Barry Bonds hitting home run No. 756 while at the center of the steroid scandal, for example. Rich Gossage getting elected to the baseball Hall of Fame only because Jim Rice was the only other reasonable candidate for another. Or how about the New England Patriots being branded the greatest team in NFL history after running the table thanks in no small part to playing in a division where the other three teams have a combined record of 12-36?
Granted, it’s uncool to downplay someone’s accomplishments. I’ve also written about how unpopular it is to disagree with the likes of ESPN, Fox and most sports-talk radio hosts. The thing is, most of your major-market sports multimedia vendors have a habit of using superlatives where they may not be merited.
Which brings us to the BCS national championship game. While Fox fell all over itself declaring the glory of LSU national title win, how many people out there were wondering if they were really the best team in America?
Forests have been destroyed to supply the paper for all the BCS debates in the past decade, so we won’t go into that here, but consider that, despite the fact LSU ended the year 12-2, won the SEC championship and beat the No. 1 team in the poll, the Tigers also had two fairly damning losses. One was to Kentucky, which finished the year by losing four of its last six and barely beating an already mediocre Florida State team with more than 20 players academically ineligible for the Music City Bowl.
The other, a season-ending loss at home to Arkansas in which LSU gave up 50 points, should have bounced the Tigers from title-game contention. The only problem was, West Virginia, Kansas and Missouri couldn’t stop losing.
Then you have Ohio State, which went into the title game at No. 1 despite beating no one who finished the year ranked higher than 23rd and losing to Illinois at home. Almost no one outside Columbus seemed to want the Buckeyes in the BCS game again, especially at No. 1.
It’s almost as though this year’s BCS was more about who lost than who won. A 1-2 matchup between West Virginia and Missouri had been in the works until the Tigers lost the Big 12 title game to Oklahoma, which then failed to exit the locker room en route to being hammered by the Mountaineers in the Fiesta Bowl.
Kansas may have been the biggest loser, having a comeback fall short against Missouri before handling Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl. Kansas seemingly was punished for losing to Missouri, while LSU ended up getting away with its loss to Arkansas. While Missouri was left out of the BCS altogether, the Tigers hammered the same Arkasnas team which beat the eventual champs on the road.
Again, we’re not trying to decipher the BCS system, which has been tweaked yearly as much or more than even the Nextel/Sprint Cup points format. If anyone can adequately explain either in 20 words or less, give NASA a call. You may be qualified for a career in space engineering.
While watching LSU and Ohio State duke it out Monday, I was left wondering one thing: What would either of these teams do against USC?
While a horrible loss to Stanford killed any shot the Trojans had at a national title, there were many analysts who said in the season’s final weeks that once healthy, USC was actually the best team in the country. Not that who’s best has anything to do with the BCS, of course.
At the end of the day, we’re left with the same issues in college football we’ve always had: A lot of discussion and debate but no real national champion - besides Appalachian State in the Championship Subdivision, which actually has a tournament.
Funny thing is, Appy State stumbled during the year but was still generally regarded as the best team in the country before proving it in the playoffs. It’s likely Pete “Vote for Us” Carroll would have liked to have had the same opportunity in the Bowl Subdivision.
For those still clinging to hope for a Division I-A playoff, don’t hold your breath. BCS Bowls like the Orange, Sugar and Rose each had a payoff of $17 million, as did the title game. If a separate tournament were held, do you think the sponsors would sink that kind of money into both the old bowls and new qualifying games? Forget about it.
The debate over who’s the national champion in college football is nearly as old as the game itself. No matter what other changes are made, that is one tradition that will never die.