The need for clear, defined, universally-accepted standards is this week's essay topic. Add a gallon of subjective heft, and you have this week's Affirmation, brought to you in special "wilderness blog format" while College Football News's Scout.com server goes haywire. If ever a technological issue rears its ugly head, I'll just post stories here so you can read them... at Matt Zemek's College Football Emergency Center.
On with the show, and the Affirmation...
Part I: The Subjective Heft Show
Subjective statement: Rick Neuheisel, who ran into off-field problems at Colorado and Washington, is now committing another offense: He’s stealing money.
Objective support: It’s year three of the Neuheisel era in Westwood, and after a lay-down-and-die performance against Oregon in which Neuheisel kicked a field goal inside the 10-yard line when trailing 15-0, he clearly doesn’t trust anything about his offense. What are he and Norm Chow doing? More importantly, why are the Bruins not overtaking an NCAA-wounded USC program by any clear or demonstrable measure?
Subjective statement: Any Big East prediction or projection column, at least at this point in time, isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Find some other, fresher story ideas over the next five weeks, please?
Objective support: Syracuse 19, West Virginia 14, in Morgantown… AFTER West Virginia scored 14 first-quarter points; South Florida 38, Cincinnati 30, in Cincinnati, AFTER South Florida scored not one touchdown in its previous two conference games; Syracuse is 2-1 and has won its two conference games this year despite a COMBINED TOTAL of 192 passing yards in those two games; Syracuse has been outscored by 22 points in Big East play and is averaging just 15.3 points per (conference) game.
Subjective statement: Say what you want about the scandals and the lack of institutional control – it was clearly bad – but Pete Carroll’s body of work at USC just looks better and better when you judge it on the raw merits. Seven-season runs of sustained excellence just don’t happen all the time. Appreciate what you have when it exists.
Objective support: Iowa State 28, Texas 21. In Austin… in a game ISU led 28-6.
Subjective statement: Jeff Tedford is an overrated coach and is so-so on the raw merits; Kirk Ferentz is a much better coach than Tedford, but he’s probably the most overrated upper-tier coach in college football. He’s very good, but not the elite of the elite.
Objective support: Ferentz has never won an outright Big Ten championship at Iowa, and after losing to Wisconsin, his team must win out to have a chance of going to the Rose Bowl. Moreover, Iowa’s early-season loss to Arizona means that Iowa must win out to get any BCS bowl bid at all. A 9-3 mark, given the strength of Michigan State, Wisconsin and Ohio State, will spell “O-U-T-B-A-C-K-B-O-W-L” for a team that had genuine national-title aspirations at the beginning of the season.
Subjective statement: Tom O’Brien never won a conference title at Boston College, and the Weekly Affirmation knocks him around from time to time. However, it’s not as though the man was a bum; it’s high time to give O’Brien credit for the good things he did in New England.
Objective support: Maryland 24, Boston College 21… in Chestnut Hill.
Subjective statement: Jeff Jagodzinski is a certifiable idiot for not respecting Boston College Athletic Director Gene DeFilippo.
Objective support: Maryland 24, Boston College 21… in Chestnut Hill (and don’t forget to mention Raheem Morris, too, but that’s pro stuff, we don’t concern ourselves with that).
Subjective statement: Want to really rip a team other than Boise State or, along other lines, somebody like LSU or Oklahoma that’s good but could be so much better? Want to tear into a program that plays far below expectations and does the kinds of things that warrant genuine displeasure? Travel to Tempe.
Objective support: California and Jeff Tedford 50, Arizona State 17… with 14 of ASU’s points coming from defense and special teams. Yeah.
Subjective statement: Utah and BYU were right to leave the Mountain West Conference.
Objective support: You could not find last week’s Air Force-TCU Mountain West Game Of The Week on a widely-accessible cable channel or broadcast network. This week, while ESPN2 serves up Colorado-Oklahoma (what?!?) in prime time, you will not find the Utah-Air Force Mountain West Game Of The Week on a widely-accessible channel or broadcast network. And you wonder how realignment will continue to unfold in the coming years?
