A Conference That Makes Sense...
by Mulliganville on Aug 6, 2009 8:12 PM CDT
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PrintI am not sure if any of you caught ESPN's proposed "reconferencing" (that is a word now) which would take the top 40 teams per their "draft" and slot them geographically with a couple of exceptions. The most interesting aspect of this is the rivalry it would immediately create between Texas and LSU. Every year the Horns would play the following:
Arkansas
Missouri
Kansas
Mississippi
Nebraska
LSU
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Texas A&M
Add a couple of non-conference games and you have one very respectable season year in and year out.
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/columns/story?columnist=maisel_ivan&id=4380677
Moreover, when you scan the other conferences, you find Boise St right in USC's face along with Utah and Texas Tech headed out west. I found the read intriguing and wishful. But I realize that we have as much a chance of this happening as Boise St. does of knocking off OUsux in a BCS game.
I long for the day when conference fuddy duddies stop worrying about "how things have always been" and how the BCS crowns a deserving champion every year...except last year, and the year Auburn ran the table in the SEC and got shut out of the national title game. I hate this system. It is a complete joke and a farce.
40 Teams
4 Superconferences
4 Contenders
1 Legitimate National Champion
Now THAT is some change I could believe in...now give me back my taxes!
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I dont like
the conference naming convention…especially the conference Texas would be in, the “Bud Wilkinson Conference”…
Yes, neither do I.
I found that aspect very cheesy…but I do like that schedule year in and year out.
"Stats are for losers. I like winning games." - Will Muschamp
Confused
But I realize that we have as much a chance of this happening as Boise St. does of knocking off OUsux in a BCS game.
I’m confused. So this means that this reconferencing is already 100% guaranteed to happen?
Simply put...
the improbable and impossible are possible, the thing that could not happen and nobody in the upper brass wanted it to happen, did happen……..and EVERYONE still talks about that game.
"Stats are for losers. I like winning games." - Will Muschamp
by Mulliganville on Aug 7, 2009 1:12 AM CDT up reply actions
I still like eight 10-team conferences and a 16-team playoff...
But expand the playoffs for this version to 8-teams and take the top two in each league and I would get behind it immediately. I think you have to take the top two or you end up with problems when there are ties or if one team gets ripped off by bad officiating or losing a key player for a game. I want to see the best teams and having more teams give you a better shot of achieving it. An 8-team playoff would be very doable.
I don’t buy that having more teams gives one a better shot at seeing the best teams. Do you really think that wild cards are better teams than their own division/conference champions?
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 9:05 AM CDT up reply actions
No, but they are often better than the winner of another division...
And this isn’t pro football…2005 is the only year of the BCS era (that I can think of) where the two teams were undeniably the two best teams in the country. At least in the pros, while the two ‘best’ regular season teams may not have faced each other in the Super Bowl, the teams that did get there beat a collection of their conference’s best teams to earn the right to be in the Super Bowl. In college you can fact the weakest slate of teams in your conference and not play anyone out of conference but still get to the championship game over teams that faced much more difficult odds.
If one conference is a true power one year, why shouldn’t the two top teams in that conference play for the title or at least play each other in a semifinal? If you take four teams and one league is horrible and the other three are equal, why should one team get the advantage of playing a weak conference champion while the other two have to play each other? At least with 8 teams you get a better and more diverse collection of teams and the semifinals will then have competitors who have faced and defeated some top intersectional competition.
Taking more teams also balances out vagaries in home and away competition and any other scheduling anomalies that might have made the season unbalanced between two teams in the conference. (See last year, where we had to run a gauntlet of the best teams right in a row, while OU faced them spread over the season and got to face them all after we did.)
The problem with not just having the champion of each conference in a playoff is that any comparison between conferences is usually going to be subjective at best. I do think UT was better than Florida, and I know that UT was better than Oklahoma, but the problem there was not the lack of a playoff so much as it was an idiotic tie-breaker that didn’t make any sense.
I could buy the idea of maybe taking seven conference champions and a maximum of one wildcard, or maybe nine plus one. But as many wildcards as champions? That just dilutes the whole concept of winning a conference, just like it has done in the ridiculous charade that is the NFL playoffs.
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 11:33 AM CDT up reply actions
To be fair
There are only two wildcard slots in the NFL, while four division winners in each conference. That’s not too bad.
by TheElusiveShadow on Aug 7, 2009 11:51 AM CDT up reply actions
And they did have four wildcard slots prior to that re-alignment.
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 11:59 AM CDT up reply actions
Damnit, it was three, wasn’t it? Six division champions, six wildcards, twelve teams. Now it’s eight division champions and four wildcards.
