BCS Fail: Alabama, not Oklahoma State, heads to the BCS National Championship Game

I thought it was pretty clear cut that the two best teams in college football this year were LSU and Oklahoma State.  That was really the case all year.  Oklahoma State consistently played top competition in the Big XII.  They beat all comers  Alabama played two of the top teams in college football in their own division.  They split.

Now, the important thing is we have a system that officially recognizes SEC champion LSU as the best team in the nation this season.  If we had stayed up all night arguing the injustice that is Alabama being ranked second overall in the nation, even though they are a clearly more qualified pick than Stanford, or Boise State, or Houston, or Oregon, we would have missed the fact that the BCS typically gets it right.  LSU is the best.  There’s no real competitor.  Having a championship game because of indecision is not necessary.  Everyone knows who no. 1 is.  They just happen to be contractually obligated to play it.

The game they got though is a particularly boring one.  LSU and Alabama play stylistically similar.  Both defenses are amongst the very best in the nation.  Alabama has one NFL starter among their skill positions, who is a true difference maker when he is in: Trent Richardson.  When he comes to the sideline, Alabama cannot move the ball.  They cannot kick the ball.  Their quarterback cannot run or throw the ball.  Alabama is a brutally efficient college team, they are not an interesting college team.  If LSU is any better, it’s because their dominance is almost artful in nature.  LSU has more talent at the receivers than in the backfield, and their offensive line is not great by SEC standards, but they choose to run it because it defines who they are as a team.  It doesn’t make LSU particularly interesting to watch, but they are an easy team to appreciate.

LSU-Oklahoma State might have been the best of all the BCS bowls.  As it is, LSU-Alabama will be the third best game of the series.  LSU should be expected to win comfortably.  They are the better team.  Furthermore, I don’t know how much Alabama can actually do to close the gap from last time, other than to run Trent Richardson on some type of Olympic distance running program so he never comes off the field.  Absent that, I think LSU wins very comfortably.

I feel like LSU would have won easily against Oklahoma State as well.  And no, I don’t think the score would have been 39-36.  I think LSU could have easily exposed Brandon Weeden in the first half, and in the second half would have dominated Oklahoma State with their depth.  I think OSU would have put up many touchdowns, but would have been chasing the whole game.  Alabama at least is unlikely to be put out to pasture int he second half.  Still, will the game be in doubt at any point?

More concerning to me is the fact that four of the top nine teams in the BCS standings will not play in BCS bowls.  What is the point of this charade?  One vs. Two?  I guess.  After doing an awful job of sorting out the top five teams, I’m not sure the BCS standings have a purpose.  Arkansas and South Carolina can’t make it by rule, which I suppose makes sense since if you are going to have automatic qualifiers, there has to be some system of making deep conferences ineligible past a point.  But the bigger issue is Boise State and Kansas State both didn’t make it.  Uh, what?  The B1G Ten and ACC both received at large berths?  REALLY?  A team that failed win the ACC is in the BCS?  I’ll go say the obvious: Virginia Tech is less qualified than Houston is to be in a BCS game this year.

The BCS failed to provide compelling or even fair match-ups in multiple games this year.  Is this specifically the fault of the BCS?  Perhaps not.  College football may be in danger of over-saturating the demand for its product in certain geographic regions of the United States.  They consistently must pander to the masses in order to defend the Bowl system.  Does that hurt the sport?  Probably.  Is that wrong? Unfortunately so.  Will any of this matter when LSU is holding the crystal ball?  The BCS executive committee is gambling that no, none of this will matter to anyone in a month.  Life will go on.  And history suggests: they are probably right.

There is no reason to have a two team playoff in college football this year

I am someone who supported the BCS prior to the year 2006, and the genesis of the BCS National Championship Game.  Since then, I have become someone who advocates for the abolition of the system that the NCAA adopted to name its champion for college football in 1998.  To me, the BCS was something of a lateral move from the system we had prior to 1998 in college football.  College Football used to be special because there was no universally recognized “National Champion,” but rather a series of Bowl Game champions and a post-season AP poll vote to determine which school got rights to use the unofficial title “AP National Champion” for public events and for recruiting pitches.  This was always plenty adequate: for all the complaints about what computers and schedules would say, college programs pretty much got to control their own destiny, and the national champ was by definition a popular choice.

