When does a 13-1 record not warrant consideration for the national championship? When does going 8-3 or 10-2 mean diddly-squat for the bowl picture?

Welcome to the age of the conference tie-in.

There was a time when a college football team’s merit was based solely on its record. If you go 11-0 or as close to it as possible, you were named National Champion. If you didn’t go undefeated, but had a respectable season, you went to a lesser bowl. Simple.

Now words like “marketing,” “fan base” and “conference slot” creep up whenever bowl talks start swirling, and it’s getting sickening. Consider:

Stanford, Michigan State and California, all 6-5 teams, will play in a bowl game. Wyoming (10-2), San Diego State (8-3), and Rice (7-4) will not.

Why? Because their spots were reserved at the postseason dance.

Also consider:

Brigham Young (13-1), the Western Athletic Conference champions and No. 5 team in the nation, won’t have a shot at the national title.

Texas (8-4), which was unranked until they beat Nebraska last week for the Big 12 title, is suddenly considered a better team than the Cougars.

Forget spoiled athletes. Bureaucrats will destroy college football.

At the very least, they’re doing some serious harm. When stuff like this happens, you know something’s wrong.

It goes like this: There will be 18 bowl games played between Dec. 19 and Jan. 2. That’s 36 total spots. Between them, four conferences the Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and Big East control 17 of those spots. The Southeastern Conference holds another five. That makes 22. The Atlantic Coast Conference has another four.

The WAC has two, even though seven of its teams had records of 6-5 or better, which is supposed to make you bowl-eligible.

But this setup means that the fifth-place team in the Pac-10, Cal, gets priority in the bowl selection process over Wyoming, the second-place WAC team.

Why? Because that slot was guaranteed.

Does this make sense to anybody? Of course not. Not even to WAC Commissioner Karl Benson.

“We’ve seen that it’s not necessarily the most deserving teams that get to go to a bowl, but the most attractive,” Benson said Sunday night via teleconference.

Just what we need: College football turning into singles night. It’s not how good you are, but how pretty you look.

The Alliance was created four years ago, supposedly to create a true national championship game. No. 1 vs. No. 2. Sounds simple, right?

For the second time in three years, that’s not going to happen because No. 2 Arizona State (11-0) and No. 4 Ohio State (10-1) have a prearranged date at the Rose Bowl Jan. 1.

Instead, the title game will be between No. 1 Florida State and No. 3 Florida in the Sugar Bowl, again. The two teams played each other two years ago in the same game, and the Seminoles beat Florida just a week ago.

So logic would dictate that BYU ranked No. 5 as of yesterday would go into the alliance-run Fiesta Bowl against No. 7 Penn State, right?

Of course not. Here’s where the suits come in.

The powers-that-be picked a Texas team that beat Nebraska but also lost to Oklahoma earlier this year over the Cougars. And a Penn State team that didn’t win any conference title. The Longhorns came into the game unranked. Now they’re No. 20.

Why? Fiesta Bowl Executive Director John Junker made it clear.

“We wanted an anchor team that would answer most of our needs and was the most positive force,” Junker told reporters Sunday. “Penn State was that. The Alliance was never established to match rankings.”

Correct. It was established to make more money for the bigger conferences, and this proves it.

The rich keep getting richer.

The six Alliance berths are in the hands of the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Big East. The big boys. And may the rest be damned.

“A strong signal was sent (Sunday),” Benson said. “Unless the Alliance system is changed, it doesn’t appear the at-large berths will be available to us.”

Leaving BYU out of an $8.486 million payday from the Fiesta. Instead, they’ll go to the Cotton and get $2 million for playing No. 14 Kansas State.

“It’s something that we need to reflect on,” Benson said. “Because it’s something that has never happened before, for a WAC team to be playing on New Year’s Day on national TV.”

That’s true, but in the face of what could have been what should have been that Cotton Bowl berth is tainted. The whole Alliance is tainted. Hell, all the bowls are tainted.

If you’re in, say, the Big 10, what’s the use of playing for first place in your conference if you know that you could go 6-5 and still be playing in late December?

If you’re in the WAC, does it really matter what you do anymore when the best team in your conference gets this kind of snub?

Benson said that he would present the Alliance a plan that would give an automatic berth to a champion from the four conferences the WAC, Conference USA, Big West and Mid-America that aren’t in the Alliance if that team is ranked in the top 12.

In the long term, Benson said, Sunday’s events will cause the WAC to “take an active role” in pursuing a playoff system at the end of each season.

If the Division I-AA playoff system is any indication, it wouldn’t hurt the “tradition and excitement” so many bowl bureaucrats like to talk about when promoting their games.

But if the same people running the Alliance are in charge of any new system, we could be seeing the same problem creep up sooner than we think.