BCS championship game open thread

The Fight Hunger.com bowls, the Humanitarian bowls and the Poulan Weedeater bowls (well, that last one is now defunct but it remains our favorite bowl game name) are all behind us and with a mere four weeks before pitchers and catchers report for spring training we've finally arrived at the big one where the two best teams in college football, Auburn and Oregon, will square off for the big prize.


But before we get to any trenchant analysis, Spencer Hall tweets:

The sponsor for the game is the University of Phoenix, the online university whose football program doesn't exist. When it does, though, they'll still have higher academic standards than Auburn.

That's really taking an unfair crack at Phoenix University, don't you think?



Something to watch for during the game:

Former Florida Gator head coach, Urban Meyer, opines that if Auburn only had a week to prepare for Oregon, he would take Oregon. However, with 36 days to prepare for the Ducks, he is leaning towards Auburn.

So, why isn't he applying the same logic to Oregon's defense with respect to preparing for Auburn's version of the zone-read spread offense? Cam Newton of Auburn makes far fewer decisions in Auburn's offense than does his counterpart, Darron Thomas of Oregon. Less decision-making = fewer options/wrinkles in the Auburn attack and thus less prep time is required for Oregon's D. It is indeed the Cam Newton show (See Cam run! See Cam throw!) with the Tigers and Meyer believes the relative simplicity of Auburn's offense compared to that of Oregon's combined with the time to prepare for it will be the difference in tonight's game.

Now, having said all that we hate to disagree with the Coach but we like Oregon getting 2-1/2 pts. (down from 3-1/2 a couple of weeks ago). In fact, we like Oregon winning outright, 35-30, for their first BCS championship.


Enjoy the game everybody.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL MAKES FOR STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Folks, we’re very possessive of this site. After all, it’s ours. Every once in a while, though, we open it up to a guest blogger. Having said that, we have maintained our promise to not bitch about the BCS and its inherent corruptness for the entire season and we will continue to hold to that promise… by letting someone else do it for us.

Ladies and gentlemen, after a prolonged absence due to observing and documenting primal mating habits in the Amazon basin, the liberal conscience of Beers with Demo, Mongo, takes the BCS and the rest of you all to task:

(quick background note: undefeated Alabama and undefeated Texas will square-off for the national championship in the BCS title game while undefeated Texas Christian and undefeated Boise St. get stuck playing each other in the “Eff-you, little guy” Fiesta Bowl)




Greetings, Teabaggers!

So I get it confused whether you arch-conservative types are for the Invisible Hand of the Market Place or for Fundamental Fairness. Both, you say? Well, as with all things John Birch-like – Whenever you extend beyond the conservative comfort zone, you soon come to realize that the world ain’t that simple.

Case in point: The final BCS standings.

College football’s elite (See how I did that? Threw in a conservative buzzword – elite – to get you on my side of things) have formed a cartel based on whether your school was a gridiron juggernaut when TV’s were mass-produced in the early 50’s. Hell, errr, heck, errr, shoot, even an irrelevant team like those Catholic heathens at Notre Dame are grandfathered in under the “We were great in the 50’s” rule.

So what if a team like TCU, week in/week out, quarter by quarter, played the best football in this Year of Our Lord 2009 in this great land of ours founded under God’s watchful eye. Under the advertising/psychological concept of “branding” (Go look this up if you don’t know what it is. BwD only gives us socialists so much space to explain things), if you were great when Ricky and Lucy conceived Little Ricky from separate beds, you are in the national championship game – aren’t you, Texas? And if you are the TCUs and Boise States of the world, you are sent to dine at the Little Kids Table (Can’t have yet another upset – or two!! – of David over Goliath (purposeful Biblical reference inserted for your comfort) a la Boise over Oklahoma circa 2006 or Utah over Alabama this year, can we?) Forget for the moment that the Horned Frogs of Texas CHRISTIAN were national champions about 15 years prior to the advent of TV. If a clear-cut is done in the forest, and no one is there to see it…

So TV and all its adoring masses have been around now for like 60 years, plenty of time for a correction by the market place to demand and bring about a fundamental fairness that would let the University of Southern Vermont prove they had the best darn team in the land if that be the case, no? Well, then surely market forces will prevail and such a change is right around the corner – and there is no need for our evil federal government to interfere in this process of determining a champion in the sport that is as purely and uniquely American as it gets.

