The then 8th ranked, and two loss Sooners without Adrian Peterson? Yeah, that was simply unthinkable. :rolleyes:
I’m talking about the top 4 or 5 teams, not that latter half of the top 10. And I’m not saying it is impossible for the Utes to beat those teams. I’m saying that 9 times out of ten, USC/Texas/Oklahoma/Florida would beat the Utes, with 6 out of those 9 being blowouts.
And don’t misunderstand me. I like the Utes, I’m thrilled they won, and they’re a good, if not great team. But there is no way in hell they are the best team in the nation.
It was a classic lose-lose game for Alabama. If they beat the stuffing out of Utah, no one would remember 5 minutes later. Alabama’s season was over when they lost to Florida. If Florida would have lost, I think a highly motivated Utah might be able to beat the Gators in a meaningless bowl game a month after the regular season as well.
But, could that Utah team who played last night beat the Gators right now? No way.
You are convinced Utah is undefeated because they beat inferior competition. You are convinced they couldn’t beat those other teams and you might be right or you might be wrong.
We’ll never know for sure because they’ll never play. This is why we hate the BCS, because championships are based on guesswork not on the field. People love March Madness because of Cinderellas. I think it would have been great if we had a Division I playoff and Utah, who nobody gives a chance, won it all. Alas, that is merely a dream.
Football teams don’t play each 9 or 10 times, so your point is moot. They play each other once, and any given Saturday, any team can win. Utah beat a top 5 team in Bama. They beat every team that played them. They couldn’t do anything better. The Mountain West isn’t as bad as people seem to think. It’s not on the same level as the SEC, PAC-10, Big 12, or even the Big 10 but it might compare favorably to the ACC or Big East.
There are always excuses. The fact is Utah whipped them . They were a better team. If Alabama wanted to be considered they should have creamed a lesser babka. A close victory would not have done it. Utah looked faster.
Then there’s no champion at all. It’s fine to theorize on who the best team is, but in fact there’s no playoff system, so there’s no real championship. They can say the BCS determines a champion, but it really determines five, and one game is arbitrarily declared more important than the others.
The relative strength of different conferences seems to be much more an article of faith than everything else, and it’s one that can’t be subjected to any real scrutiny because the conferences don’t all play each other, and the best teams don’t all play each other. It’s the worst possible kind of positive reinforcement, where if someone was incredibly good at some mythical time in the past, that somehow counts toward whether they should be awarded the National Championship today.
And, on preview, what RickJay said, too. There is no national champion, just a team that has been plucked from a pool of four or five contenders based on arbitrary criteria.
It allows us to push aside pesky, irrelevant questions like who is actually winning the games, and focus on what’s really important: who would, under most conditions, beat the most other teams that they never actually play? I think the NFL would be much better using a similar system. As you rightly point out, those pesky Giants never would have been crowned champs last year if we had been allowed to make a proper evaluation of which was the best team, and simply hand that team the Superbowl.
Why play any games at all? Why not just have the coaches and journalists decide the championship at the beginning of the season? We could make up for lost ad revenue by allowing Tostitos and FedEx and all the other sponsors to bid on having their name associated with the championship team.
YOU
DON’T KNOW
THAT!!!
You can surmise, guess, pretend, suppose, and insist all you want. But you don’t know that, and there is simply NO analysis you can subject the situation to that will prove your point. All you can do is have an opinion, an opinion that is, moreover, lacking much empiric support. :smack:
I have no clue how to read this post. Some of it is clearly sarcasm, but those parts jive with what you seem to be defending.
My belief is that you can’t know who’s actually the best team under the current system. I’d wager that most of the people that are saying that there’s not way Utah is the best team are people that thought they had no chance against Alabama. Playoffs are imperfect since a string of luck can get you a championship, but it’s quite possible that this year we’ll have 3 or 4 teams with, IMO, legitimate arguments for them to be champions. That’s a flawed system and Utah winning points that out. That’s the point of this thread, right?
The best team in the nation is not the champion of anything unless they emerge as the winner of a championship tournament. You seem to be saying that “Well, this is the best system of deciding a champion we have.” But it’a not a system for determining a champion AT ALL. College football has no real championship.