Either way, twelve out of 32 teams is a very watered-down playoff. Considering the number of CFB teams who are actually in the picture at all, 16 teams would seem pretty watered-down as well. I’d say eight, maybe ten, and then I could potentially be convinced. But I’d hate to see bowls scrapped entirely.
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 12:04 PM CDT up reply actions
I don't see why the bowls would be scrapped...
You have your 8, 10, 12, 16 playoff teams and all other eligible teams go to bowl games. You can’t tell me that anyone watches the current bowl line up for anything other than a December/January college football fix. Most of the games match up teams who are just on vacation. The other half you can tell who is going to win in the first quarter just by which came in with a competitive attitude rather than finishing up a vacation or prepping underclassmen for the next season.
If you are going to crown a legitimate national champion (meaning you run a gauntlet of the other top teams not because you were picked as champ) then you are inevitably weakening the concept of winning the conference. You really can’t have both on equal terms. Ultimately the sport is about entertainment and I think the more teams involved in the playoff the more entertaining and ultimately the more legitimate the champion will be.
Last season I think the top 4 teams at the end of the regular season may very well have been us, Florida, OU, and Alabama (Bowl games aside, the only game played after December 3rd that mattered was Florida-OU, everything else was just an exhibition.). But if you only take the conference champs then teams like Cincinnati and Virginia Tech get a spot while better teams like Texas and Alabama get left out. Texas missing out only because of a tie breaker. Our getting left out wouldn’t have stung as much if we still got the second playoff spot and got a chance to go out show the idiots in the media who voted against us just how wrong they were.
This whole concept is contingent on the assumption that shows the flaw of the NCAA basketball tourney, which is that the best team wins.
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 1:26 PM CDT up reply actions
Now we are getting to a question of semantics...
The whole point of the NCAA tournament is to crown a champion. The main reason it has gotten bigger is the fact that the early tourneys left out too many top teams because it gave autobids to all the lower-tiered conferences. When you have 220 team how better then do you suggest determining who is the ‘best’. I say the ‘best’ is the team that wins the NCAA tournament. That is a lot better definition of the ‘best’ than anything college football has given us in its 100+ year history.
On the downside, you end up with a Villanova or NC State winning when you take that many teams, but that would argue against your idea of taking only conference champions in football since some of those teams will inevitably not end up being one of the ‘best’ teams in the country. If you want the ‘best’ then use a BCS or RPI-like formula and take the top 8 or 16 teams regardless of conference. If the #16 seed wins then they would have played and won a more difficult 4-game stretch than any of the teams in front of them would have had in securing their higher ranking during the regular season (and would in fact offer a bigger challenge than the NCAA tourney since with upsets a team can win the tourney by only having to play one or two teams that were truly good during the regular season). Outside of my parenthetical, I just don’t understand where you think the flaw is in the NCAA basketball tourney.
When a team that doesn’t win a conference championship wins the national championship, the overwhelming odds are that the hottest (or luckiest) team, not the best team, won the championship. Having a single wildcard in proportion to seven conference champions would more than allow for the rare instance when the arguably-best team does not win its conference. Last year, UT would’ve been the wild card.
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 1:54 PM CDT up reply actions
But the team that won the conference championship might have also just been hot and lucky...
You could lose your conference by a game to a team that lost most of its OOC games but got on a hot streak in conference and then flamed out in the 1st round of the conference and NCAA tourneys. That team isn’t any more deserving to be a national title holder than the team that got unlucky in the schedule and had a long road stretch against all the toughest teams in the conference and lost a few games while the other team got a chance to pick off the top teams on the road by having them nicely spaced and after the other teams just got done playing a tough game. The schedule can ultimately be the biggest luck factor in determining a champion in any sport. Hell, we don’t lose to Tech if the game is three weeks later, no way, no how.
I would say outside of Villanova and NC State pretty much every other NCAA basketball champ was a pretty legit team. In football you would be taking a smaller number of teams and while I agree that the conference champs should have their places guaranteed I think you should have more ‘wild cards’ to correct for the imbalances not only within conferences but also regionally. Leaving UT would be a real travesty, but why should Alabama be left out to make a place for Cincinnati?
Because Alabama proved that they weren’t the best team the SEC had to send off to try to win a title. Cincinnati proved they were the best team the Big East had to send. The object should be to eliminate any team that had proven it wasn’t deserving of the national title, and the strongest indicator in a pool where not everyone plays the same schedule is that a team does or does not win the conference championship.
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 8:07 PM CDT up reply actions
But you above you were saying you were worried the 'best' team wouldn't win...
So you are saying Cincinnati is better than us based solely on the fact they won their conference? You would have only begrudgingly included us last year as a wild card. I don’t think the strongest indicator is a conference title…especially if it is used to legitimize a team like Cincinnati! In fact, the Big East is a large part of the rationale for taking the top 2 teams.
