January 9, 2007
College Football: Gator Burn
Speed kills. It's an old football saw, but it still cuts right to the heart of the matter in sorting out the detritus of last night's BCS National Championship Game: faster is better.
From Ted Ginn's kickoff sprint for a touchdown to start the game, to Florida's hyperspatial defense, to Urban Meyer's pulse rate, this night was about speed. And when the final gun sounded to end the fourth quarter, Florida proved to be the fleetest and elitist team in the land, dropping the Ohio State University like MWF 8:00 a.m. French Lit, 41-14. And it wasn't that close.
Florida came in a seven-point underdog, and after Ginn did what he does on the opening touch, it looked like things were ready for the lighter fluid in Columbus. But in the touchdown celebration after his runback, Ginn turned his ankle. He left the game later in the first quarter and didn't play again the rest of the night. Wow. Either Karma is a freakin' bee-ahtch, or we smell a Neil O'Donnell-Larry Brown, suspicious circumstances, somebody ought to look into it, rat.
Bet this guy felt pretty stupid on the bus ride home. This outfit just doesn't quite work when your team loses, ain't that right Raider Nation? Photo from Fox Sports.com.
Cuz' it was all Florida after that. The Gatahs came right back and scored, and the track meet/rout was on. Heisman Trophy winner Troy Smith was absolutely overwhelmed by the Florida defense, and he was not alone as Florida swamped the whole Buckeyes team. Let us lay this number on you: 82 total yards for OSU. Not total rushing yards, or even total passing yards for Smith. Total yards, all of them, el toto, 82.
And we finally learned what the hell a buckeye is: a deer in the headlights.
The U of Florida is riding high, high right now, becoming the only school in NCAA history to hold both the men's football and basketball titles at the same time. D'ya-yam! Watching the Florida students soaking it all in after it became obvious the game was theirs made us wonder if we could still do a beer bong of two warms beers in the parking lot after drinking Jaeger all day and then hit the bars for some real celebration. We envy those kids their joyous night of innocent binge drinking and wanton vandalism. Good times.
Anybody still think the BCS got it wrong? Nice showing Wolverines. That miserable performance in Pasadena ought to silence the yapping for a while. In fact, this bowl season once again exposed the Big 10 as the fraud that it is and has been for decades. Another stat for you: OSU is 0-8 all-time versus the SEC in bowl games. As a conference, the Big 10 can't compete with the team speed and athleticism of SEC teams. Period.
Michigan had their shot at the national title in November and USC did themselves with a careless late-season nap. Both Ohio State and Florida earned the right to play for the title. They did, and the underdog won. How could it get any better?
We-ell, wouldn't you love to see Boise State get a shot at Florida? If there was a playoff system like there is in Division I-AA, Division II, and Division III . . . .
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Yes, the BCS got it wrong. It will always get it wrong. It's pretty much never gotten it right. As (at least) King Kaufman at Salon pointed out, Florida only went to the championship game because USC lost to UCLA in the final week.
The BCS always gets it wrong because it's all based on predictions of the relative goodness of teams and conferences that never really play each other enough to warrant the predictions.
Take a look at any of the championship teams in any sport, college or professional, with the exception of I-A college football, and note how many of the teams with the best regular season record or #1 ranking actually won the championship. Take last year:
Miami Heat: #2 seed in the East
Pittsburg Steelers: wild card
Carolina Hurricanes: #2 seed in the East
St. Louis Cardinals: wild card, barely
Florida (basketball): #3 seed in regional
Maryland (women's basketball): #2 seed in regional
See a pattern here? What a truly crappy system, the BCS.
Ian,
I don't really understand your point. Florida was not even supposed to be there, according to most people. USC shot itself in the foot, that wasn't the BCS's fault. Nobody disputed that OSU should have been in the final game, yet they got smoked. So what is your point? Who would you have had in the final game? And is there any way you can deny that right now, today, Florida is the best, hottest, most impressive college football team in the US (excepting Boise State)?
Again, what is your point? What should/could have the BCS have done differently to satisfy yo and present a championship game with two deserving teams? Who do you think should have played in the championship game, and why?
SEC baby! At least my college was the only one to beat the National Champs. :)
My point is that the BCS's lack of a playoff prevents deserving teams from competing for the championship. They more or less arbitrarily pick two teams to compete in the title game, and then declare the winner the champ. That's lame.
If you believe that Florida is the deserving champion, the best college football team in the nation, and the only reason they got an invite to the title game was totally beyond their control, doesn't that at least strike you as bizarre?
In any fair system for determining a championship, there's a playoff series that requires the high seeds to justify their ranking, and eliminates the good-regular-season-lousy-playoff teams (like, in this case, Michigan & Ohio State).
I listed the previous years champions & seedings because it illustrates just how broken the BCS is. Under the BCS, none of the teams that actually won their championship would have even been invited to the title game.
OK, I see what you're saying about a playoff system, and I totally agree -- as the piece indicates -- a playoff system would be preferable and needs to happen.
But I think you're overexagerating the "randomness" of the BCS system. Granted, some of the formulas seem a little wonky, but they are formulas and they do try to take into account a variety of factors. It is not perfect, but this year in particular is not really one that I would hold up as an example of how crappy the BCS system is.
I think most people now realize that Florida is a damn good team and they deserved to play in the title game. As was OSU. And they did. And the best team in the nation won. So what's the beef? Sounds like a system that worked to me.
And even with a playoff system, how are you going to determine the seeds? What formulas or determinations are you going to use to figure out which select teams get into the playoff? Are you just going to pluck potential upset underdogs out of thin air?
Your plan is thin on specifics, but the idea is sound. However, I suspect the details of such a playoff system and the entrenched ulterior motives attached to the pro and con positions are just a few of the reasons why we continue on with a rickety, duct-taped together, accident-waiting-to-happen system instead of a more transparent playoff format.
On the contrary, this year's BCS shows precisely how random the selection is, and how picking two teams out of the six or seven or eight elite teams that potentially could win (again, look at other sport's champions and their rankings) is so stupid.
I disagree that this year's BCS title game had the best two teams in the country. Why? Because there's no way to verify it.
Given the realities of college football, you have to use polls and so on to select the top eight teams (or whatever number) for the playoff. I'm sure there'll be controversy about which teams get in and which don't (just like the NCAA basketball tournament). But it's better than arguing about statistical formulas and theoretical matchups, like we do now.