The people who love to bitch and moan about the BCS are sure going to have some fodder now.
Oklahoma, #1 for every week in the human polls this season, dropped to #3 in those polls after not showing up for the Big 12 Championship.
USC, #1 in both human polls, will not be playing in the BCS Championship, however.
LSU, currently ranked #2 in those human polls, will be.
Against Oklahoma, currently ranked #1 in the overall BCS poll.
Goofy?
Maybe. How do you pick between three one-loss teams?
But you know what?
I’m not all that bothered by the outcome here. Before the BCS, you would have had writers making the thing a popularity contest, and basing their votes effectively on what happened in the final weeks (or in this case, the final week) of the season, instead of the whole season.
That’s no better than a playoff, and it’s no better than the BCS.
What the overall BCS ranking takes into account, what human voters typically do not, is the strength of a team’s schedule, and the team’s consistency over the course of a season.
Anybody who thinks Oklahoma wasn’t the best team in the country over the course of this season is a fool who doesn’t know much about college football. They play in one of the top two conferences in college football (the SEC — which supplied the other BCS Championship team this year, LSU — being the other), and they dominated college football this year like no team has done for quite a while (probably 1995). They had one bad week — against a team ranked in the top five to start the season that was effectively playing a home game this weekend. That one bad week is a shame, as far as this Sooner fan is concerned, but it doesn’t change the fact that this team was heads above everyone else every other week of the season. And that ought to count for something.
USC plays in a weaker conference without a championship game (that would boost strength of schedule), and played against a weaker overall schedule, than Oklahoma and LSU. That’s not the fault of Pete Carroll or his players, and they do have every reason to be disappointed. But if they hadn’t lost to California — a far weaker opponent than Kansas State — we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, because there would be a USC-OU matchup.
This notion that Oklahoma isn’t deserving of the Sugar Bowl is just silly. In reality, three one-loss teams are deserving. Two can go. There’s a formula to determine those two teams. That’s the system we have. And the two teams it selected both deserve to go. End of story.
Would a playoff be better? Maybe. Maybe not, though.
But are human polls that ignore a team’s performance over the course of a season any better than the BCS? Not in my opinion.
Now before everyone just dismisses this post as the rambling of a Sooner fan, let me just say that I would not be whining if the system had left Oklahoma out of the Sugar Bowl. I think the worst thing that happened last week was all the talk that OU would get in the Sugar Bowl regardless of whether they won. Knowledgeable college football fans know that Bob Stoops rarely loses a game with everthing riding on the outcome. But they ate the cheese, and if it would have cost them the Sugar Bowl because of it, you wouldn’t have heard bitching here (even though I probably would have pointed out they were the best team in college football all but one week of the season).
So there you have it. I’m certainly looking forward to the Sugar Bowl, and I think the Rose Bowl (USC/Michigan) should be a good game. And of course, the Hawaii Bowl will feature Houston and Hawaii and maybe 1200 yards or so of total offense, which should be fun. And the other BCS bowls look like good matchups. And as much as people bitch and moan about the system, they’ll be tuning in for the games.
(12-08-2003 Update) If nothing else, this is all kind of fun because the sportswriters who USED to run college football are just beside themselves. I can almost feel Kornheiser’s spittle coming through the monitor. Relax, big guy. Sports controversy is good for people like you.
(12-08-2003 Update 2) Stewart Mandel has a calmer view of things:
Face it, folks. We can sit here and bash the BCS until we’re blue in the face. We can bemoan the silly computers, the strength-of-schedule quartiles and the whole nine yards. Fact is, for all of mankind’s advancements over the years, we’ve yet to figure out the age-old dilemma of how to place three equally deserving teams in a single football game.
“I don’t know if anyone will know who the legitimate national champion is,” said LSU coach Nick Saban, “unless all three of the teams in consideration get the opportunity to play one other.”
So, as college football fans we can do one of two things today.