Subjective statement: As important as coaching is in football, and especially at the collegiate level, great players – over the passage of time – emerge as the real reason behind their coaches’ successes.
Objective support: Danny Wuerffel and Tim Tebow at Florida; Vince Young and Colt McCoy at Texas; Robert Griffin III at Baylor (after missing most of last year with an injury); Cameron Newton at Auburn; Marcus Lattimore at South Carolina; Josh Heupel, Jason White and Sam Bradford at Oklahoma; David Greene and David Pollack at Georgia; Pat White at West Virginia.
Subjective statement: Wisconsin is one of the five most underappreciated programs in major college football.
Objective support: The Badgers have won at least nine games in every season but one since 2004.
Subjective statement: A Northwestern diploma is overvalued.
Objective support: Ladies and gentlemen, the 2010 Northwestern football team, snookered on a 4th-and-11 fake punt with a six-point lead in the latter half of the fourth quarter last weekend against Michigan State… in Northwestern territory.
Subjective statement: Conference USA is almost as crazy as the Big East. Almost.
Objective support: Tulane 34, UTEP 24, at the Sun Bowl. At night.
Subjective statement: Most overlooked score of the week: Houston 45, SMU 20. In suburban Dallas.
Objective support: In one shocking about-face, Houston – playing a pup named David Piland at quarterback – temporarily gained the inside track to the C-USA West title. Houston’s schedule is tougher than SMU’s, but the result speaks volumes about the quality of UH head coach Kevin Sumlin. June Jones, the SMU boss, has to be very disappointed with his team’s inability to close the sale in its division.
Part II: Standards – College Football’s Other Missing Link
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been making it a point to shine a spotlight on many of the flaws in college football’s postseason architecture. Not the BCS itself (although it is obviously the number-one problem facing the sport), but the overall landscape of this immensely entertaining yet supremely frustrating enterprise. The journey to New Year’s Day is great fun on the field, but the off-field politics and other absurdities take much of the joy away from being both a college football fan, and from being a pigskin pundit as well.
Football is a big-game sport. Whereas baseball is played every day, and basketball is mostly played every three to four days, football is the once-a-week confrontation in which two rosters gear up for mortal combat and spill their guts on a sprawling green canvas for three and a half hours of rollicking good fun. After the regular season finishes, mother nature meant for human beings to contest championships and leave no doubt about the merits of the whole exercise. That is what football is about: lifting the trophy; walking off the field with a Joe Namath index finger raised in triumph; the coach getting the victory ride he never thought would come after so many near-misses in big games. Football is NOT about being asked, “So, do you think you have enough votes in the coaches’ poll?” or “Did you think you made enough of a statement to the voters tonight with the style points you accumulated?” That’s not football; that’s not a sport; that’s politics, which is just as prevalent today as it was under the old poll-and-bowl system, which at least had the good sense to give us a New Year’s Day platter of games that held the nation’s attention and captured the nation’s imagination.
America was thrilled by the Orange Bowl through the mid-1990s, but it’s not enticed now. America was regularly excited about the Sugar Bowl through the mid-1990s, but we’re not so consistently geeked about the game these days. America enjoyed a strong relationship with the Cotton Bowl through the early 1990s and those clashes between Notre Dame and Texas A&M, but the Cotton Bowl is a second-tier event these days. Even the Rose Bowl has lost stature, though not as severely as the other BCS bowls. The Rose is still the most enduring college football bowl game; but it, too, lacks the juice it once possessed, for the simple reason that fan bases think “national title” at the beginning of each season, seduced by the BCS into thinking that there’s objectivity in a system which possesses little of it.
As this column has been trying to build a case for over the past few weeks, although the BCS is going to be with us, the sport needs to find ways of reforming itself within the BCS substructure.
No team illustrates the need for college football bowl system reform more than Boise State.
This isn’t the time or place to tout Boise State or make any statements about its ability to win consistently in any BCS conference. Dismiss that entire set of considerations for now. The point of talking about Boise State within this larger framework of college football is to illustrate why the sport needs systemic reform in terms of the way its postseason is shaped.
