Playoffs? You kidding me? Playoffs?

I think Jim Mora said it best.

I for one don't want a playoff in D-1 college football. It's the Football Bowl Subdivision.

I enjoy the yearly BCS conundrum. Colorado missed out on the national championship game by .05 points to Nebraska in 2001 - a team we'd hung 62 points on in their final game - ruining the corn's perfect season and preventing them from even the Big XII North, let alone the conference title. Granted Miami would have drubbed us like Oregon did, so it really should have been the Ducks playing for the championship. But I only mention this because my team has been kicked in the pants by the BCS, and I still think it can work.

It's certainly not perfect. First there is the rubbish about BCS conferences (see this post about the Big East). Then the fact that the Big Ten and Pac-10 have no conference championship game, which has already been mentioned by several BD bloggers. Though in years past this has allowed Ohio State and USC to move up the ladder after another school's loss in their conference title game, it could end up hurting a team like Penn State this year. If they had another chance to prove themselves, maybe they could sneak in to the conversation. After all, their only loss was by one point on the road on a last second field goal.

The conference championship game actually hosed Missouri last year. They beat Kansas in a highly anticipated rivalry week game, giving each school one loss and giving the Tigers the Big XII North. They then went on to lose their second game to Oklahoma in the Big XII championship, vaulting one-loss Kansas over them in the BCS standings. Kansas was then rewarded with a BCS bowl, the Orange Bowl, against the ACC's yearly patsy Virginia Tech. The only reason the Jayhawks won the Orange Bowl was because of their loss to Missouri to conclude the regular season.

Another pitfall of a playoff would be the issue of all the bowl games. Do they remain part of college football's postseason? (Though many of these pre-Christmas games could be contracted anyway. What is the Magicjack Saint Petersburg Bowl?) A playoff certainly takes significance away from earning a bowl bid for non-playoff schools.

I like what Ookie Crisp had to say in his 'BCS Bashing' post. The regular season is the playoff. You have twelve games to prove that you should play for the crystal football, or that you should land one of the premier BCS bowls. This can't be college basketball where 65 schools make the tourney after a thirty game regular season. Maybe everyone just wants a playoff so they can fill out more brackets and have office pools.

Just get rid of the computers; you can never trust a computer. Let the voters decide who should play for the championship. And if there was a playoff, none of this eight team business that's been proposed and supported by everyone from BD Sports to Gameday to Obama to Flo at the local IHOP. Four teams, the best of the best. This year that would be Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma, regardless of what happens this weekend.

I'll conclude by alluding to another famous Jim Mora quote: playoffs in D-1 college football would be diddly-poo.

Big 10 (11) Fix

Alright, I'm tired of watching the Big 10 finish up two weeks early every year and sit back while every other school has rivalry games and conference championships.  While the Big 10 teams stay home and rest up, every other good team in the country is getting beat up and through attrition - helping those teams with a bye move up the rankings.  As long as we're going to have a BCS system instead of a playoff I think that the BCS conferences need to have title games.  The Pac-10 is an issue for another article, but largely it isn't worth having a title game out there right now because there's only one good team in the conference.  That being the case, let's focus on the Big 10.

For this scenario to have even a shred of credibility, (not saying there's much of a chance of that, but let's pretend) I think it's important to maintain as many traditional rivalries as possible.  That way when the conference is split up, there's not the concern that Michigan only plays Ohio State every three years.  Additionally, which we'll get into, there will be the need to add another team so everything may be divided up evenly.

Big 10 Rivalries

• Illinois: Indiana, Northwestern
  
• Indiana: Illinois, Purdue
  
• Iowa: Minnesota, Wisconsin
  
• Michigan: Michigan State, Ohio State
  
• Michigan State: Michigan, Penn State
  
• Minnesota: Iowa, Wisconsin
  
• Northwestern: Illinois, Purdue
  
• Ohio State: Michigan, Penn State
  
• Penn State: Michigan State, Ohio State
  
• Purdue: Indiana, Northwestern
  
• Wisconsin: Iowa, Minnesota

Okay, so now what?  How can we start breaking this down?  Well based on rivalries the 11 teams fit into three main groups:

Group 1: Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State

Group 2: Indiana, Purdue, Northwestern, Illinois

Group 3: Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin

Right off the bat there's a problem - there's no easy split to get six and six while still maintaining these traditional rivalries.  I propose instead of the traditional approach that is done in the other BCS conferences that have championship games where the conference is divided into two groups of six that the Big 10 institute a pod system similar to how the CCHA balances out the hockey schedule.