There was no requirement for consensus prior to 1998.  It was college football.  The goal was clear: schedule tough, win those tough games, get to a bowl, win the bowl.  Initially, I think the BCS may have added an element to that with their standings, because college football didn’t have inter-conference standings, and the Bowl Championship Series brought that, and plus with the proliferation of mid-tier bowl games as a revenue source, it did become relevant to differentiate between the prestige of certain bowls.  The BCS changed college football’s postseason forever.  But it wasn’t until 2006, and the advent of the college football playoff, that things got bad.

You may be wondering why I keep arguing that College Football has a playoff, but if you define playoffs as any postseason field where teams play for the exclusive right to eliminate one another on the playing field, this is exactly what the BCS National Championship Game is: a two team playoff.  And this is the worst possible ending to a college football season.  Prior to the BCS, it was obvious that playoffs were not necessary.  Just award the USA Today Coaches Poll National Championship to the team that finishes first overall in the BCS standings following the bowl games.  That would work great as a national champion.  In some years, I think the AP national champion could differ from the Coaches Poll champ.  But that, in my opinion would be a good thing.  You have standings and you have a poll, and because they use different methodology, they do not necessarily have to agree.  I think that makes perfect sense in the realm of college athletics.

The national championship worked great last year, as it pitted undefeated Oregon: the team with the most impressive regular season resume, against undefeated Auburn, who didn’t have quite the number of impressive wins, but had overcome the playoff field that was the SEC to get there.  That was a great match-up.  In any year, if you take the best undefeated team: the undefeated team that plays the toughest schedule (so either the SEC champ or the Big XII champ), and you pit them against the team with the largest margin of victory, so like an Oregon, Boise, TCU, or a Oklahoma/Oklahoma State type, I think having a BCS National Championship game makes great sense.

But in a year where the LSU Tigers so thoroughly dominated both criteria, there’s no point to even having the game.  You’ll either end up with a blowout (in all likelihood), or a close game where a far less qualified team can steal the title from LSU.  Such is the downside of having a playoff field at all, something the conference presidents are obviously trying to avoid.  LSU, Alabama, and Oklahoma State would all be playing in BCS bowls this year in any system, but the idea that two must play each other at the end of the season to have a satisfying end to the college football season is pure lunacy.  And its a logical fallacy based on an awful premise: the two team playoff field.

Really, with the unbalanced schedule in college football, any type of playoff would be based on a dumb premise, but at least opening up the field to eight teams gives considerable margin for error (instead of screwing over the third best team in Oklahoma State, you screw over the ninth best team in Arkansas, or Boise State if you’re in the business of giving automatic qualifying bids).  But a two team field, particularly this season, is pointless.

LSU is college footballs best team by any measure, but the one loss teams are pretty indistingulishable, as are the two loss teams.  The computers basically say that Alabama and Oklahoma State are equal teams.  The pollsters do not think so, but polls are notoriously fickle.  Stanford’s last game against Notre Dame was a seemingly more impressive and complete win than anything that either Oklahoma State or Alabama has done this year, but Stanford other opponents were so generally weak that we went to the last week of their season without a good idea as if they should be ranked second or twenty second.  Boise State is having another really impressive one loss season, but Boise plays in a stronger conference now, and the pollsters have yet to adjust to that.  Oregon may once again be the most impressive team in college football.  Houston hasn’t lost.

I will make the argument below that Kansas State deserves to be in the national championship game as much as any team.  They are sixth in the computer ranking.  They would be playing in the Big XII title game this week, except that the conference no longer has one.  They dominated the state of Texas this year.  Their losses look good in hindsight, and I’m not sure any team’s wins look as good as KSU’s this year, exception of LSU.  They will lose the Big XII championship on tiebreaker no matter what, but stand a decent shot at a BCS bid if Oklahoma State beats Oklahoma.

The biggest thing about Alabama this year is not that they aren’t a great program having a great year, but the LSU loss makes their resume totally indistinguishable from other programs having great, but not unblemished seasons.  If Oklahoma does go on the road and beat Oklahoma State (something I expect), no team is coming particularly close to Alabama in the BCS standings.  But I think that outcome flies in the face of the logic that the BCS was founded on.  It was founded to create and settle arguments at the top of the standings.  And the way things are calculated, unless the human, fallable polls have a significant change of heart, LSU and Alabama will play for the BCS national championship because they are the two best teams in college football.

