I get a little carried away this time of
year. When I hear the sports media stumping silliness it just
makes me crazy. And every year the big silliness in December and
early January is that the USC Trojans should be crowned as the best
team in college football, regardless of what the facts say.
Because they choked against an inferior opponent for the fourth year in
a row, the Trojans needed help from Oregon to beat an injury-depleted
Oregon
State
squad in the final game of the regular season to make their annual
appearance in Pasadena, but that's a detail that is lost on the sports
pundits. Also lost is that had the Penn State offense been
remotely competent in the Rose Bowl, they would have turned a muffed
fourth-quarter punt
at the Trojan 15-yard line into a quick 7 points which would have given
them the opportunity to recover an onsides kick in the closing minute
for a chance at a tying score. Nevermind that Penn State
consistently shot themselves in the foot whenever opportunities arose
throughout the game... we are used to seeing that from Big 10 football
teams.
Regardless, the whole purpose of the BCS is to allow the best teams to
opt out of their "traditional bowl rivalries" so that they can play
better opponents. At some point the people who choose the bowl
match-ups as well as the coaches and ADs have to say enough is enough
and start pitting the best teams against each other. If USC
really wanted
to play the best competition, there really isn't anything to prevent
them from doing so. But they choose to play the Big 10, a
conference that hasn't been relevant to the national championship
picture in any of the major sports in 40 years, so that they can preserve "their traditional rivalry". Last year USC could have opted to play Georgia
if they
wanted and the year before they could have played LSU, but chose
instead to take gimmes against Illinois and Michigan.
Since 1970 the Big 10 has won 8 national championships. Not
in football. Total. In the three major college sports - football,
basketball and
baseball - the entire conference has won 8 national championships and
only 2 in football. That's out of 117 possible
opportunities. Even if you
retroactively add Penn State before they joined the conference that
only brings the total up to 10 titles. The sports media talk
about the Big Ten
being a
power
conference, but consider that the Big East has won just one fewer
national titles over the same span yet they aren't guaranteed a
BCS spot.
Compared to the other major conferences, the Big Ten doesn't even show
up on the scale. Since 1970, the ACC has won 16 national championships
(21 if you retroactively add Miami). The Big 12 has eleven football
titles when you include the
now-defunct Southwestern conference record of Texas, two basketball
titles and four baseball titles. The SEC has won ten titles in football
and
six apiece in basketball and baseball. LSU with 7
major sports titles by themselves almost match the entire Big 10.
Five different schools
(LSU,
Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Tennesee) have each won national titles
in football, and three of those (LSU in baseball, Florida in basketball
and Georgia in baseball) have won championships in football and another
major sport.
But let me focus this even more. In terms of just football titles
since 1970, the tally is: Big
10.....2 (4 when retroactively
adding Penn State before they were a
member) Big
East...2 (Miami was a member
for their 1991 and 2001 titles) ACC........4
(9 when retroactively adding
Miami) Pac
10.....4 (although
Washington should have been declared champ in
1984, so I would personally give them 5) SEC.......10
Big 12....10 (11 when
including Texas' championship while in the SWC)
The SEC is the only
football conference that features five
head coaches that have won national titles and another who finished #2
last year. By comparison the Big 10
has two title winners and Joe Pa's last one came more than 20 year ago. The Big 10 just barely ranks with the Big East and
falls well short
of a "non-football conference" like the ACC. That they get an
automatic BCS bid is insulting to the intelligence of all football fans
and to college football as an institution.
Yet USC, the Pac 10 and the Rose Bowl committee continue to schedule
the pathetic Big 10 for
January. After the predictable thrashing, USC then caterwauls the
rest of the year that they weren't
given
the national title. The ABC/ESPN network does its best to give it to
them with their non-stop booster-ism - there's no confirmation whether
or not employees of the network each recieve a blow-up Pete Carroll
doll each Christmas - conveniently forgetting that
every year USC loses to a team that has no business being close in the
game. Losing to 41-point underdog Stanford at home ring any bells? How
about the year before when they scored only 9 points against a then
6-win UCLA
team in a loss in the final regular season game? This year's
beaut was a cringe-inducing loss to Oregon State who had already lost
to Penn State and Stanford (!) before facing the Trojans.