We can sit around and lament a system that prevented the No. 1 team in the polls from playing for the undisputed national championship. (Personally, I lament the pollsters for not having the cajones to move LSU to No. 1 after crushing a top five team.) Fact is, the system did exactly what it was designed to do, which is select the two teams that, on paper, accomplished the most against the best competition.
And on the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl matchups, Mandel has this to day:
Together, they mark by far the best tandem of games in the BCS’ six-year history.
Undeniably true. Bowl season is going to be great fun. You football fans should sit back, concede the imperfectibility of man and the cosmos, and get ready for some great football.
(12-08-2003 Update 3) Here’s kind of a wishy-washy take from Pete Fiutak (wishy-washy in the sense that he is at least up front that a December loss is his equivalent of a playoff loss — and then later concedes that USC might just be the third best team in the land). On the same site (when did Fox Sports merge with The Sporting News?), Artie Gigantino offers some thoughts on fixing the BCS (interestingly enough, some of his suggestions are to reverse changes made to “fix” the BCS formula previously. So goes the quest to perfect man and the cosmos). And elsewhere, more from Pete Fiutak:
Are you REALLY so sure that USC is number one?
17 comments On In Defense Of Oklahoma (But Not Necessarily The BCS)
Split national championship! This bowl season will have a decidedly retro feel to it. 🙂
I’m just glad that OSU will be going to the Cotton Bowl. And Melissa and I are still trying to figure out how OSU beat K-State earlier in the season.
Dave: USC still has to beat Michigan. Not a gimme (IMO).
Certainly not a gimme, and I am looking forward to watching the game. (As much as I can any game with Michigan.)
But I am grooving on the possibility of a split national championship. It just makes me giddy, for some reason.
Thanks, you saved me the trouble of writing pretty much the same thing :).
This may be cause to review the BCS rules and change them (not allow non-conference winners a change, add weight to polls, etc.), I haven’t really thought too much about that yet, but right now these are the rules of the game and I don’t believe Oklahoma should be penalized for coming out ahead in them.
Did you see Lopez’s column in the Chronicle? Something to the effect of "based on last week alone, it’s apparent OU should not be the title game"… I was unaware that the ranking system should be based solely on the last game of the pre-bowl season…
I could not disagree more.
You earn a place in the NC game by your performance during the regular season. Losing by 28 on a neutral field in December, giving up 550 yds of total offense, letting one guy rush for 230 yds and average 11 YPC is not indicative of a team that merits an invitation to the NC game.
If OU had lost a nailbiter, no problem, I would be the first to vote them in. But they got dominated, crushed. Neither USC nor LSU had nearly so bad a loss, and their seasons were every bit as compelling as OU’s; OU just happens to be the media darlin.
OU played mediocre competition (and don’t cite their SOS ranking, b/c that number is so flaed I don’t even know where to begin), and got absolutely crushed in their conference championship game. Such a performance does not merit an invitation to the NC game.
Now, I am a playoff advocate, but I’m not really talking about that as the panacea right now. What I am saying is that losing the way OU did, when they did, is more than enough to vitiate their right to play in the NC game, IMO.
If Oklahoma were a media darling, they’d be higher than third in the media-influenced polls.
Fact is, Oklahoma is getting scorched by the media right now because people want the BCS rankings to be a substitute for a playoff. They are not. And that’s not Oklahoma’s fault.
The BCS ranks the top teams in the nation by a complicated set of criteria that take into account a team’s performance over the entire season (including strength of schedule) in order to put two teams in a marquee $$$ game. That’s it. It’s not a substitute for a true playoff system. It’s not realistic to expect it to be.
You tell me not to bring up strength of schedule because it’s flawed. News: man is flawed! But it’s one of the more objective measures we have in this whole mess, and the stats on strength of schedule are what they are. I’ll concede that it’s not necessarily USC’s fault that the Pac 10 is a weaker conference than the Big 12 or SEC and doesn’t play a title game, and that Notre Dame and Auburn usually could be counted on to give USC’s numbers a boost. They didn’t this year.
