This BCS Championship Game: It All Comes Down to Losses

I know, I know...I hear the moans and groans all over the place, and this year it's worse than usual which, if you think about it, makes sense.

There hasn't been a seasonin recent memory in which honing in on the best one or two teams in the country has been so damn difficult. Some of the gripes: How can LSU be in the title game? They lost twice and almost lost on two other occasions.

More commonly I hear, "How does Ohio State get in with that marshmallow schedule and a loss at home?" The simple answer to all of this is don't lose late in the season, because the BCS System is flawed.

But is it? Consider, if you will, the fact that until the last ten years, it was strictly the polling that determined end of season rankings and ultimately the "winner" of the National Championship. Look at the polls this year: OSU finished No. 1, LSU finished No. 2. The BCS is just a reflection of that. In my view not much has changed. There isn't an objective result to be had at the end of a subjective process.

Before we go off on a tangent, this isn't an article about creating a playoff system. Most of us agree that is the way champions are crowned and accepted in virtually every other sport worth watching. This is an article about reality, and in the words of an infamous man, "You go to war with the army that you have, not the army you wished you had." Such it is with college football. We go into and out of each season with the BCS.

So, if you will permit me use of the most rational part of your minds, I think you'll come to understand why the BCS Championship matchup makes sense. First, let's start with the most controversial and impassioned part of this debate—strength of conference. This is why I love the idea of open source sports, because discussions on strength of conference belie one of the most hideous tendencies of the sports media establishment.

The SEC is the gold standard by which competitive football is measured, and as a fan who is emotionally indifferent to any and all SEC teams, I would typically agree it is the most well-rounded and challenging conference in the country. I think most knowledgeable (and honest) college football fans would agree. Certainly the SEC has had years in which it was not as good as the Big Ten or the Big 12, but it's still the gold standard. Where the major media outlets get it wrong is the way they fall in and out of love with the Big Ten, Big 12, and daddy's little girl, the Pac-10. 

Every year, whenever a couple of Pac-10 teams get hot all I hear is how dominate that conference is. So let's start there. I can’t count how many times this season I heard that the Pac-10 is the second best conference in college football.  Much of that is due to the infatuation of what USC was.

Then you have a couple of other teams that play well in the first half of the season, namely Cal, Oregon, and ASU. Somehow, even after getting beat by Stanford, the last two weeks of the regular season I can't turn on ESPN, Fox, or CBS without hearing how USC is the best team in the country "right now." Oregon evaporated after the unfortunate loss of Dixon, who in retrospect must have been the best player in the country. They dominated with him and couldn’t tread water without him. Cal was the epitome of the flash in the pan and ASU seemed an up-and-comer until they started playing people. In short, I'm not impressed with the Pac-10. 

Nor, like many others, am I impressed with the Big Ten. I think that playing on the road in the Big Ten is as hard as playing on the road in Florida or Alabama, or a few other SEC schools. In fact, it may be harder. Not just because OSU, Michigan, and Penn State have the biggest stadiums in the country, which they pack to the gills, but the atmosphere is as intense as any in college football and more intense than anything in pro-football. In any case, Michigan flopped this year. If Michigan was a one loss team going into the final game with OSU, I think the view of that conference would be entirely different. But they weren't and Penn State and Wisconsin, much like Cal and ASU, weren't who we thought they were.

Before I move on to the Big 12, let me just give a shout out to the Big East. While I do not think it is one of the top conferences in football at the moment, it was definitely the most enjoyable to watch this season second to the SEC. I think that conference is on the way up in hurry, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a national champion coming out of there in the next two or three years. As for the ACC, well, let's just move on to the Big 12, with all due respect to a great Hokie team.

You have to understand, and I mean no disrespect, but there isn't much to do in the central plains of the United States. And these folks, great folks, love their state teams. It's a perfect environment for college football and the Big 12 is a great conference. Some would argue it was the best this year with the competition between Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas. However, in reality, that's myopia settling in over the Dust Bowl.

What's unique and unfortunate about the Big 12 this year is how great every team at the very top is, and how horrible every team is below that. Did you catch that Nebraska vs. Colorado game over Thanksgiving weekend? Holy Cow! The worst defensive football in the history of the sport! If you asked me what conference had the two best teams, I might say the Big 12. If you asked me on average which conference had the worst teams, again, I would say the Big 12. The only teams in the Big 12 that were going to beat Oklahoma and Missouri were Oklahoma and Missouri. So, in short, I really don't think there is a clear second best conference in college football this year. 

Moving on...Now that we let the reality of conference competition ferment in our minds, let's look to the teams that most people seem to think deserved to be in the big game, but aren't.

Let's start with easy pickin’s: USC.

USC is the only team in the country that could have lost to a team that lost its last three games of the regular season and a team named Stanford and still be considered for the National Championship. Let's be honest: You cannot lose two games, one of them to Stanford, and play for a title. It's 100 percent hype. For those who say the loss to Oregon was a quality loss, I would agree. And if you want to pursue that line of logic then you have to consider the Ducks with Dixon. If that is the case, Oregon would have easily won the Pac-10 and USC would be out of the picture for this championship game.

Again, I like this Virginia Tech team, but they got absolutely trounced by LSU, and if that game doesn’t mean anything, than neither does the rest of the regular season. I don't mean to make it seem so simplistic, but in this case it is. Ironically, if they had played LSU to a tight score, that National Championship game would have been a great rematch.

Georgia fans are irritated, to be sure, but be reasonable. Not only did you not play your way into your conference championship, you lost to Tennessee, which lost the conference championship game. Is that a fair synopsis of your candidacy? Well it wouldn’t be, except that you lost to South Carolina too. If you wouldn’t have, you’d have earned the right to play for the conference championship. Next!

Missouri. I think that the greatest travesty done by the BCS Selection Committee was not putting Missouri in the Orange Bowl. They deserved to be there. What they did not deserve was to be in the National Championship game. I am a big believer that you have to win your own conference to play for the National Championship and based on the fact that they lost to Oklahoma twice, you can't possibly put them ahead of Oklahoma nor would there be any need to match the two in a National Championship game.

Oklahoma. I like this team. Bob Stoops is a tremendous coach who has teams in the Top 10 year after year after year. They make the only reasonable case to have been in this game outside of the two that are there. But they have a fatal flaw—they lost twice. I know, so did LSU, but if you look at Oklahoma’s two losses, they are bad losses. They lost to Texas Tech (8-4) down the stretch when they thought they had to win to get into their conference championship. But worse than that, they lost to Colorado (6-6). That is only surpassed in sadness by USC's loss to Stanford. 

In short, it all comes down to Oklahoma. They didn't play any Top 25 out of conference games. They had two losses to teams that were weaker than LSU's overtime losses, and Ohio State's loss to a team eventually selected to play in the Rose Bowl.

When you have a season with so many memorable losses, how could it come down to anything else? Most of the time, we look to a team’s quality wins. This year we have to consider mediocre conferences and quality losses. LSU played in the toughest conferences, had two three-OT losses and won their conference championship. Ohio State’s only loss was to a BSC selection playing in the Rose Bowl. USC, Virginia Tech, Missouri, Georgia, and Oklahoma can't match that.

So when you tune into the BCS Championship Game, enjoy it. Maybe your team isn’t playing, but the two teams that should be playing in the most flawed of all championships are.