What? What’s that you say, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican of the Great State of Utah? What say you, Rep. Joe Barton, Republican from the Great State of Texas?

You want to stick your very visible hands into the marketplace? But there’s a lot of money being made by the rich. Shouldn’t that count for everythi… errrr, something? A higher principle involved, you say your Honorablnesses? Fairness, truth, justice, the American Way? Wow. All that?

OK, federal representatives of the American government of the conservative persuasion: Make it so.

But the Rose Bowl stays right where it is.

College football open thread

As we polish off the Thanksgiving leftovers this weekend, visions of Turner Gill and Mike Rozier will be dancing in our head as we summon legends of Cornhusker past in our last chance for BCS Armageddon when #22 Nebraska takes on #3 Texas later this evening in the Big 12 championship game.

This is because, we will have the defacto BCS title game semifinal played earlier when #1 Florida locks up with #2 Alabama for the SEC crown.

Any chances of the little guy, represented in stellar fashion this year by #4 TCU, fouling the pristing big conference BCS waters rests with Nebraska.


Take Bama and the 5-1/2 pts. and #5 Cincy giving 2 to #15 Pittsburgh today in the Big East championship game.


We should be back later but if not please enjoy the rest of your blessed "holiday season" college football Saturday.

One last gasp

UPDATE #1:A solid, if sloppy and uneven 24-14 win over Oklahoma last night by the Passion of Tim Tebow and the Florida Gators did nothing to dispel our notion that they are necessarily a better, currently, team than USC, Texas or Utah. So, with apologies to Urban Meyer (of whom we are a big fan and of whom we predicted great things) whose team did everything it needed in order to win the BCS championship, we are throwing the decision as to who is the real “mythical champion” of college football to our readers. It’s been a while and we credit B-Daddy for the idea. It’s in your hands dear readers: Florida, Utah, Texas or USC…. Who’s #1? (poll in right hand margin)
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Two straight college football posts. Just what in the sam-hill is going on around here.

As the college football bowl season grinds to a merciful conclusion and just when we were going to begrudgingly give a tacit nod to this year’s BCS championship match up between the Florida Gators and the Oklahoma Sooners by taking a break from our regularly scheduled BCS-bashing… last week happened.

Last week where a physically dominant USC team toyed with a very good one-loss Penn St. team (whom we might add was the sexy pick for the BCS bowl upset), took the 4th quarter off and still won by 2 touchdowns and where an undefeated Utah team destroyed an Alabama team that was ranked #1 in the nation going into their previous game, 31-17 and also where Texas finished the season with one loss by beating Ohio St. in the Fiesta Bowl and which also beat one of the BCS championship game participants (Oklahoma) earlier in the year.

(Quick side note: We keep hearing about how Alabama lost to Utah because they “weren’t up for the game” and that “Utah had more to play for”. Why is it that we’ve heard more of that in recent years than we can remember in years previous to that? Could it be the glut of bowl games we’re forced to endure? Could it be the uncompelling match ups wrought, in part, by the BCS? We’re not sure but the causal evidence seem to be pretty strong).

So where do we go from here? We watched all 3 of those teams play and we can’t sit here and say under any circumstance that those 3 schools are un-deserving of a shot at the BCS championship.

One of the ideas we’ve heard over the last few years and which very well-meaning people trot out as a “path to an eventual playoff” is this idea of a “plus-one”, as in, a game after the Florida/Oklahoma game against another team to then determine the true national champion. This, they tell us is the next step to a true playoff.

