The College Football Belt

[Zeldar]

@Stink Fish Pot

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.

Perhaps you failed to see this in the description:

Update

After receiving some feedback from our readers, we have checked the championship lineage if we had started The Belt with the 1936 Minnesota Golden Gophers as well as the first documented game between Princeton & Rutgers. The lineage confirmed what we expected in that the current champion is still the same. The Princeton/Rutgers lineage flowed directly to the 1971 Nebraska Cornhuskers as the Alabama Crimson Tide brought The Belt to the 1971 Orange Bowl. If we had started with the 1936 Minnesota Golden Gophers, the 2 lines converged on October 31, 1942. When Alabama traveled to Atlanta, Georgia to meet the Georgia Bulldogs, the Crimson Tide were the champions of the Princeton/Rutgers lineage while the Bulldogs held the Minnesota Belt. With Georgia’s 21-10 victory, they became the unified, undisputed champion.

The lineage now will include many of the greatest names of college football. Coaches like Walter Camp, Pop Warner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, & Knute Rockne. While many of the great teams of the past fall outside of this lineage we believe this is at least as fair a system as is currently in place. Sometimes great teams & great players don’t get the opportunities they feel they deserve.

With over 1300 games in the Belt lineage, we feel comfortable in saying that you could choose any team in the history of college football as the starting point & that lineage will converge with the current champion in a reasonable amount of time.

In case I haven’t said so in so many words before, I’m not trying to sell anybody on the idea of The College Football Belt. I simply see the idea of deciding things on the field as a better way to determine strengths and weaknesses than reading some blogger’s (or talking head’s) analysis of why his or her home team or alma mater is better than anybody in the country.

I view it as a fact that “strong teams” are just as likely to lose as “weak teams” with the recent Michigan-Appalachian State affair as a case in point. And if Appy State can hang onto The Belt for a season or two and nobody can take it away from them, all the better.

One of the main reasons Tommy Tuberville was persuaded to leave Auburn was because Vanderbilt beat Auburn that year. I saw it as a good thing for Vandy more than a bad thing for Auburn, and I have loyalties to both teams.

If you think the idea sucks, good for you. What’s your improvement to the BCS? The idea behind the thread (as I see it) is to discuss that sort of thing. It doesn’t hurt my feelings at all if you think The Belt is a crummy idea. I just happen to think the BCS is a crummier idea.