I didn't say it was the only factor, I said it was the most important. Penn State probably had a higher SOS than Nebraska too. I guess you could say record and SOS are equally important now that I think about it, so scratch what I said previously.
I think you have to pick from the one loss teams. Oregon and Nebraska are the best of the bunch. Nebraska lost to Colorado, who is#3 in the nation, which is probably much higher than whoever Oregon lost to. I think this is a no brainer. Colorado had two losses in the same conference. It's not even like they played in two completely different conferences. That should end the discussion easily.
Possibly. Their only loss was to a pretty good Michigan team in Ann Arbor, they beat Purdue and Louisville, but they had a hard time with Northern Illinois. You could probably make a decent argument for them and for Maryland. A better question would be why haven't you responded to my post?
The Big 10 is way down this season. The ACC is perennially weak, and FSU was a shell of its former self. If you include Illinois and Maryland in the discussion because they only have 1 loss, why not BYU? The number of losses shouldn't be the measure, IMO. I'd look more to the quality of wins.
I'm not including Maryland because their strength of schedule is bad. I'm mentioning Illinois because their SOS is almost identical to Oregon. Illinois and Oregon, both won their conference, both have one loss, both have the same SOS, but only Oregon is b****ing (or else nobody is listening to Illinois)...why? Of course, I think Nebraska was clearly the choice to make though.
I don't think winning the conference championship needs to be a prerequisite. You can lose 1 game, and if it is the wrong team, you don't get another chance. Why overweigh 1 game over what you did in the other 10 if the whole package is quite impressive? For instance, if OU hadn't lost to OSU or say Florida's only conference loss was to Tennessee, well I think you could have made a good case for either of those teams to play Miami. At that point would it really be fair to take a 2 loss CU team over a Texas team whose only loss was a squeker to OU and who obliterated CU mid season? Likewise what if the best 2 teams are from the same conference. Say had Texas beat CU and Miami lost to Vtech, wouldn't the most compleling match-up be Texas versus NU--two 1-loss teams from the most elite conference who have never played each other? Why should a 1-loss team from a lesser conference with less impressive results over 11-12 games who doesn't play a championship game get in simply because there can only be 1 conference winner from the elite conference.
ESPN ran a nice feature on a playoff featuring the bowls. It was a 16 team playoff with 10 conference champions plus 6 at-large bids. The only conference left out was the Sun Belt because it's only been around a year. 10 Conference Champions Miami (Big East) Maryland (ACC) Illinois (Big 10) Colorado (Big 12) BYU (Mountain West) Oregon (Pac 10) LSU (SEC) Louisiana Tech (Wac) Toledo (MAC) Louisville (C-USA) 6 At-Large Bids Texas Florida Oklahoma Nebraska Stanford Tennessee Only 1 team (Washington State) with 2 losses gets screwed in this deal, every other major conference team with no more than 2 losses makes it to the playoffs. I forgot how they had the bowls set up, but the way they set up the 4 BCS bowls was that 1 of the bowls will host a quarterfinal game (the bowl that hosted the national championship the year before), 2 of the bowls would host semifinals, and 1 bowl will host the championship game, and they would get cycled around. They also had a schedule of when the bowls would happen, and the championship game would occur only 4 days later than the date of the current Rose Bowl... I thought it was a great idea.
I saw the Sportscenter idea also and loved it. That would be a badass tournament. Now the problem would be money of course in that the 6 conferences that are now guaranteed 13 million would have to worry if one of their teams would get to a 13 million dollar bowl. Of course, I don't give a damn about their 13 million so I say lets do it. Also, I forgot about that UT/CU argument. Now CU played tougher opponents and won but looking at the two losses we were better than CU (beat them by more, lost to a better team otherwise). Of course I'm not saying it's right and CU definitely gets the call ahead of us but I hadn't considered that before.
Has anyone mentioned that CU ducked a game at Washington State? It was cancelled due to the 9/11 attacks, but Gary Barnett refused to reschedule it. Funny, if CU wins that game it makes up the difference in the BCS in strength of schedule. Washington State was 9-2. I guess being cowardly does not pay. DaDakota
When were they supposed to play it? On the same weekend as the Big XII championship game? I'm pretty sure when they rescheduled all the games, no one knew that WSU would be that good anyway.
Both Washington St. and Colorado attempted to reschedule the game, but they could not find a time to do so. No one was being cowardly there.
