Finally, it's 'playoff' time
Posted: Sunday, November 30, 2008 8:22 AM
While wishing the Big Ten and Pac-10 would get with it and add the necessary members so that they could have a conference championship game, we’re back to wrap up Week 14 of the college football season.
HERE’S YOUR PLAYOFF: Aside from the messy tiebreaker in the Big 12 South, which the BCS decided in Oklahoma's favor, it’s hard to argue with where we are at right now. At the beginning of the season we knew that the SEC and Big 12 were the two best conferences in the nation. There were four teams from each of those leagues ranked within the AP’s preseason Top 12. Three month later, we’ve got a “playoff” of sorts to determine the combatants for the pseudo national championship game.
It’s not a typical bracket, but it does have a distinct structure to it. Five teams tied to two games to sort it all out. You’ve got the SEC championship game between Florida and Alabama with the winner advancing to play in the BCS title game. And today’s second-to-last BCS rankings combined with how Missouri fares in the Big 12 championship game will determine if Oklahoma or Texas will face off against the SEC champ. Follow that?
Yes, despite losing to Kansas, 40-37, on Saturday, the three-loss Tigers still won the North and will play the Sooners in Kansas City with a chance to win the Big 12 title and also drive a stake into the heart of OU's national title hopes.
If Missouri upsets the South champion, the South runner-up that didn’t even play in the league title game will slide into the No. 2 slot in the final BCS rankings next week and be on its way to the title game. Hold your outrage. This isn’t anything new. A Big 12 team that didn’t win its conference championship has played for the BCS national title twice before (Nebraska and Oklahoma following the 2001 and 2003 regular seasons, respectively).
Pac-10 champion-elect USC and Big Ten titlist Penn State will protest, but they don’t have much to stand on. Both lost games that they shouldn’t have within their conferences that have been proven to be unworthy. Sure, it isn’t the Trojans’ or Nittany Lions’ fault that their leagues are down, but it does mean that they aren’t as tested as the four “semifinalists” from those two elite conferences. As far as this season goes, it’s apples and oranges . . . and there’s nothing wrong with roses.
HOLDING STEADY: After all the teams in our Top 10 from last week held serve if they were in action, we’re making only a slight switch in this edition, flopping Texas Tech and Penn State at Nos. 6 and 7.
1 – Alabama
2 – Florida
3 – Texas
4 – Oklahoma
5 – USC
6 – Penn State
7 – Texas Tech
8 – Utah
9 – Ohio State
10 – Boise State
Texas Tech’s come-from-behind 35-28 victory in Lubbock over Baylor, which has lost five of its last six to drop to 4-8, further pounds home the point that we made last week, extracting the Red Raiders from the three-way tie in the Big 12 South and making it just a matter of Oklahoma and Texas . . . which, of course, was settled in Dallas on Oct. 11.
VOTING WITH INTEGRITY WITHOUT TRANSPARENCY: With a full week of vigorous debate and another set of results in the books, hopefully the voters in the USA Today coaches' poll and the Harris Interactive poll find themselves more willing to use Texas’ head-to-head 45-35 victory over Oklahoma as the most significant determining factor when deciding how to slot those two teams.
We’re thinking that if the coaches had to reveal their votes publicly as they will have to do next week, Texas would be the beneficiary of a few more points. But with this lack of transparency, the door is open for some backroom shenanigans to occur.
With more and more coaches speaking openly about the faults that exist in the current system of determining a national champion, wouldn’t it have made sense for the American Football Coaches Association to issue a decree that each ballot be made public since this vote is obviously nearly as important as the final one is? I guess not.
ANYONE WILLING TO VOLUNTEER ANY ANSWERS?: We’ve got questions. Who has the answers?
When was the last time an SEC school hired a football coach with absolutely no collegiate head coaching experience?
What is it about Lane Kiffin’s 20 games as the head coach of the Oakland Raiders that impresses the brass at Tennessee so much? The grand total of five victories? The squabbles he continues to have with those who hired him there?
How is Kiffin going to fare when matched up against Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Les Miles, Steve Spurrier, Houston Nutt, Mark Richt and so on and so on?
Why would Tennessee jump at the chance to hire a coach that Minnesota passed on following the 2006 season?
Why act so quickly? Were teams really lining up for the chance to make this sort of multi million dollar gamble?
TIME FOR TIM TO SHINE: Don’t exclude Tim Tebow from the Heisman Trophy conversation just yet. While the quarterbacks in the Big 12 have garnered much of the attention thus far -- and rightfully so -- Florida’s main man is in good position to vault into contention with a standout performance against top-ranked Alabama in the SEC Championship Game. With the way the balloting always shakes out on a regional basis and the high probability of votes being split between Texas’ Colt McCoy and Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford, Tebow could go back-to-back if he’s able to conquer the rugged Crimson Tide defense in style.