Over the past few weeks, the Weekly Affirmation – with assistance from guest columnist Jarod Daily – has tried to show how flexibility, a willingness to be elastic and agile in response to the permutations of every unique college football season, is an essential part of a healthier and truly fair sport. This week, as our October spotlight series concludes, it’s worth considering the importance of maintaining defined and universally accepted standards of performance in college football. Not everyone will like these standards, and no solution is going to satisfy each fan or soothe every constituency, whether it is in college football, party politics, or elsewhere in our lives. Great spiritual teachers tell us that acceptance does not have to be equated with full approval. However, the BCS is not even accepted as legitimate by most college football fans. College football can be made more legitimate, in the short term at least, if the parameters are refined
Boise State is the team that, more than any other, points out most precisely (this season) which ingredients must be thrown into the BCS selection mix while this flawed and broken system remains in place (contractually through January of 2014 - and likely through January of 2018 with the addition of another four-year rotation).
Whether you admire Boise State or not; whether you are high on this team as an analyst or not; whether you think Boise State is good for college football or not, you have to concede that college football has no coherent plan for placing the Broncos or other “non-AQ” teams that are like them into the national championship equation. We should all agree on this point even if we have radically different estimations of the Broncos’ on-field merits.
College football needs to get ahead of the curve and become more proactive in ways that mimic the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, also known as the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee. College football might not need a formalized institutional body that sits in an Indianapolis war room on the first Sunday of December after the conference championship games are done, but what this sport certainly does need is a central leadership that can guide teams to a necessary course of action before the season begins.
In college basketball, the head of the Selection Committee tells Jim Nantz and Clark Kellogg, on Selection Sunday, which points of emphasis are most valuable. This provides the template for college basketball programs in the future. Interestingly enough, the main priority for the basketball committee has been the strength of the non-conference schedule; in other words, the portion of a schedule that is left to a school’s own discretion. If, in college football, there was a similar leadership body that could pound home that point of emphasis on the first weekend of December, you had better believe the sport would see a lot more quality non-conference games in September, instead of the Big Ten’s “MAC Invitational” or the “Sun Belt-SEC Tour,” for instance. You would also see Boise State avoid Toledo and Wyoming, instead choosing a pair of far more imposing opponents.
These details are nice, but the larger point is not strength of schedule in and of itself; there needs to be a coherent and clear voice that all schools respect, and which then follows through in its attempt to apply and reward certain specific virtues. If the sport’s schools (at the FBS level) elect to accept the terms and conditions – though not all schools might like them – we will be better off than we have been in the past.
Let’s flesh out this point a little more as it relates to Boise State, the team of the moment in college football not from a standpoint of pure excellence, but in terms of its place at the center of a firestorm of impassioned debate. (Man, did Twitter ever light up like a Christmas tree on Tuesday night for a Boise State-Louisiana Tech game; how often has that matchup ever aroused such intensity from a nation of football fans?)
Maybe Boise State has done enough with its non-conference (i.e., non-discretionary) schedule to warrant a spot in the BCS National Championship Game if, perhaps, all the power-conference teams lose at least once. On the other hand, you might feel that Boise State needs to schedule four big non-conference games, not just two, because of the minimal quality of the Western Athletic Conference. You might feel that Boise State can never deserve title-game consideration as long as it’s in the WAC. Perhaps you think that since the Mountain West Conference Boise is joining – sans BYU and Utah – doesn’t have enough heft to make Boise title-game-worthy in future years. Or, another point, the Mountain West, if it added a premier team, would become title-game-worthy. This is not to suggest or declare that one view is more correct than any other; the purpose of mentioning all these competing viewpoints is to say that, in college football, THERE IS NEVER A CLEAR VERDICT, NEVER A CLEAR ROADMAP!