And let's quiet the talk about the Pac 10 conference strength. True,
they went 5-0 this year in bowl games. But only two of the bowls they
played occurred when traditionally the top bowls are played: New
Years's Eve
and after. And the most significant one of those was against the
Big 10, which is now
1-5 in bowls this year with 1 to play, and that conference's record
over the last three years is 6-15. Conversely, the SEC will play all
eight of
its games during the big bowl season and their record over the last
three years is
17-7 (5-2 so far this year with 1 game to go). The other three of the
Pac 10 bowl
wins
this year came against traditionally over-rated
BYU, a rebuilding Pitt program that had it's first winning season since
2004 and a 7-win Miami (8th best team in the ACC) this year. Yay
team! Only Oregon's win over a very
good Oklahoma State offensive team measures up as impressive.
The Pac-10 has
been a top-heavy conference at least for a decade and
the bottom half plays some of the worst football in the NCAA. This
year, they fielded just five winning teams. The bottom two
teams combined for two wins. Washington State has not had a winning
season since 2003. Washington's streak of non-winning seasons goes back
to 2002. Stanford hasn't posted better than five wins in a season since
2001. The Pac-10 went 3-6 versus the Mountain West, including losses by
3rd best Oregon State and 5th best Arizona. Put another
way, without USC, the Pac 10 is practically the Big 10. In fact,
without USC the Pac-10 would not have won any titles in football over
the last 40 years. Granted, it was a strong year from the
Mountain West, the pinnacle of which was Utah's impressive victory in
the Sugar Bowl against Alabama. That's not so much a knock
against the SEC as it is evidence that maybe the BCS should consider
giving the Big Ten's automatic bid to some other conference.
Many have suggested that this year was a down year for the
SEC. I
agree: they only had seven teams with winning records and only four
teams in the top 20. In the Pac 10 that would qualify as a banner
year.
I was incredibly disappointed by how LSU performed against its
conference
schedule this year, but even an underachieving Tigers squad (5th best
in the SEC) was clearly miles better than the highest ranked team in
the ACC (Georgia Tech). The 4th best team in the SEC (Ole Miss)
thrashed the #1(b) Texas Tech team in the Big 12 (the #1 and #1a
teams being Texas and Oklahoma). More impressively,
both the LSU (at the Georgia Dome) and Ole Miss (Cotton Bowl) wins took
place in the other team's back yard. In a down year for the SEC
they dominated the bowl season
with the most January appearances and will likely hoist the national
championship trophy for the third straight year and fourth in six
years.
One can not state with any integrity that this year's USC team
has the best
defense in college football history (as the ESPN/ABC crowd does) if
they give up 27 points in a loss to the
26th ranked
offense in the country. And no one can state with a straight face
that USC is
comparable to
the best teams in the country if they lose
the only tough road game they had all year. Just to be clear,
this so-called "best defense in college history" gave up 186 yards
rushing to a freshman running back in that game, and USC's last
touchdown that made
the game look somewhat close came with a little more than a minute left
to
play. If (as the sports media are saying) USC dominated Penn
State, then Oregon State dominated USC, and "best teams" don't get
dominated by anyone. Certainly "best teams ever" don't. The
Trojans' other toughest opponents -
Oregon and Cal, and if you insist on terming Big 10 opponents as
"tough", Ohio State and Penn State - were all played at home.
Conversely, Florida
trampled bowl-game winners Georgia, Vanderbilt and Florida State on the
road and their only loss was a one-point nail-biter at home to Ole
Miss, who proved their worth in the Cotton Bowl.
I don't buy the Oklahoma argument that they should be in the title
game, but Texas has a legitimate claim after beating Oklahoma at a
neutral site and were just one dropped interception on the road in
Lubbock after consecutive weeks playing Oklahoma, Missouri, Oklahoma
State and then Texas Tech from going undefeated.
So, USC
fans and ESPN/ABC talking heads, please understand you have no argument
until your team plays
a quality opponent in January. Until USC is more about
performance on the field
against quality opponents than it is about media-inflated ego, they
don't
deserve the chance to play for the national title. While it does
happen every once in a while - contrary to
the prevailing media and West Coast sentiment - national titles are not
given. They are earned.