Breaking down in pods, a team would be paired with a rival and this rival they would play automatically every year.  Providing you add one more team, you would have six pods.  Nine conference games would be easy enough to schedule in that you play your rival and then you play both teams in four of the five remaining pods that year.  You still have room for three non-conference games and then the pod that you do not play one year you rotate through and play the next year.  This means that teams in the Big 10 pod system would play every team aside from their rivals four out of every five years, which is pretty much how it all works out now.  Additionally the championship game would be #1 playing #2 at the end of the year and the advantage of this system is that you don't have a top team sitting out just like you do in the Big XII this year with Missouri playing for a BCS automatic berth instead of Texas or Texas Tech.

There are a number of different scenarios for pod breakdowns, each has pros and cons.
Pod 1 - Penn State/ Michigan State
Pod 2 - Michigan/ Ohio State
Pod 3 - Indiana/ Purdue
Pod 4 - Illinois/ Northwestern
Pod 5 - Wisconsin/ Minnesota
Pod 6 - Iowa/TBD

I kept Minnesota and Wisconsi together becase I like the rivalry and playing for a Slab of Bacon is just cool.  What to do about adding another team?  I'm sure a lot of people will say that Notre Dame is the obvious answer.  The Irish are independent in football and already play a strong Big 10 schedule every year.  As a Domer, I think it would be cool to see in addition to Michigan, Michigan State and Purdue each year a more consistent showing of Penn State and Ohio State.  The problem is, where do you put Notre Dame?  You can't really slide them in with Iowa, that doesn't make much sense.  If you put them in with Purdue or Penn State or Michigan or Michigan State, none of those teams have a strong rivalry with Iowa.  So if Notre Dame doesn't work, what are other schools that have a strong enough rivalry with these schools for football and would actually add to the conference.  Penn State has some of the better out of conference rivalries with Pittsburgh and West Virginia.  In the immediate time frame a frequent matchup of Michigan/ West Virginia would be interesting, but that's a temporary storyline.  Additionally you still have the problem that if you add in one of those teams, then you end up putting Michigan State with Iowa, which isn't a great scenario.  Plus you'd have to find another team to fill in for the Big East (Marshall?).

So where do we go now?  Back to Iowa, and finding a team to plug in with Iowa.  I propose move Iowa State out of the Big XII and into the Big 10.  In order to fill the void in the Big XII add TCU which should be able to be competitive (probably more so than Iowa State or Baylor).  There are a few extra moving parts here but it accomplishes four things: 1) traditional rivalries are maintained 2) the Big 10 will have a championship game which will be more equitable in selecting the Rose Bowl berth and the top teams won't have the chance to creep into the BCS by being idle 3) the Big 10 will finally be forced to find an accurate name for their conference and not try and hide an 11 (or in this case 12) in the design.  The Big XII used to be the Big 8 and they managed to learn to count accurately, it's not that hard.

Same as Everyone Else...

...ND coaching and BCS

BCS first, and the 3-way ties thing. For what it's worth, I'd like to point out that this year the BCS is working EXACTLY as intended. The national championship game will likely pair the winners of the 2 undisputedly best conferences, which combine to include 4 of the consensus top 5 (and 5 of the top 7) teams in the country. So, my apologies to USC (not really), but their conference and related strength of schedule wasn't good enough to merit their single loss as a national championship contender.

Although the SEC model worked out fine this year, the Big XII tiebreaker for determining the South division champion is really the problem. By this point, we know that OU is going to the Big XII Championship and, hopefully for the BCS, the national championship. (What a mess it would be if Missouri somehow finds a way to win that game.) But this is a problem with the conference, not the BCS, so don't blame the BCS for this.

I agree that it's unfortunate that Texas and TTU (I hate that people are discounting them because their BCS rank isn't as high in large part because they weren't a preseason top 10 team and lost most recently) apparently won't have a chance to factor into the national title picture, but I don't have a solution for the conference tiebreaker, so to go any further with this would be counterproductive.

However, in response to earlier posts, I am against forced scheduling, in large part because I think it is unnecessary and impractical and I think that it could hurt historical inter-conference rivalries (i.e. ND/UM, ND/USC, Florida/FSU, Iowa/Iowa St., etc.) because who would want to play a 3rd marquee non-conference game if they already have to play 2? I am also against an 8-team playoff because mid-December scheduling interferes with finals and because now you are bringing 2-loss teams into the picture.

