Rarely do I agree with anything regarding the Ohio State Buckeyes, so it came as a shock to me that the University's president is echoing something that I have been saying for weeks, if not months. OSU pres E. Gordon Gee, who was formerly president at WVU, Colorado, Brown, and Vanderbilt, says that TCU and Boise State, even if they run the table, do not deserve a shot at the national title. Thanks dude, you're singing my song. And why have I been saying this? Because playing in one of the big conferences, like the SEC, Big 12 and Big 10, is a full-on brutal schedule. It's not one big game at the beginning of the year like Boise played against Virginia Tech. They think one game in front of 80,000 people in a hostile, road-game environment makes them legit. You know that they call that in the SEC? Saturday, every stinking Saturday. Gee quotes, "Well, I don't know enough about the Xs and Os of college football. I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it's like murderer's row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gantlet that there's some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to be in the big ballgame." THANK YOU! He could not be more right. It's asinine to think that teams who generally play the likes of Idaho and Wyoming belong in the big game. You can give me a one-loss Bama team that wins the SEC any day. Why should teams like Boise and TCU get to play grown up football with a JV schedule. You can't ask for that company when bowl season rolls around when you don't play it all year long. Boise can move to the Pac 10, and TCU can move to the Big 12, and if they still go undefeated then I'll be convinced that they belong. Until then, go play Fresno State.
This is also why I am one of the few believers that the BCS is better than a playoff system. The BCS is not designed to make all the bowl games exciting. It's made to do one thing: put the two best teams against each other for the national title. Guess what, ol' E. Gordon agrees with that too. "It's not about this incessant drive to have a national championship because I think that's a slippery slope to professionalism," he said. "I'm a fan of the bowl system and I think that by and large it's worked very, very well." Yes it has. Well said sir. Going to a playoff grossly decreases the chances of the two best teams playing for the title. Say the playoff has eight teams, four on each side of the bracket. Then, let's say a couple teams get upset and both four seeds are playing for the national title. Who wants to see the presumably 7th and 8th best teams that season play for the title, when they are clearly not the best teams in the country. The BCS has 4 criteria, three of which are a major factor in assuring the two best teams play each other. First is wins and losses, which is about the only argument that teams like TCU and Boise have. They run the table against teams that are generally... well... shitty. Which brings us to number two, strength of schedule. Ahhh, there it is. That's your dagger mid-major schools. You don't play anyone good, so we don't care that you never lose. Boise State's SOS is 80th and TCU's is 84th in the country. Auburn and Bama's SOS are 19th and 9th respectively, and LSU's is 11th. You couldn't hang in that conference, I'm sorry. Texas is 13th and Oklahomma is 4th. Yup, you'd get killed in the Big 12 too. I could keep going but why bother. Point proven. Not that it's even necessary to the argument anymore, but opponents strength of schedule is third, which makes even less of a case for you. So, if you go undefeated and end up #3 again, that's just too bad. Of course if you did play in the SEC or Big 12 we would probably never have this conversation because you'd probably be the third or fourth best team in those conferences with at least 3 losses a season. So if you want to play with the big boys in January, you have to play in a big boy conference. Until then, we'll never know if you can really hang. My guess is, you can't.