Sure, we could factor in margin of victory/defeat (which, incidentally, were removed from the BCS formula last time it was tweaked)? But Oklahoma will still finish ahead of USC, even counting that K-State game, because the BCS takes into account more than the final week of the season.
Want to make a rule that games in December count, say, 95% of the final BCS formula for the top five teams as of end-November? Fine. Oklahoma’s out in that case. It might make a good rule for next year. But there’s no such mechanism in this year’s BCS formula, however much everyone right now seems to be insisting there is (or at least wishing there were).
This year, with the formula that takes into account season-long performance, strength of schedule, polls, and the like, OU and LSU topped USC in a system designed to pick only two teams whether there are three or four or five who are deserving.
What is hilarious is the uproar that’s resulting now. We saw this happen with Nebraska (same conference even!) once before, but apparently it didn’t bother anyone enough to change the system. And all the stats gurus warned us a week ago that Oklahoma was in the Sugar Bowl, win or lose. Where was the uproar then?
Oh, I remember. Back then everyone thought Oklahoma was invicible and wouldn’t lose again this year. Those were the same pollsters whose advice people now want to elevate over the BCS system that was put into place to take away the sort of subjectivity in polls that people USED to say they didn’t like! I’ve even heard suggestions we need a committee of "wise football men" to pick the teams at the end of the year. Oh yeah, THAT is what we need! Back to the smoke-filled rooms that used to decide bowl games, because the BCS set up a system to de-emphasize the subjectivity of pollsters and their tendency to weigh late-season losses disproportionately, and the system produced EXACTLY what it was designed to produce?
Oklahoma owes nobody any apologies for being in the Sugar Bowl. It should be a great game, and so, too, should USC-Michigan. And, as Dave says, it’s gonna have a groovy retro feel to it!
Maybe one of these years, we’ll even get around to a playoff system. I wonder what the over/under is on how many years THAT will take?
Now wait a minute. Ever since this 35 year old has followed college football I have heard that a late loss is more devastating than an early one. You don’t like it, get a playoff. This Sooner Spinsanity is just plain silly. You lose a December by 28 points, you don’t deserve jack. I don’t care how you dominated in your other games, you just undid all that. If y’all beat LSU, that’s a bogus National Championship and there is no way of spinning it any other way.
If December is all that matters to anyone, then the BCS planners need to alter their formula to give December games disproportionate weight. Would 50% satisfy people? 75%? Play 95% of the season to determine rankings, calculate those by December, and count games after that 100%? If that’s what everyone wants, then let’s be clear, and go tweak the system to give us that.
But that’s not the case at the moment. We have a system that accounts for the entirety of the season.
Critics of the BCS WANT a playoff. They WANT the NCAA to resemble the NFL, where one loss in the playoffs and you’re out. And that’s fine (until you start having these same debates about who makes the playoffs, and how you determine those teams, and what about Team X in Neglected Conference Y, and what about Team W in Super-Conference Z, and… well, at some point, human polls and computer formulas are probably going to re-enter, because the NCAA is not, ostensibly, a professional entertainment league with a commissioner that can tell all conferences and all schools how it’s going to be).
We don’t have a playoff system right now, and even if we did, it wouldn’t be perfect. The BCS isn’t perfect, and after it’s tweaked again in the offseason, it still won’t be perfect.
But the quest to remake the cosmos into perfection will continue apace, in the name of Progress. We are stubbornly human, after all.
Kevin,
Suffice it to say we’re not going to convince each other. I stand by my belief, under any system–BCS, smoke-filled rooms, whatever–that if you lose your conference championship/final game by 28, and get absolutely demolished, you have no business being in a NC game where the other finalists handled their business, and whose losses were nowhere near the @ss-kicking suffered by OU.
I think you’re also responding to points I didn’t really make. My argument is not based on the preposterousness of the BCS. It’s based on my belief that losing the way OU did, at the time OU did, with the consequences of that game being what they were, should disqualify OU from participation in a NC game, regardless of whether we use the BCS, or smoke-filled rooms, or whatever.
