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| SJS College Football Extravaganza |
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BCS Mess?
Why do I bring this up in 1999? It's probably because I don't think everything is due to work out for the better every season. Sooner or later more than a couple of highly-ranked teams are going to finish undefeated. When the inevitable happens, deserving teams will get left out of the championship game. That's the day that the fans and media call for the BCS's head, and call for a real 4 or 8-team playoff system to replace it. Look, there's no other improvements to the mathematical formula you can really make - the next step up is playoffs. It could happen this year: Although a number of the highly rated teams from different conferences play fairly solid schedules, they don't tend to play many big games out of conference. Current AP #2 Penn State could easily come out of the Big 10 undefeated, along with Wisconsin since the two don't meet. Undefeated, too, could be the winner of the Florida State - Ga. Tech game from the ACC, Nebraska or Texas A&M from the Big 10, or Tennessee or Florida from the SEC. The difference between these programs that are perennially ranked high and the rest of Division 1A is a substantial one - you can glance at a lot of the really good teams' schedules and point to only a couple of games that they really have a chance to lose. And how about the really good teams from the weaker conferences? Like Tulane last year, you can find a number of smaller schools that will beat up lousy conference opponents, play winnable non-conference games, and have a decent chance to go unbeaten. Schools in that category this year are Marshall, Louisville, and BYU.
One Way To Slice It: Rankings are from last week; teams in red are teams that could simultaneously go undefeated because they don't play each other. I've just assumed the higher ranked-team from either a conference or an inter-conference match-up is the one to go undefeated, except where the higher-ranked team of a pair has already lost a hypothetical match-up to an even higher-ranked team (e.g. Virginia Tech undefeated, Miami not) The point is, there's probably a couple of ways to get a bunch of undefeated teams at season's end. 7 / 20 is a large fraction. Don't believe a Virginia Tech could go unbeaten? Think again. That's certainly not a world-beating non-conference schedule, the Big East is not that difficult of a conference, and they get Miami in Blacksburg. Those are probably the reasons they're getting that one AP vote. |
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December 5th may be remembered as the date last season when the newly-formed Bowl coalition averted disaster. Two of three highly-ranked, previously unbeaten teams lost absolute heart-breakers that day. The BCS was able to pit, with very little controversy, an unbeaten #1 (Tennessee) with a one-loss #2 (Florida State) in a January 4th championship game. The result provoked a lot of self-congratulatory talk among the committee folks about how well the new system "worked", matching up the "two best teams" in the country. Imagine how different it would have been had UCLA and Kansas State avoided their upset losses in December. Looking back, I certainly didn't have a clear idea of which two teams would have emerged from the BCS math to play for all the marbles; I don't think a lot of people did then as I was still reading and hearing wildly different things from the various sports outlets in the days preceding the conference championship games. Obviously the poll results after the December 5th games would have had a major effect on the choices. One thing is certain, that the arguments and confusion would have lasted until the final bowl game was played. And it would have been worse had Ohio State avoided their own monumental upset loss earlier in November.