If I had a hammer (as the song goes), I would also have options. And the options would boil down to these two:

1. I could take my hammer and hit myself in the head with it. This is, after all, what it feels like every time I try to employ logic against the defenders of the junk faith that is the BCS.

2. I could hit one of the defenders with it.

BCS executive director Bill Hancock, for instance.

Hancock is the guy who on Monday said the BCS cabal would meet Tuesday over a steaming cauldron of eye of newt to decide how to complete the destruction of college football. OK, so he didn’t actually put it that way, but he did promise everything would be on the table.

Presumably, this did not include the one thing that could improve the BCS, which is my hammer. Plus a case of dynamite.

Hancock immediately nixed that by saying a true playoff system is still out of the question, on the once-again ridiculous grounds that it would somehow diminish both the regular and bowl seasons. Done right, of course, it would do neither – and in the case of the increasingly irrelevant BCS bowls, it would more than likely save them.

But the cabal still can’t see it. And so what they’ll likely do is just enough to placate a disinterested public, and thereby keep the money rolling in.

And so, head meet hammer.

One more time I’ll use it to bash home my point, which is nothing if not obvious: The BCS, as presently constituted, reduces its cherished bowl games to meaningless exhibitions. And the numbers suggest more and more people are starting to realize it.

TV ratings for the Rose Bowl, down 15 percent last year, were down another 15 percent this time around. No one, it seems, watched the Sugar Bowl.

All of this was topped by the SEC Invitational, aka the BCS national championship game. Alabama shut out LSU, or at least some tailgaters dressed as LSU, 21-0 – a plodding rematch America evidently regarded as soccer in helmets, because it was the lowest-rated title game in the 14-year history of the BCS.

Yet here the BCS remains, still refusing to scrap-heap itself. Even the coach of its new national champion, Nick Saban, thinks it’s unfair, but it goes blithely on, skittishly sticking its toe in the water by considering a plus-one – the four BCS bowls in a four-team tournament – and then scurrying away.

But you know what?

If you do this right, everyone wins.

Here’s how: The top eight teams in the final BCS poll make the playoffs – i.e., the Sugar, Orange, Fiesta and Rose bowls. The winners of those bowls advance to the semis, and the winners of those two games advance to the title game.

Voila. The BCS bowls would actually mean something again. The regular season would be undiminished. And all the Taco Bell Beefy Crunch Burrito bowls could still exist for whatever reason they exist.

Instead, the last time a plus-one was on the table, the Big Ten, Pac-10, Big East and Big 12 were all against it. Now Big Ten commish Jim Delany says they’re all at least willing to discuss it, which means it might actually have dawned on them that it would clearly benefit all of them.

And if not …

Well. Where’s my stinkin’ hammer?