Alabama, had one loss and that loss was better than Florida’s. Just because Florida beat them doesn’t mean they couldn’t be the ‘best’ team, it just means they lost at a more critical juncture. In fact, if the SEC didn’t have a championship game Alabama would have been the champ because they were undefeated. This all just plays into the fact that unequal and uneven scheduling pollutes the variables and the only way to improve the odds of crowning the most legitimate champion is to take as many top teams as is feasible and make them play each other.
I’m saying that the vast majority of the time, the best team wins a conference—so vast a majority that having more than one at-large bid each season would be silly.
by burntorangehorn on Aug 10, 2009 10:33 AM CDT up reply actions
I think most conferences races are pretty close...
…basketball probably even more so than football.
The Big 12 and SEC often seem to several teams each year that on any given day could beat the other top teams. The Big 10 is usually Ohio State, Michigan, or Penn State (and sometimes another fortunate team who gets the benefit of avoiding two of the other traditional powers) and usually the team with the most favorable schedule gets the nod rather than the ‘best’. The ACC has lacked elite teams for several years, but is about as even as a conference can get from top to bottom and saying who is ‘best’ probably goes deeper than their record as well. The Big East looks to be a revolving door of mediocre champs for years to come, so while the obvious best team from that conference might win it, the champ is barely worthy of getting a BCS bid much less a spot in a playoff. I would say the Pac-10 has been the only conference where one team stands out year after year as the ‘best’ team and it has just happened to be USC almost every year…the one year where they weren’t the best team got left behind because their QB was hurt.
Ultimately this is a moot point. We won’t likely see a playoff anytime soon and who knows how the college football map will look when it does happen.
This isn't baseball - where you play 162 games
You play 8 games in conference and that decides a champion. Teams almost always win their conference by a very slim margin (or tiebreaker).
Slim, sure, but how often have you actually disagreed with how a conference championship has been determined? Last year and…when?
by burntorangehorn on Aug 7, 2009 8:05 PM CDT up reply actions
Try not to forget USC
To me, after the bowls, there was UT, FL, USC, and UTAH. They destroyed a dejected Alabama team, but that is the #2 team from the SEC that just played FL very tough.
"Stats are for losers. I like winning games." - Will Muschamp
by Mulliganville on Aug 7, 2009 5:33 PM CDT up reply actions
This is fun, but its just talk
it isn’t going to happen, and I can’t say I would like it very much. Don’t forget that the individual schools have to actually join their respective conference. If I was TTech I would never join a conference where the nearest other school is on the other side of the rocky mountains. And why would USC want to join a conference with Utah, Boise, and TTech in it?
Also, these “super” conferences would be VERY tough. Nobody would ever finish undefeated. Imagine playing OU, OkState, LSU, and Texas every year. We would end up quibbling over whether a two-loss USC was better or worse than a two-loss Georgia/Florida. Or whether beating GaTech by 7 is better than beating MichSt by 13. We would also have the case where an undefeated OhioSt goes out and lost to a two- or three-loss USC (again). In other words, it would be exactly the same. This scheme doesn’t solve anything. It just keeps teams like Rice, Rutgers, and Navy from EVER having the chance to play with the big boys. And nobody would ever schedule an OOC game against another “super” conference member. That would be nuts.
I like college football just the way it is, with plenty to bit, err, gripe about every year. If I would make one change it would be ONE MORE GAME. The PlusOne scenario ala Phil Steele is the only proposal that I like.
plus one would not have...
crowned a champion last year. Of course it is just fodder…but this is what it has come to…this is how irritated true sports fans are at these university presidents and conference presidents.
The point of your argument or comment of “Also, these "super" conferences would be VERY tough. Nobody would ever finish undefeated…” is precisely what is wrong with college football today. Why do you have to run the table to be national champion? At least in this scenario, it would be earned, not granted by some beginning point in a pointless poll (which we might be a benefactor of this season).
It would be rare for 3 teams to be tied the way we experienced it last season (Gideon-you could have prevented this!—I am not on you kid…just remember the feeling). Each conference would crown a champion…4 teams, 3 games, one national champion. It would be better than what we have today.
I would take plus “whatever is necessary.” Because last season, Utah, UT, and USC all have a gripe.
"Stats are for losers. I like winning games." - Will Muschamp
by Mulliganville on Aug 7, 2009 7:02 PM CDT up reply actions
I think it's amusing how this idea
sounds eerily similar to an idea proposed over at Rock Chalk Talk. This was linked on BON a few months ago, a great read, and actually makes a lot of sense. Makes you wonder (yet again) about the journalistic integrity of Disney-run sports news.
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