Do you really believe that OU isn’t the media darling? They could not possibly drop farther than #3 b/c there are only 3 one-loss teams. Even the coaches and writers aren’t that stupid.
Daniel,
Out of curiosity, you mention that you disagree with the current SoS rating system. What precisely is your problem with it? I’m going to post on the subject soon and would like your input.
Daniel: I really believe that OU has fallen from grace with the media, yes. I think the media loved the Jason White story — for about half the season. I think the media loved the Riverboat Bob story — for a couple of games. And I think the media loved the idea of this Oklahoma team defying an age of parity in college football.
But this Sooner team had a loss at an inopportune time, and all of that was over. It’s like the media built up this great girl for weeks, finally took her home to the parents, she committed a faux pas (the seriousness of which we’re debating), and there’s no end of it now! But faux pas aside, she’s still the same girl that had one of the most dominant seasons in recent college football history.
I understand the notion that a team that doesn’t win its conference championship shouldn’t play for the national championship. I think that devalues the regular season, but the formula can account for that if need be; I’ve even suggested some tweaks to do so.
Much of my commentary is not directed at you, but rather at people who criticize the BCS for doing exactly what it was designed to do.
I will quibble with two things:
They could not possibly drop farther than #3 b/c there are only 3 one-loss teams.
You’ve just slighted Boise State, Miami(OH), and TCU! And since you don’t want to factor in strength of schedule and those guys lost their games earlier, better get ’em ahead of Oklahoma! 🙂
It’s based on my belief that losing the way OU did, at the time OU did, with the consequences of that game being what they were…
But we knew before the game that the consequences were nil. Everyone told us that Oklahoma would still be in the Sugar Bowl even if they lost. Nobody seemed all that bothered by that, then. Believe me, I wish Oklahoma had been motivated by the threat of no Sugar Bowl if they lost! The results couldn’t have been worse, and I suspect they might have been better.
Of all the possible topics in sports talk, this yearly exercise in who is in what bowl and how "we wuz robbed" is the most stale
Daniel,
On SoS for my upcoming post: I’m looking for something a bit more ponderous. If you were to make a SoS calculation, how would you go about it differently? Polls? Margin-of-victories?
So far I’m hard-pressed to find a way where the Big 12 ranks as poorly as you suggest. Poll-wise they have as many ranked teams as the Big 10 and SEC (with two in the top five) and SoS is hard when 75% of a conference’s games are against each other.
On OU: If you take margin-of-victory into account and include the KSU game as a blowout, you also have to include their high margins against #5 Texas and ranked OSU and just about everyone else. If you just staunchly believe that the end of the season and the post-season should matter so much, we may or may not agree there in the abstract (it’s one of the things I’m pondering), but right now the rules only penalize insofar as the polls do, and it didn’t count for enough to make a difference..
On OU, USC and SoS: I’m very, very hard-pressed to see how anyone could consider weak scheduling as a reason to choose USC over OU when the former’s scheduling was almost undeniably week (one ranked opponent).
Daniel: If strength of schedule is misleading and when a team loses is as important as suggested, then why not rank Miami(OH) higher? They only have one loss, it was their first game, and it was to a much better team than Cal! I mean that in all seriousness — if we’re going to reward teams for losing early and punish them for losing late, and we’re going to contend strength of schedule is misleading or unknowable, then let’s have the courage of our convictions! Obviously, I do not agree.
Incidentally, some of the computer rankings do try to account for quality of opponent in their win/loss calculations. So, while the overall formula does not have a separate calculation for that, it is taken into account in a non-trivial manner. Still, the other is not without utility; beating an 8-4 team from a mid-major is arguably a higher quality win than beating Iowa State this year.
Now, I’ll admit I didn’t think OU would lose that game, but anyone who knows the Sooners under Bob Stoops had a pretty good idea that yes, if they did lose, it would probably be ugly. In the handful of games he’s lost when his team has been favored heavily, that’s how it’s played out at least as often as not (Texas Tech in 1999, Oklahoma State in 2002; A&M in 2002 and Oklahoma State in 2001 are counterexamples). So perhaps "no one with reason" alone would know that, but an avid college football fan or avid Big 12/Sooners fan would. Word is that afterwards Chuck Long called it the worst week of practice since he’s been there. It showed on the field.
