De-fense! D-fense!

Nothing wrong with a little "D", says Dave George...

On Dec. 28, Baylor won a game 54-52 over Mississippi State. The following day Baylor won another game 67-56 over Washington. The first was regular-season basketball. The second was the loony-tune Alamo Bowl, where a total of 17 touchdowns were scored by the two teams.

LSU's defense, by contrast, has allowed 13 touchdowns all season. Bama's defensive unit, even stingier, has limited an entire season's worth of opponents to nine.

That's old-school football, folks, and we ought to be out clapping erasers in celebration of it, rather than pretending that the only game worth watching is the one where every incompletion calls for a replay and quite possibly an investigation.

Never worry, either, if the BCS rankings system got this thing right.

LSU and Alabama undoubtedly are the two best teams in the nation, if for no other reason than Oklahoma State and Stanford and all the rest are not true teams at all. They are fractions of a whole, with all the best athletes on the offensive side of the ball and the defensive units left merely to play a role in the overall entertainment package, like the Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters.

This is more than just an opinion. It's a natural fact, demonstrated by the results of the four major BCS bowls that served as the undercard for Monday's championship match. In those games, Stanford, Wisconsin, Clemson and Virginia Tech combined to score an average of 32.25 points, and they were the losing teams, for crying out loud.

A touchdown ought to carry more value than that. It ought to make you jump up and down. It ought to make you hug a stranger.

Instead, the growing trend is to slump deeper into the couch when your team crosses the goal line, mumbling something like, "Oh, man, we scored way too fast. Our defense has already given up 40 points and they needed a few more minutes to rest. It's going to get really, really ugly now."

LSU and Alabama went to overtime in November and never scored a single touchdown between them. Spectacular? Not especially. Pathetic? Only if you're convinced another team could have done more against the same ornery level of resistance.

The last five BCS title games say otherwise, with SEC teams shutting down the flavor-of-the-month scoring machine of some other power conference in every case.

Ohio State, for instance, averaged 36 points per game in 2006 but managed just 14 against Florida in the national title game. Half of that, remember, came on Ted Ginn Jr.'s 93-yard return of the opening kickoff.

Auburn's 22-19 BCS title win over Oregon last January is the most recent example. The supersonic Ducks rolled into that one having scored at least 50 points in half of their 12 regular season games and an obscene high of 72 against New Mexico.

Monday night could be another punting festival between the Tigers and the Tide, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Wrong is 49 points by halftime, which was West Virginia's cartoonish Orange Bowl total.

Wrong is 1,129 yards in total offense, like Oregon and Wisconsin rolled up in the Rose Bowl. The grandaddy of them all used to be "Whoa, Nelly," with Keith Jackson. Now it's just "Whoa!"

If it matters, I'll take LSU to earn a two-game sweep of the Tide, figuring that Les Miles makes it happen with one of his classic fourth-down gambles.

How refreshing that too would be. In so many of this year's scoreboard-scarring bowl games, the defenses rarely even forced a fourth down.