The BCS And The Cop Out Hall Of Fame

Tonight at 8pm Boise State will take on TCU in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. This is the biggest cop out in the history of the NCAA (I hope that was an appropriate level of obligatory internet hyperbole). All season the argument was whether or not the mid-major teams deserved their high rankings. These two teams were at the center of the discussion as to whether or not either of them deserved to be in the top 10 based on the fact that they didn't play in a conference with an automatic BCS bowl bid and the competition in their respective leagues was supposedly inferior. Boise State is the Western Athletic Conference (the WAC, best conference name) and TCU is in the Mountain West Conference. There were other teams in these conferences, the Mountain West in particular with ranked teams who took shit all year about being ranked too high. BYU and Utah were both ranked relatively high for the whole season.

The whole argument was based on the fact that the competition in these leagues in inferior, whereas these conferences argue that they also have good records outside their divisions and that their bowl records are all very good. The latter argument was borne out this year when BYU smoked Oregon State in the Las Vegas Bowl (gotta love the irony of BYU playing in the Vegas Bowl) and also when Utah beat Cal in the Poinsettia Bowl. Similarly, Air Force (Mountain West) beat Houston in the Armed Forces Bowl and Wyoming (Mountain West) beat Fresno State in the New Mexico Bowl.

So the mid-major conferences, the Mountain West in particular had a hell of a bowl season. Boise State has been wreaking havoc on bowl day for the past several years. This year the NCAA had a chance to really let these mid-majors prove themselves in some real BCS bowls and instead they take the two mid-majors who rpresent the best of what they ahve to offer and pit them against each other. This will prove absolutely nothing. One of them will win, the other will lose and in the end we won't be able to argue either way about whether they were ranked too highly or not.

Given that Ohio State and Oregon were locked into the Rose Bowl, the NCAA should have let TCU play Florida and Boise State play Cincinnati. That way when TCU would have gotten smoked by Florida (just like Cincinnati did) and Boise State would have probably beaten Cincinnati it would have been a good argument that the mid-majors were essentially as good as all the other conferences except for the SEC which is far and away the best conference (incidentally, Alabama is going to destroy Texas in the national championship game, thus proving that Florida is the clear #2 team in the country).

For the record the Big 10, which currently has 11 teams, and is soon going to have 12, is the most overrated conference. Ohio State is the only good team in that conference and they have consistently been destroyed in national championship games by teams from the SEC in the recent past. The Big Ten desperately needs to have a conference championship game, and the only reason they don't is because of the Ohio State / Michigan game. The people with the money want that to be the last game of the season every year, instead of just having a real championship like every other conference does. Big Ten = Wack. And not good like the WAC conference, but bad like in wiggety wiggety wiggety wack.

Also clearly they should just have a playoff system to determine the national championship. Notice how no one is arguing this year about who should play in the national championship game after the Alabama / Florida SEC championship game. If they would just have the top 4 teams they could determine a national champion in the span of 2 rounds totalling 3 games. If they had done that this year, they would have given TCU a chance to simply prove themselves in the playoff against Alabama, Texas, and Cincinnati.