Now ND coaching. I am for the most part in agreement with most of the other sentiments posted on this site. I think ND is in a lose-lose situation right now. Therefore, for too many reasons to write on a post that is already too long, I think that the best course of action is to keep Weis for at least one more and probably two more years. Link Weis to Clausen and that class--if he can't get it done in 1 1/2 years, fire him mid-season and be first in line to get a new coach.

Or maybe he'll die from "health complications" before that point.

BCS Prediction Commentary

So ESPN's projections for the week are a bit rough (I don't know what ever happened to Blozar's projections - I must have missed that post).   Here are some thoughts on each game:

FedEx BCS National Championship Game (BCS No. 1 vs. BCS No. 2)	Texas Tech vs. Florida	Texas Tech vs. Florida
Tostitos Fiesta (BCS vs. BCS)	Texas vs. USC	Texas vs. Utah
Allstate Sugar (BCS vs. BCS)	Alabama vs. Utah	Alabama vs. USC
FedEx Orange (BCS vs. BCS)	Maryland vs. Cincinnati	Cincinnati vs. Miami (FL)
Rose Bowl presented by Citi (BCS vs. BCS)	Penn State vs. Oregon State	Penn State vs. Oregon State

Texas Tech vs Florida - I'll admit I am a Big XII apologist, and I really am a believer in Texas Tech right now.  While their wins have been impressive, they did beat Okie State and Texas at home and trashed a KU team on the road that is a shadow of the team from last year.  Going to Norman will be a real test, which I'm not sure if TTU is up for.  If this matchup happens I'm predicting another SEC National Champion.

Texas vs. USC = great game, Texas vs. Utah = not good - Yes Utah has won a BCS game...against Pittsburgh, and Texas is well beyond TCU or Michigan or BYU.  The Utes will be out of this one early.  However, Texas vs USC provides the potential of a great rematch of the 2005 Rose Bowl.  USC's defense against Colt McCoy?  This would be a fun game to watch.

Alabama vs Utah/ Alabama vs. USC - So pretty much take the reasons from above and put them here for why I wouldn't want to watch Alabama vs Utah.  Also, the thought of two storied programs, two great defenses with a lot of speed and some great playmakers on offense, this would be awesome!  However...that means that based on these predictions if Alabama plays USC, then Texas plays Utah...ugh.

Orange Bowl - this really isn't worth talking about other than the fact that ND could possible play the ACC team not in the Orange Bowl in the Gator Bowl.  I'm sure the Orange Bowl organizers love the thought of Cincinnati coming to town while everyone else gets teams like Texas, Alabama, USC and Penn State for their fan base.

Penn State vs. Oregon State - For those that didn't TiVo the 45-14 drubbing in the first weekend in September, don't feel bad you get to watch the replay.  I will be surprised if Oregon State wins at Arizona and then beats Oregon.  I expect them to slip once, USC to win the Pac-10 (again) and there will be no at large bid for Oregon State.  That probably means that Ohio State slips in as another at-large over Boise State.  If that's the case it would be great if Ohio State could play an SEC school, just for fun.

BCS Bashing

Hello everyone. My name is Nick ("Hi, Nick!"), and I'm a BCS enthusiast. Please don't judge me. It's not my fault--it's a disease. And I'm fighting the good cause. With you're help, I've been clean and sober from bashing the BCS for 247 days...

I know you've all heard the arguments for both sides. You've probably heard most of the BCS complaints about 20 times each, and most of the supporting statements only thrice. Well I had too, or I thought I had. And then the trump card was played (on ESPN of all places, where you are more likely to hear the third-string special teams gunner from the 1986 SMU team complain about the BCS format than you are to see more than 3 highlights of last night's MLB playoff game) by Tim Cowlishaw in early September on Around the Horn. And I'm paraphrasing here, but it went something like this:
"Welcome to the biggest and best sports tournament of the year. No, it's not March yet. No, I don't mean the MLB playoffs. The college football SEASON has kicked off."

That's what the BCS is. You don't know a 64 or 16 or even 4 team playoff--you already have it. Think about it--if you lose, you're out. So don't lose.

I'm not saying that the system is perfect. It certainly needs to be tweaked (e.g. eliminating preseason polls and pollsters rewarding difficult schedules), but I think that most of the imperfections are due to the polls, and not the BCS format. Even if you went to a post-season tournament, you'd still have to use some sort of judgment to determine the teams that qualify, no matter if your tournament is 2 teams or 32.