The team that appears to be the best team on paper is not always the champion, but that’s just sports. The MLB team with the best record usually doesn’t win the World Series. The NHL team with the best record usually doesn’t win the Stanley Cup. I’m not sure what the numbers in the NFL are but, hey, Giants 2008. But no matter what team did or didn’t win, those sports determined champions on the field of play. If you say that doesn’t mean the Phillies were really the best baseball team in the majors in 2008 that’s a fair argument, and in fact it’s one I’d be inclined to believe; we can have discussion and arguments all day on whether the Phillies were legitimately a better team than the Red Sox or Rays. I can construct a reasonable argument that they weren’t even really in the top three. That’d be a fun argument. But make no mistake: they won the championship fair and square. Maybe the Red Sox were a better team, but the fact is the Phillies were hoisting the trophy while the Red Sox were already playing their sixth round of golf. Maybe the Patriots were really a better team than the Giants, but the Giants get to hoist a Super Bowl banner and the Patriots don’t, and those issues were decided on the field of play.
College football has no championship and calling it a “national champion” is a joke and a lie. The results of football games are not determined by a poll of sportswriters.
Yes, playoffs are imperfect, but they have the one, single overriding advantage that makes them far superior to the current system: the games actually have to be played before you can crown a champion.
Sure, a team can win against the odds in the playoffs, but at least they have to actually win the game, rather then being declared champion on the basis of what they might be expected to do in nine out of ten games.
To be quite honest, i think the best and the fairest way to crown a champion is the way they do it in the English Premier League. Take 20 teams, have each team play every other team twice (once at home, once away), and whoever is on top of the table at the end of those 38 games is the champion. No playoffs.
That way, every team plays exactly the same competition, under pretty much exactly the same conditions (in terms of crowd support at home and away), and the championship is decided based on who is on top at the end of this series of games. There are no playoffs that will allow a team to get lucky and win a few games at the end of the season.
Of course, the drawback of this system is that you lose precisely the sort of tension and excitement that playoffs are designed to generate. It’s possible, for example, that in some years you will know who the champion is going to be a few weeks before the end of the season. That tends to take a lot of the excitement out of the last few games. Playoffs, on the other hand, allow the excitement to build exponentially each week, until the championship game. English soccer gets this sort of excitement in single elimination competitions (“knockouts”) like the FA Cup, as well as some of the Europe-wide competitions like the Champions League.
I’ll admit that 'Bama favored from a schedule that turned out to be easier than it looked pre-season (Clemson, Georgia, Auburn). So they were slightly overrated. But to say that they and the entire SEC was horribly overrated is false.
In case you missed it, Ol’ Miss, who is approximately the 4th best team in the SEC, dominated TTech is a way that Texas could not, and that only Oklahoma did.
Alabama was slightly overrated and way unprepared.
The Big 12 was overrated.
Utah was underrated due to being in a “non-BCS” conference.
The only argument that you can make for Utah not deserving a shot is that they aren’t in a big-six conference.
2006 SEC All-Freshman First Team[6]
2007 AP All-SEC First Team[7]
2007 Playboy All-American[8]
2008 Outland Trophy[9]
2008 AP All-SEC First Team[10]
2008 AP All-American[11]
2008 AFCA All-American[12]
2008 CBS All-American[13]
2008 ESPN All-American[14]
2008 FWAA All-American[15]
2008 Pro Football Weekly All-American[16]
2008 Rivals.com All-American[17]
2008 Sporting News All-American[18]
2008 Sports Illustrated All-American[19]
2008 Walter Camp All-American[20]
Here’s a picture of the behemoth. His loss was enormous. He was injured in the Ol’ Miss game, which Bama handled easily until he went out. After his injury, they were able to blitz with impunity. He’s so huge and talented that he can consistently handle two defenders. Another first-string lineman went out early in the game, so we had the weakest line we’ve had all year. Add to that the fact that JPW doesn’t work well under pressure and you can see why the Utah gameplan of BLITZ BLITZ BLITZ BLITZ worked so well.