I have no doubt that of all the random matchups of potential BCS pairings, LSU-Alabama remains more interesting and will be a higher level of football than Oregon-Michigan State, or Houston-Michigan, or Louisville-Virginia Tech, or Oklahoma-Stanford.  That’s not a particularly good draw of BCS games.  But don’t act like we couldn’t take those ten teams and create three or more compelling match-ups for generating bowl revenue simply by being willing to split up the deserving BCS teams.  I want to see Stanford-LSU, Alabama-Oregon, Michigan State-Virginia Tech, and Kansas State-Michigan.  Every one of those games is a more intriguing matchup than LSU-Alabama, which right now stands as the one BCS game to look forward to.

And the reasoning to justify this is incredibly specious.  The BCS is not helping college football, and that’s a shame because I think for five or six years after its inception, it did help college football.  But now, it’s combined with other well-funded ideals to become a highly-publicized justification for defending the continued dominance of certain conferences over other conferences, and if I’m not a Big Ten, Pac-12, or SEC fan, I can’t help but think that the BCS is hurting (both financially and competitively) the college football postseason.

So, how much can you bracket?

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Some disjointed thoughts on some very interesting teams that will play in a very uninteresting NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Field.

Notre Dame A basketball team that completely re-invented itself in the middle of it’s season, faced with the necessity to do so, or to end it’s season early in the Big East tournament.  The result: six straight wins in the NCAA’s toughest conference, and a two point loss at the buzzer to Big East Champion West Virginia.  Notre Dame enters this tournament as one of the toughest outs anywhere in the bracket, but they’ll have to handle another tough out, Old Dominion, in the first round.

Oklahoma State beat Kansas decisively in Big 12 conference play, so they might be the team best equipped to handle Georgia Tech and Ohio State in the first two rounds.  If and when they can get by the two teams they’ll play this weekend, Georgetown is going to be a near reprieve in the sweet sixteen.  I think they can come out of this and earn their rematch against Kansas.

Kansas State is the team that first de-throned the Texas Longhorns, and this was before we found out that UT wasn’t going to be much of a threat down the stretch.  They’ve been unable to overcome Kansas, but they’ve been a top ten team in the country throughout the year, and they’ve got the best chance to play in the final four of any team that is not a number one seed.

Michigan State is never really not a great pick to make a run in the tournament, as they are pretty much an ACC team stranded in the north. Duke, without the villain aspect.  But this year, there’s simply not a whole lot of upside for last year’s runner up.  They’re going to be a dead heat with Maryland, and that’s if they can get out of the first round against New Mexico State.  And if they happen to make it through to the Sweet 16, which wouldn’t be all that shocking given their history, there’s not a whole lot Michigan State can do to beat Kansas.  It wasn’t a good draw for Tom Izzo’s crew, and they’re not playing their best game right now to boot.

Marquette is such a strong team that squeezes the most out of its recruits, and on top of their accomplishments, their draw in the tournament is really good.  And yet, I don’t think they are going to be able to travel out to the west coast and beat a less accomplished but more talented Washington team.  Marquette will make an early exit before they can get going.

Baylor sports very strong fundamentals this year, which would normally make them a great investment to do well in this tournament.  But, if Notre Dame can slip by ODU (and that’s far from a certainty), the culmination of everything they have accomplished in the past three weeks will come to a head against Baylor.  And at the end of the day, the number one peripheral value in college sports is program history.  Notre Dame has had it’s best tournament season in school history, Baylor is talented but unestablished, and I think they’ll make the exist prior to the sweet 16, one way or another.

[picapp align=”right” wrap=”false” link=”term=jon+scheyer&iid=8234614″ src=”d/c/b/8/ACC_Basketball_Tournament_9590.jpg?adImageId=11303185&imageId=8234614″ width=”234″ height=”366″ /] The Kansas City area media, normally the poster children for midwestern modesty, are nearly unanimous in their assertion that this year’s Kansas team is the best college basketball team any of them have ever seen.  Jason Whitlock, in particular, has been notoriously vocal in this assessment.  The numbers support them.  Kansas appears to be every bit as dangerous as any team has been going into the tournament.  I cannot say the same for an overachieving Syracuse, or even a great team like Kentucky.  However…

They are not my favorites to take the tournament.  The favorites, according to this non-expert, are the Duke Blue Devils.  My comment about program strength should have probably given this away, but Duke excels in two critical areas: perimeter shooting, and perimeter defense.  For all of what OSU’s Evan Turner can do, I wouldn’t bet against even odds that Jon Scheyer has the best tournament of any player.  Duke is a near lock to be in the final four, thanks to their lucky draw, and beyond that point, they will progress purely on merit.  I do not feel comfortable picking anyone in this weakened field besides Duke, which makes them the pick.