In reality, though, all this would do would be to add another layer of frustration and nonsensicalness to an already dubious system.

And how, exactly would that work this year when you have 3 teams, all with a legitimate argument to being one of the “plus-one” participants?

And how do you think Florida and Oklahoma would feel about this arrangement?

Hey, wait a minute, did we as the #1/#2 ranked team in the nation not just beat the #2/#1 ranked team in the nation? And now you are telling us that to reeeeally be the BCS champion, we have to play one more game against a team that was ranked #3 or lower?

The more “ideas” come up in way of a “plus-one” or the sure-to-fail incorporation of the bowls into a playoff system, the more ridiculous the current state of the BCS system and any future permutations, thereof, appears.

No bowls, no more.

P.S. Take Florida giving the 4 pts.

P.P.S. Numbers-crunching stat nerd and head Sabermetrician Bill James, explains why computers make no sense in determining rankings in college football, here. OK, then.

In with a Bang.... (Updated)

The following is an update to a post from last August, the original which can be found here.

Over the past 20 years there have been 9 coaches to win a national championship within the first 3 years of taking over at head coach of their respective college program, and outside of one, Pete Carroll at USC, that coach never won another one (Urban Meyer won it two years ago so we will have to wait and see, Les Miles (pictured) won it last year and we feel comfortable will never win it again and Pete Carroll won it in his 3rd and 4th seasons. The rest of the lineup is as follows:

Lou Holtz – Notre Dame ’88 (3rd Year)
Gene Stallings – Alabama ’92 (2nd Year)
Lloyd Carr - Michigan '97 (3rd Year)
Bob Stoops – Oklahoma ’00 (2nd Year)
Larry Coker – Miami ’01 (1st Year)
Jim Tressel - Ohio St. ‘02 (3rd Year)

Obviously, each data point has a different backdrop and context from the others…. Holtz continued to field national championship caliber teams after ’88, though the last 3 years were mediocre (23-11-1) by Tying Irish standards. Stallings also, had very good on-field success after his lone championship, though he stepped down in ’96 after an exhaustive 2 yr. investigation of the ‘Bama program which did result in sanctions. Michigan coach Lloyd Carr, though, has not only not won another national title but was perceived as heading a program in gradual decline and was fired, er, stepped down at the end of last season as a result.

Also in the 90s, one has examples conversely of this alleged phenomena where ironically it was two ball coaches that had been at their respective schools for years before winning their first championships in the persons of Bobby Bowden at Florida St. and Dr. Tom Osborne at Nebraska. In fact, those two pretty much owned the decade by combining for 5 National Championships.

Things get a little juicier with this next set. Tressel won in his 3rd year and had a chance to win the title in the last 2 consecutive years before being upset by Florida and Urban Meyer, a 2nd Year guy at the time and then Les Miles of LSU, a year 3 guy. No shame, that.

Larry Coker is the poster-old man for this post. After winning the championship in his very first season with the ‘Canes, his win totals declined thereafter until he was dismissed two years ago. And though by no means is he in the hot seat, Sooner Nation, is getting a little anxious for Bob Stoops to get back to the BCS title game... or least show-up at a BCS bowl game where they have lost their last 4 of which they appeared.

Again… not sure if there are enough data points to lead to anything more conclusive than perhaps that each of the above won primarily with the last guy’s recruits.

We would be remiss if we did not hand out an Honorable Mention-type award as well: Kirk Farentz of Iowa has seen his win totals in steady decline after winning the Big 10 title in both '02 (4th season) and '04 (6th season). And both Ralph Friedgen of Maryland and Chuck Amato as HC at NC State who were fired at the end of the ’06 season, shared similar career arcs starting at the beginning of the decade in the ACC.

It will be interesting to see how Tressel, Stoops, Meyer and Miles, coaches who man one of the 7 or 8 mega-programs in the nation, fare in the coming years.