If the sport wants to give teams like Boise State or TCU a precise “here’s how you do it” blueprint for becoming worthy of a spot in the national title game, then spell out the plan in all its details. Don’t leave Boise hanging or tease the Broncos with false promises and empty entreaties. Give Boise’s athletic director, Gene Bleymaier, the outline he needs to follow. Give the ADs of the other FBS schools the acceptable parameters they need to follow in order to coexist with Boise yet also look out for their best interests as they relate to regular-season college football scheduling.
We never have never seen clearly-articulated standards in college football. There is rarely if ever, an “If X, then Y” form of clarity for FBS programs, across the board, in equal measure.
Moving away from Boise State, one would do well to recall not just the most unfair BCS resolutions over the past 12 years – the 2001 and 2008 seasons – but the most confusing BCS resolution of all, the 2003 season. Remember that wacky final day – Saturday, December 6, 2003 – when computer results involving a Notre Dame-Syracuse contest and a Boise State-Hawaii game (hey, Boise still figured in the larger scheme of things after all – how ironic!) gave LSU a positive nudge? Remember how Oklahoma lost a game nobody outside of Manhattan, Kansas, felt the Sooners would drop? Remember how USC took care of business against Oregon State? Remember how LSU’s second win over Georgia really wasn’t supposed to be counted within the convoluted BCS metrics that are no less decipherable today?
That day, more than any other day in the BCS era, revealed the extent of the politically-fueled confusion which emerges – to the benefit and satisfaction of no one – when college football lacks a core of central leadership, a person or group that can say exactly what all teams from multiple vantage points must do in a given situation. Just as various schools all need to be told what they need to do in terms of discretionary (non-conference) scheduling, so it also stands that on the morning of December 6, 2003, a person or group should have been able to tell everyone in college football – players, coaches, fans and journalists – what needed to happen for each team to make the 2004 Sugar Bowl, then the (mythical) national championship game.
Naturally, college football regularly provides wild scenarios all the time (it’s what the sport does and has always done), but given the many permutations that were possible on the final day of the 2003 regular season – since the BCS forces a Notre Dame-Syracuse game and a Boise State-Hawaii game to affect an Oklahoma-LSU-USC competition – we did indeed need a leadership figure to announce an extended list of scenarios and outcomes. We needed someone to tell us if Oklahoma’s loss to Kansas State – by denying OU of a conference championship – prevented the Sooners from being eligible for the 2004 Sugar Bowl. We still need college football to decide, formally and finally, on whether second-place teams in conferences should be eligible for the national title under any circumstance in any season.
In short, we need standards. We need roadmaps. We need to be shown, as members of the college football community, the path from point A to point B. This is true if you’re a Boise State fan or an advocate of the non-automatic qualifiers, but it’s no less true if you’re an advocate for the Southeastern Conference and its member institutions. This is true if you’re a Big Ten fan in Ashtabula, Ohio, but it’s no less true if you’re a Pac-10 fan in Apache Junction, Arizona.
Say this about the BCS: It’s standards might suck, but if it could at least broadcast a roadmap to clarity, it wouldn’t be hated as much, and we wouldn’t argue as much in a waste of our brain cells and blood pressure levels. At least tell us, college football – tell Boise State, tell TCU, tell the Big East Conference, tell a 12-1 SEC champion, tell a 12-1 Big Ten champion – what needs to happen in order for a given team or conference to reach the BCS National Championship Game under several basic scenarios. Give all of us standards that we can then try to live up to. Give us a bar we can jump for. Give us a metric the teams and coaches can strive to reach, and which writers can clearly explain.
Give us anything beyond the ultra-political “talking/debating/arguing is what makes college football fun” bullcrap we’ve had to stomach in the not-at-all-objective BCS era. If we want to debate, let’s go back to the old poll-and-bowl system, when we knew the process was unscientific but the sport’s traditions (and classic bowl games – sniff, sniff, beloved Orange Bowl; we knew you and loved you before you died) breathed free. Just give us anything beyond what we have now. Just give us some standards that will remain in place for awhile, so that all FBS programs can align their operations as they see fit.
A SET OF STANDARDS! Deliver this, just this, and so many of college football’s maddening and unnecessary problems might cease to exist.
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