College Football Pretend Playoffs: The Seedings

The way it looks now it will literally take an act of congress to get a college football playoff and with a little more than a week remaining until Texas and Alabama face off in the BCS Championship Game we’re still left wondering what if. What if teams like Cincinnati and TCU were given opportunities to play for all the marbles? Would they get trampled over by a champion from a BCS or would they actually have a punchers chance at providing a March Madness like shocking moment? Unfortunately we’ll never know and instead we have a series of bowl games that look like this;

Rose Bowl – Ohio State/Oregon

Sugar Bowl – Florida/Cincinnati

Fiesta Bowl – Boise State/TCU

Orange Bowl – Iowa/Georgia Tech

BCS Championship – Texas/Alabama

Honestly, unless you’re a fan of one of those teams which game are you just nuts about watching? The Texas/Bama game should be fun for a championship but we’ve got to deal with Boise State/TCU before we get there. Really?

I’ve always argued that you could use the current BCS formula to select the top eight teams for a playoff and things would be much more exciting during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. How about this for the first round?

Rose Bowl - #4 TCU/#5 Florida

Sugar Bowl - #1 Alabama/#8 Ohio State

Fiesta Bowl - #2 Texas/#7 Oregon

Orange Bowl - #3 Cincinnati/#6 Boise State

Come on, you can’t tell me that doesn’t look like a better BCS Bowl lineup. Can you imagine the ratings for these match-ups? Advertising revenue would be through the roof with excitement and anticipation off the chart. The next round would move to the home sites of the two remaining top seeded teams and then finally a BCS Championship game that rotates sites as normal. It would be a lot of fun but we’ll never see it. So in the meantime we’re going to use imagination and computer simulation over the next week to play through our pretend playoffs.

Pete Carroll Thinks The BCS “Stinks”

Pete Carroll said on Tuesday that the BCS System, “stinks” and he’s right but it isn’t the system that is keeping the USC Trojans out of the BCS title game. USC pounded Washington 56-0 on Saturday and then dropped from 5th to 7th in the BCS standings.

“I don’t know how the computer thing works,” Carroll said. “I don’t get that part of it. I don’t know how the computer knows how good another team is. I don’t understand that. I don’t know how they can evaluate who you’re playing and stuff and all that."

The problem for USC isn’t the system, although admittedly it is a broken system. The Trojans woes come from their schedule. With Ohio State now having two losses and out of the top 10 USC’s one quality win suddenly lacks …well…quality. Another thing you have to look at with the Trojans is that the Pac-10 is tremendously weak. Don’t believe me? Look at their head-to-head against the Mountain West.

The Trojans are currently on a five game winning streak, including three shutouts, but the five teams they’ve played (Oregon, Arizona State, Washington State, Arizona and Washington) have a combined 14-28 record. Which team ranked ahead of USC wouldn’t breeze through that schedule? Carroll is right, the BCS does stink but not as bad as the Pac 10.

BCS Makes The Wrong Decision, Again

The 2007 college football season ended with five teams having two losses and one with only one loss. Of course only one was crowned as the national champion and it wasn’t the one loss team. The problem isn’t in crowing of a champion but in the process to which teams are eligible to win it. There are only two teams each year who have the opportunity and the BCS voted on Wednesday to keep it that way. Continue...