it all depends on how high the initial bcs rankings have them... Last year the top two teams never lost so, they didnt have a chance...
Definitely very possible. I guess this is also going to come down to style points as well. If BSU is winning games 50-0, it'll turn out very differently if they win a bunch of games 28-20. Funny this is that I hope it doesn't work out that way. If Texas can't go undefeated (and I don't think they can), I'd love to see BSU make the title game, and I believe they can win it. They might not be able to make it through a BCS-level schedule, but in a one game season where they have time to rest & prepare, I would never bet against them. And I would absolutely love to see BSU standing as the national champions at the end of the day. It might delay a playoff a little, but I think a playoff is coming regardless due to the sheer amount of money involved there.
I cannot see either team going undefeated this year. Somewhere, both teams will lay an egg. Just too many players they had to replace. I think it would be sort of funny if by some odd course of events that the only two teams that go undefeated are Ohio St & Boise St. and they play for the national title game. I mean think of how insane the backlash from so many college football fans that game would cause.
Being a Hokie fan I don't give a damn about VT letting down the other BCS schools. Just tired of being let down in the first game of the season. Time to stop scheduling tough teams as our first opponent.
Great college weekend of football...was able to catch some games at the hotel bar... The Boise/VT game was a good one...
The problem with a team like Boise State and scheduling is that they play a bunch of D level opponents mixed in with an A-level opponent in VT and a B- level opponent in Oregon State. Most BCS teams play a conference schedule that gives them at the very least a couple of ranked opponents and several B / C type teams mixed in.
I agree with your point, how can a 1-loss SEC school be left out when they play games like last night almost weekly and BState plays a crap schedule? Saying that, I know BState tries to schedule the big dogs and no one wants to play them so thus the move to the MWC but penalizing other schools in much tougher conferences is not the way to go.
It cracks me up how Boise apologists (not anyone on this board, mostly in the media) argue that an undefeated Boise deserves to be in the national title game, while simultaneously criticizing other teams for not being willing to schedule them. I guarantee, over the next month, you'll hear hundreds of backhanded slaps from the media to major-conference teams for scheduling weak non-conference opponents. So, they want major-level teams to play stronger non-conference schedules? Yeah, put Boise and its 100-or-worse schedule nationally in the title game and vote them top 2! Clearly, that'll teach them to encourage competitive play! All I want is consistency. If I have to listen to an ESPN slobberfest on Boise State for the next three months, which I know I will, then at the least we shouldn't have to hear a single word about Texas scheduling the likes of Rice and Wyoming OOC. Somehow, I doubt it will work out that way.
Actually, over the past 5 or 6 years, probably no team has been ranked more accurately at the start of the season compared to where they finish in the polls: http://www.collegepollarchive.com/football/ap/app_preseason_team.cfm?TeamID=128
Other schools aren't being penalized. You can't just say 1-loss SEC > 0-loss WAC. What if BSU wins all its games by 60 points while the SEC team squeaks by a bunch of crappy teams? Or what if the SEC team gets a lucky, easy schedule? For example, the 1-loss Alabama team that was #1 for much of the 2008 season didn't really have a difficult schedule. They beat some top 10 teams that turned out to be not very good at all. According to the final rankings, they had ranked wins against the #13 and #14 teams in the country - that's it. They beat a lot of mid-tier teams, but no one else that turned out to be amongst the top 25. There are two components to the BCS - polls and computers. Polls allow people to evaluate whether they think BSU's overall resume is better than your 1-loss SEC school's resume. The computers then objectively evaluate them as well, putting a strong emphasis on schedule strength. At the end of the day, they merge the two to decide whether a 1-loss SEC team is better than a 0-loss WAC team. I don't see where the problem here is. The only way BSU makes the title game is if the polls and computers, using two totally different methods of evaluation, agree that they are up in the top 2 or 3 teams in the country.
There is consistency. The only time Texas' schedule comes into play is if they lose a game or there are 2 other undefeateds with better schedules. If either of those situations happens to BSU, no one will argue that they should be in the national title game. The Texas schedule commentary - both from the media and the fans - is that if Texas loses a game, they have a problem and will get stuck behind other one losse teams - as we saw in 2008. None of that is relevant to BSU.
I can't believe there was all that publicity about teams not wanting to schedule Boise a few months ago. Last night illustrated perfectly why no one wants to. What did VT gain out of it? Even if they had pulled it out, the voters would just have said Boise didn't deserve to be #3 and VT may have been bumped to 6 or so. But, by losing, VT faces a very uphill (probably impossible) battle to get to the championship game now. Boise, however, can pretty much take a season long vacation now and show up again for whatever bowl they play in January. Big schools like Texas and Oklahoma get laughed at for scheduling the likes of Louisiana Tech and Utah State... These are the teams Boise plays every week! What sucks is that a playoff would solve all of these problems.
To put it more simply, Texas wants consideration even if they lose a game. If they want that, they need a tougher schedule - which they have, in the past, avoided at times; to their credit, they have added Notre Dame, BYU, and others over the last 2 years to beef that up. BSU only wants consideration if they are undefeated, and they have always been willing to schedule more difficult opponents if those teams will play them. The two scenarios are totally different - one is complaining about a scenario in its own control; the other is doing every they can already.
One gripe I have about the polls is that VT will inevitably go down in ranks after losing to BSU. However, if Boise is #3 and VT is a #10, then didn't the game and the final score reflect accurately where both teams should be ranking-wise? A #10 team isn't suppose to beat a #3 team, but in reality they will drop in ranks after losing to a team they were suppose to lose to. And just this minute as I'm typing, here's the poll results. http://espn.go.com/college-football/rankings
I think the problem we have against is that people give us a hard time for scheduling cupcake OOC opponents, not that we want to be considered ahead of undefeated teams when we have a loss. Florida hasn't played a road OOC game outside of its own state in 10 years, Alabama scheduled Georgia State, a football program that just started this year with all freshmen and juco transfers, yet we're the one that always get blasted for our OOC scheduling. And another thing, SEC has been down the past couple of years. You have the 2 dominate teams holding the banner (Florida, Alabama, LSU taking turns) and then you got barely ranked teams living on their names (Tennessee, Georgia, Auburn, Ole Miss lol, etc etc). Sounds just like Big 12, or Big 10, or Pac-10.
A 3-spot drop is not unreasonable at all. If the #20 team loses to the #1 team, they still drop - that's just the inefficiency of how the polls work. Some pollsters probably thought VT could beat BSU (especially given that it was essentially a home game) when they originally ranked them at #10. Now they know they didn't, so that information gets incorporated into the poll.
But the only time anyone has really given Texas a hard time recently is 2008, when Texas fans were b****ing about the whole 3-way tie fiasco. That's exactly the purpose of the tougher schedule, which OU had that year. Beyond that, it's mostly Texas fans b****ing about it because we want to be in the mix with 1-loss, and the current scheduling doesn't give us that opportunity. The media doesn't really focus on Texas' OOC schedule much at all. I agree - you look at Alabama's schedule right now, and if Florida really does have problems, then Texas' OU and Nebraska games might be more difficult than anything Alabama faces.
