusive province of the power conferences by knocking off Oklahoma.

So, here's the BCS, still a little shaken by having the Sooners, one of its most formidable lodge brothers, embarrassed in the Fiesta Bowl last season when, darned if the pesky Western Athletic Conference doesn't produce another unbeaten team. The only one in the country, too. I mean, what are the chances?

Most people believe, incorrectly, the BCS was designed to determine a national championship. It wasn't. It is supposed to assure that the lion's share of the postseason money — more than $100 million — stays in the pockets of the power conferences. For this the best BCS minds had put together a formula that was supposed to largely fence out the lower classes but leave just enough room to mollify Congress and monopoly-charging lawyers.

And now along comes UH to squirm through a hole in that fence, doing it with a schedule that has drawn comparisons with French pastries.

If the Warriors — and they are 9-point underdogs on some betting lines — should somehow win, they will not only reinforce everything Boise State did last season but expand upon it. And there would go another chunk of the BCS' argument for controlling bowl berths and staving off a true national championship playoff.

So, you see, it isn't just the Bulldogs that have a lot riding on this game. It is the BCS, too. In that, the team that arrives from Hawai'i today has the potential to inflict a significant New Year's hangover.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.

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