Ohio State Should Serve As a Warning to College Football Fans

In various articles and posts today, I'm now seeing Buckeye fans admit to their team being overrated for the past three years.  However, it's worthwhile to add a little perspective here. 

Ohio State wasn't that overrated last year to start the year.  They started at No. 11 in the polls.  For the 5th program in history with the most win that had just the year before went to the National Championship game, they didn't seem excessively high to me. 

The reason that they ended up in the No. 1 slot was because the teams in front of them kept losing while Ohio State played a fairly easy schedule and kept winning...not because the pollsters were intentionally overrating them.

The reason this should serve as a lesson is that it's possible we're going to get treated to USC playing East Carolina or BYU for the championship.  That's because teams from good conferences that currently populate the top 12 of the polls are from the SEC and the Big 12. 

The ACC in Week One, the Big East in Week Two, and the Pac 10 (other than USC) this week, and the Big Ten all season have all been badly exposed.  And, with that, East Carolina and BYU finds themselves in the upper teens in the polls and I write this before this week's rankings in which they each (especially BYU) expect to move up. 

When the SEC finishes bloodying each other over the course of the season, it is likely that there won't be a team with less than two losses.  The same might be said of the Big 12.  Yet, since 2000, these two conference have combined for five of the eight national champs (SEC-three, Big 12-two).

Then, we will find ourselves watching a team that happened to win their one or two "tough" games and then coast through their easy conference to a big game.  Why am I downplaying ECU beating two "ranked" teams to start the season? 

Well, for one, any coach will tell you it's easier to beat a team (App. State over Michigan for example) in the first game or two of the season.  Secondly, I'm quite convinced that neither Virginia Tech nor West Virginia were worthy of the pre-season rankings that they had (and I've been saying it about WVU for a long time so I'm not a "Johnny come lately" on that). 

Finally, Stanford (as incredible as it still seems) beat USC last year.  Does anyone in their right mind think that just because they happen to win that game, they were better than USC.  Chances are WVU is better than East Carolina but it sure didn't show that day.

So we have overrated East Carolina and BYU lurking around waiting for the quality teams that play quality teams on more than one occasion during the year (and some even go on to play conference championship games) to lose.  The result is when they get to the NC game, it's going to look worse than last night's USC/Ohio State debacle.

Boise State two years ago and Hawaii last year were different situations.  They didn't play anybody at all—even an overrated team that had an undeserving ranking.  The pollsters intentionally kept those teams lower and refused to move them up ("paced them") even when other teams were losing. 

But with BYU pasting the UCLA team yesterday that had previously beaten Tennessee and with East Carolina beating two overrated "ranked" teams, the pollsters might not have a choice. 

Besides, BYU and ECU are both ranked too high now for pollsters to "pace them" at this point and keep them held back (if they should remain undefeated) without there being outright legitimate claim at conspiracy that might just be settled in an hold up in court.

So get ready football fans for the yawner, low TV ratings game you don't want to see.  Perhaps, if it does happen, the good thing about it is the TV execs (who really now run the show) will finally force a playoff on college football so that it doesn't happen again.