FSU/Clemson beats UF/USC and then loses it back to random SEC team in the Peach Bowl.
Nope, the Florida-South Carolina game is for all the marbles in the SEC East. My prediction: Florida beats SC, beats App State, wins another game in Tallahassee, before giving up 125 points to Auburn in an SECCG rout. Auburn beats Oregon for the national title, and hangs on to the belt until October of next year when the Gators come to Jordan-Hare and win a close game.
Based on the schools page ( http://collegefootballbelt.com/Schools/School%20Names.htm ) for teams that have at least played in a Belt Game, the teams outside the FBS are:
Florida A&M Mid-Eastern Athletic
Furman Southern
Pacific (no longer playing football)
Georgia Southern Southern
Montana State Big Sky
SE Missouri State Ohio Valley
Charleston Southern Big South
Western Carolina Southern
William & Mary Colonial
And those in the FBS who have yet to play a Belt Game (by conference):
- Big East
South Florida
-
Conference USA
-
East
UCF
Marshall
-
Mid-American
-
East
Ohio
Kent State
Akron
- West
Northern Illinois
Toledo
Western Michigan
Ball State
Central Michigan
Eastern Michigan
- Mountain West
UNLV
- Sun Belt
Louisiana-Monroe
Louisiana-Lafayette
Middle Tennessee
Florida Atlantic
- Western Athletic
Boise State
Idaho
Utah State
My prediction is that USC beats UF, then loses to clemson before a rematch with Auburn in the SEC Championship game. They could have beaten Auburn earlier this year, but Cam Newton ran all over them in the second half. Probably will happen again, but if they can win that game by some miracle they’d be a four loss team in a BCS Game. I went to look at previous seasons to see if there had been other four loss teams playing in BCS games and it has happened 3 other times, always the ACC Champ (FSU x 2 and VaTech x 1).
This is my prediction as well, but for a more esoteric reason. I think Karma is going to bite UF’s ass and it’s time Spurrier makes it to the SECCG for SCar.
Losing to Clemson would just be a way to keep The Belt out of the maelstrom of the SECCG. That’s going to be Hell-on-the Halfshell!
USC takes the college Belt for the 2nd time this season. Only the 2nd time in the history of the belt.
And strangely, it was the other USC that did it.
Cool trivia!
Notice that mighty Troy now has a moment in the sun!
Sorry, Troy.
Will Clemson keep Auburn from having a crack at The Belt?
Auburn has The Belt!
War Eagle!
Well, they better hang on to it in January so it can stay in the SEC for another couple of years.
So what happens if the team holding the belt gets SMU’d?
Absolutely! It would be better to lose it to the Sun Belt or C-USA!
What would be best, however, would be to hold on to it for the foreseeable future. Beat the record held by Miami (FL) of 31 games.
See the website. USC has had their games from their SMUing vacated.
Just a bump to let you know of the spinoff thread College Football Belt – Who’s next? where you can engage in some predictions by way of a poll.
Just to see if “College Football Belt” had any other online discussion I did a Yahoo! search and got eight pages of hits. Of course eome of them were about the actual belts that various teams have. But at least these have some measure of talk about this specific topic. Add to the list if you know of a more interesting one.
http://mbd.scout.com/mb.aspx?s=184&f=2210&t=6760393
http://www.operationsports.com/forums/college-football/231113-college-football-belt.html
http://forums.tigerfan.com/tigers-den/60623-college-football-belt.html
Among the various Yahoo! hits were links to this thread!
has anyone brought up the issue of “belt shares” as in every D-1 school in the nation has 1 belt share. then you absorb the other team’s belt shares when you beat them? once you have your belt shares taken, you have to start over? then come bowl time, you have teams strategically weighing their options between a “just getting enough shares to win” strategy and more desperate teams playing the “give me the baddest mofos you got so i can leapfrog into the belt last second” strategy? of course all of this with a twisted dimension of “which opponent will get me the most money” strategy.
That’s a new concept to me. Looks like fun. Upthread I mentioned the idea of dovetailing The Belt with the Wall Street Journal article’s idea of arranging conferences like English Premier League soccer (see What the English Premier League Can Teach College Football - WSJ )
I suspect elements of several systems could be selected to make a huge improvement over the BCS without the ordeal of an honest-to-God playoff that would be a nightmare to schedule. As I see it, football teams need much more recovery times than basketball or baseball teams do. One game a week is about the quickest another game could be scheduled with any hope of a fair fight. So unless football goes for longer that the almost two seasons it has now, a shortcut is going to be involved.
Polls and computer systems just seem way too arbitrary to me. The Belt may be a quaint idea, but it does have the merit of being determined in actual play and not just some expert’s opinion. Experts are so rarely right anyway. Just look at the pre-season polls!
Zeldar,
Did you, by chance, create this thing? Because I can figure out no other reason for your enthusiasm for it.
The current BCS system is bad. No argument. However, this thing has me actually thinking the BCS is on to something.
The example that someone upthread used with Wyoming owning it for a while is a perfect example. Another example is if a D-1 belt holder loses to a 1-AA team, then the belt could circulate in 1-AA for years. And what if that 1-AA team loses to a D2 team or D3 team? It would only be by a miracle that the belt would bounce back up into D-1, as a D3 team isn’t going to ever play a D1 team.
For example, say Michigan owned it when Appalachian State upset them. Then App. State goes back to its own world and its own competition. It loses to a team that doesn’t play a D1 power, so it stays at the wrong level. You could make this a D1 thing only, but that defeats your only premise, that the belt would be won, lost, or held from a weekly game.
boooooooo. I can’t believe I have actually read a system that makes me prefer the BCS.
Unless, of course I’m missing something. Which is entirely possible, since my interest in college football has dropped to zero… I haven’t actually watched a national championship game since the BCS started. This year, waiting until mid-January was a complete joke.
Stink Fish Pot,
No, I’m flattered that you might credit me with the idea, but I stumbled across the website by accident long enough ago that I have forgotten what piece of trivia I may have been looking for at the time. The fact that the lineage of The Belt comes down to the current holder regardless of how far back in College Football history you go for a start convinces me that it’s at least a valid analysis of things.
The fact that not all MNC holders (regardless of which poll(s) or even some BCS outcomes have identified them as such) have held The Belt at that same time just points out that the systems are naturally at odds with each other.
As for The Belt dropping out of the FBS division and staying out for an extended period, that just goes to show the nature of the “cupcake scheduling” problem. That, in and of itself, needs more scrutiny.
If you read that WSJ article, the proposed conference alignments and movements into and out of “the Big Time” could address the issue to my own satisfaction.
I don’t really propose to have The Belt be the only answer to the confusion in the BCS approach to a National Champion. I’m more in favor of something other than a panel of “experts” determining who is and who is not a valid opponent in the chase for the title.
All season I have been evaluating the won-loss situation and how far it diverges from the Top x-number in tha various polls. Something is definitely wrong with the people involved in the polls. The website http://www.pollspeak.com/index.htm (and others like it) does a good job of pointing out some of those problems.
Don’t be too flattered. I think the idea stinks. 
Oh, and I don’t agree with the premise that the lineage of the belt comes down to the current holder regardless of how far back in history you go.
Maybe if you start in 1971 with Nebraska. But picking that game and that team is more or less arbitrary. It was chosen because it was the team that the creators of this system all saw and they used it as a benchmark. That’s not very rigorous.