So when you're watching college football this weekend, think about this: what is a bigger game--LSU vs. Florida or Ohio St. vs. Purdue? Give me a 16-team tournament, and it's not. LSU and Florida are guaranteed spots in the field, and this would only be a battle over seeding. Ohio St. could be fighting for their tournament life. Which game do I want to watch more? Which game do I want to matter?

I'm thankful that tOSU isn't in position to "get hot" in December and make a tournament run for another national championship. I'm thankful that LSU/Florida IS a game with national championship implications. Ohio St. already had their tournament run; it's Darwinism, and sports, at its best.

Let's be honest

The Big East is a joke.

Take your average Big East team and match them against any Pac 10 team not paying their players with third party gifts and you'd have one epic pillowfight.

This conference slips into the back door of the BCS every year. I'll give West Virginia their deserved respect after the last few years, and every year a new team turns the corner, but a good Big East team should not be viewed as a BCS contender. Granted, the BCS does has it's flaws, but that's for another day. Today is all about defining why the Big East should have no more say in the BCS than the Mountain West.

When the BCS began, the five major conferences (Big XII, Big Ten, SEC, ACC, and Pac 10) were all granted automatic berths. The next most major conference, the Big East, was only allowed at the big kid's table because of one, maybe two reasons: Miami and Virginia Tech.

If you've forgotten, the ACC was a meager nine teams until 2004. Wanting to add a conference championship game and the money that comes with it, the ACC decided to expand to twelve teams. Miami and Virginia Tech - the Big East's two best teams and two legitimate national powers - were immediately invited. A year later Boston College (who along with West Virginia would be the Big East's next best team) joined. So three of the Big East's best football programs, and the only real reasons the Big East was granted a BCS bid, had jumped ship to join a real BCS conference.

What was the BCS to do? Demote the Big East to the level of the MAC? Why no, they just had to plug the voids with new teams, paving the way for South Florida, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Connecticut to think they deserve a shot at the national championship because they were BCS schools now. All they'd have to do is run the table in their weak conference.

I do think going undefeated is an incredible accomplishment, in any conference, and should warrant a BCS berth and possible national championship consideration. Utah were given their due respect after going undefeated in the Mountain West (and were rewarded with Big East champ Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl). But maybe the BCS should have originally considered Miami like Notre Dame, admitting the historic program to the party if they've had a good year even if they aren't in a major conference.

After the exodus, the Big East was left with West Virginia, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, and Rutgers from their original BCS members (Temple also left the conference to join the MAC). South Florida, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Connecticut all slipped in. Aside from UConn, the other three had plied their trade in the mighty Conference USA previously. UConn, in fact, was in Division I-AA when the BCS was formed. Now THAT is the fast track to the BCS!

So subtract Miami, VT, and BC...add USF and three basketball schools...and you're still supposed to be a BCS conference?

I know every conference has down years and has their runts and the little sisters - like Baylor in the Big XII, Duke in the ACC (or Virginia if you're drinking The Doob's koolaid), or two thirds of the Pac 10. But the new Big East teams are akin to football powerhouses like NC State, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt (though the latter two are currently undefeated and ranked, this is a far cry from their usual positions as whipping boys).

I have to confess, I've been very happy and relieved the past few years when teams like Rutgers, Cincinnati, and USF finally lost their first game. Not because I don't like the nice story of the little guy playing well and being ranked, but because of the inevitable "this team could play for the championship" talk. SOUTH FLORIDA WAS RANKED NUMBER 2 LAST SEASON! If a Big East team goes undefeated it's like when Utah (MWC) or Boise State or Hawaii (both WAC) did. If the Big East gets an automatic BCS bid, I think it's only fair that the Sun Belt Conference does as well.

If the BCS was formed with the conferences aligned like they are now, I guarantee the Big East is not given an automatic berth. The flaws of the BCS are numerous, but I think the hypocrisy with the Big East is perhaps the greatest.

In the post-Miami-and-Virginia-Tech Big East, West Virginia and Pittsburgh have each represented the conference twice in BCS bowls, with Pittsburgh beating somehow-ACC champ Wake Forest once and getting annihilated by Mountain West pride Utah once. West Virginia is an impressive 2-0. So that's one of the Big East's better teams before the ACC poached their competition representing the conference well and one of the others not.

With all this being said, I'm obviously glad South Florida fell to Pitt last night. I wish Big East teams success only if they promise not to expect me to think of them like a BCS contender after week five.