As for "everyone" agreeing the Big 12 is down this year, I have to group those people in the "no one with reason" alone category — because I wouldn’t call this a down year for the Big 12. Overall, I would argue the conference was up slightly from last year (and will do so in more detail in my Big 12 post mortem probably following the bowls). In the South, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State were much better, Baylor was slighly better (not that it would take much), Texas and Texas Tech were comparable, and A&M was much worse. In the North, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas were much better, Kansas State was comparable, Colorado and Iowa state were worse/much worse. Granted, the top teams in the North weren’t as strong as those in the South, but that often goes back and forth (flash back to 1999). If there weren’t a rule prohibiting it, you probably would have had three Big 12 BCS teams (#6 UT instead goes to the Holiday Bowl). If my last name were Weiberg instead of Whited, I wouldn’t think that’s a down year at all!
Alex: USC lost to the only PAC-10 team with a winning record that it played on the road (a 7-6 team at that). They played only ONE team with more than 8 wins (9-3 Washington State) and TWO teams with more than 7 wins (add 8-5 Hawaii). A team is not entirely in control of its schedule (Notre Dame would normally be stronger, and the Mackovic factor killed Arizona), but that string of opponents is demonstrably weaker than Oklahoma’s (and LSU’s), as you’ve noted. Despite those poor opponents, USC’s pass defense ranked 110th of 117 teams (overall D was ranked 34th). Ouch! I hope they haven’t ordered those AP National Championship rings just yet. And I am a little sad that Chuck Long’s offense isn’t going to get a chance against that USC pass defense. Nick Saban’s crew is going to be a lot tougher.
One final note: for everyone who really does believe that late-season losses should count disproportionately, I give you the NY Times computer rankings (http://www.nytimes.com/pack…), which are calculated just that way. You’ll note that Oklahoma finished lower than Texas.
Alex,
My beef with the SOS rating is that it takes into account only wins and losses. an 8-4 FLA team is much much better than most other 8-4 teams out there, but the SOS rating in the BCS treats them exactly the same. Thus, in a year where everyone acknowledges the Big 12 is down, OU still has the 11th ranked SOS rating b/c most of the teams in the conference have winning records. All I’m saying is that brute wins and losses are very, very deceiving.
Kevin,
No comment on Boise State, Miami of Ohio and TCU. Dropping OU below them would entail dropping them below some 2 loss teams. Not realistic. And OU is better than those teams by a long, long shot.
I disagree that no one was bothered by the notion that OU could lose the game and still be in the Sucre Bowl. First, few thought OU would lose, and no one with any reason thought that if OU did lose, it would not be a nailbiter.
I promise you, however, if you had asked people whether it would bug them that OU would get to play in the NC game, even if OU got steamrolled by KSU, they would have answered in the affirmative. You didn’t hear much about it b/c no one thought it was a realistic scenario, not b/c the thought of it would have bothered most CFB fans and players any less b4 the game than after.
My specific quibble is not with the CS, though I do think it’s a bunch of BS (so, of course, was the prior system). My beef is that OU should not be in the NC game under ANY system.
It also puts Rice above Houston…
When it comes to rankings, I like the way CFBNews does it: it’s subjective, but they line up all the teams in their heads, and imagine who would win a game on a neutral field.
Do I think Miami of OH would defeat Miami of FL in a game on a neutral field? No. Therefore, they ought to be ranked lower. Do I think TCU would defeat FL? No. Therefore, FL,a team with 4 losses, should be ranked ahead of TCU, a team with one loss.
As for SOS, I agree that it should be taken into account, simply not the way the majority of computer polls in the BCS does it.
(And kevin, the Times may get the SOS rating right, but don’t even get me started on how it does everything else completely wrong).
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