This week’s edition of Meeting of the Minds asks the CBR brain trust what the objective of the BCS should be.
Allen Kenney: Every week when writers/coaches/bloggers submit their ballots for the various top 25 polls, we see the same trend play out. Generally, it appears that what a team has actually done on the field is less important to voters than their opinion on how good a team really is.
My question is simple: At the end of the year in the BCS title game, which pairing would you rather see: the two teams that you think would beat everyone else, or the the two teams that you think accomplished the most during the season?
Michael Felder: Easy, the two best teams. Meaning teams I think would beat everyone else. That’s what it is all about to me. That’s why 2007 LSU was awesome to see and that’s why I had a tough time moving 2007 USC, UGA and 2010 Bama down in the rankings.
I want to see the best teams play. Generally they also tend to be the most accomplished teams so that’s a win-win situation for this guy.
Kevin McGuire: Yeah, playing off what Michael said, I want to see the two best teams and more often than not the teams that accomplish the most on the field will be the two best standing at the end of the year. That said, I also wanted to see Boise State get a chance two years ago and TCU a chance last year as well. To me, winning every game on your schedule tells me you have accomplished everything you need to do in order to prove you are the best and worthy of a shot at a title. It happens, but Auburn and Oregon were the two best teams last year, and Alabama and Texas were the two best the year before. I can’t argue with either match-up to be honest with you.
Matt Yoder: Ideally you want the two best teams to play, but what if they have a bad loss or two where they “play well” but don’t get the W. Do we want to award a national championship appearance to the team that looks the best stepping off the bus, or the team that earns it throughout the course of the season? If we just want who we think the best teams are to play in the title game… what’s the point of a regular season? To me, it has to be based on merit. That’s why the NCAA basketball tournament resonates with so many people.
In the end, I think it’s a bit of a nuanced argument. 95% of the time, the “best team” and the “team that earned it” are one and the same. I do like Kevin’s point about TCU and Boise though (and even Auburn of several years ago). What more can teams do than win every game on their schedule? How do we really know if Auburn was “better” than TCU last year? Sure, we “think” that they were and they “looked” like they were… but that can’t possibly be proven true without a game being played.
Then again, I suppose this is the kind of decision we have to face with the flawed system of the BCS.
Michael: BCS is flawed in practice, not in theory. The NCAA tournament is one of the biggest examples of an absolute joke. Butler makes a miracle three pointer against Duke a few years ago and all of the sudden they’re the best team in college basketball?
Please.
I don’t watch sports to see “Cinderella” or underdogs randomly overcoming the odds because of a good match up or a lucky draw. I watch sports to see excellence and elite beat elite. Great on great. Talent on talent. Sports isn’t about “everyone deserving a shot” for me. The continuous use of the NCAA tournament as justification is a joke. The best tournament going is the College World Series because you actually watch the best take on the best and win series no fluke wins that they could never duplicate.
Unfortunately football doesn’t lend itself to series play so with that in mind give me the best of the best at the end of the year, line them up across from one another and let them get after it. That’s what I care about. Best vs Best for a title.
Aaron Torres: I like where this argument is going, but here’s the biggest tangible question: Without any type of playoff, how do we know who the two best teams actually are?
In practice, yes, I want the two best teams, and for better or worse, I think that the BCS gives us that, based on the season-long metrics that are put in place. It gave us Auburn and Oregon last year, the only two undefeated teams from major automatic qualifying conferences. In theory, those were the two best teams.
At the same time, just because the computers said they were the best teams, does that mean they were?
What I do know is what I see with my own two eyes, and what I saw with my own two eyes is that by the first week in December last year, I think you could’ve made a pretty compelling case that Wisconsin and Stanford were the two best teams in college football. Now if “best,” is measured by what the BCS tells us are the best, then that’s obviously not the case. But if you lined everyone up on a neutral field and had them duke it out, with only one team left on top, I think either could’ve taken home that title. That doesn’t even throw TCU into the mix, who beat Wisconsin on a neutral field.
So I guess after that 250 words of rambling, I want the two best teams, even if they aren’t necessarily 1-2 in the BCS polls. Then again, I guess the question becomes, without the BCS polls, how do you even determine who the best two are.
Michael: Easy answer to that one Aaron. Just let me pick.
Tom Perry: I think we all want the best two teams, but we aren’t always going to get it (and probably never will).
Remember the year Ohio State and Michigan played that thriller in Columbus and everyone was debating whether they should play again in the championship because those were the two best teams? Well, the Buckeyes played Florida and got dismantled and embarrassed.
I respectfully disagree with the feeling that TCU or Boise should get a shot after their undefeated runs. Not to steal from Michael, but I don’t want to see Butler hit the big shot and get luck in a winner-take-all scenario. Try playing that BCS schedule (I can even count WVU as it plays LSU this weekend) before you start sniping about not getting a chance. I’ve even watched my Mountaineers sort of pull off the miracle, one-time huge win twice. First, over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl and the next time over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.
Give me the two best teams in the country so we get the best team as the champ.
Matt: I don’t see how we can hold it against Butler for being good enough to win five straight games to make a championship game two years in a row. If they weren’t that good, why didn’t they get beat in the Round of 64, 32, 16, 8, or 4? Sure, it’s a one off scenario and a team can get “lucky” in a game or two. However, 100 times out of 100 I want a team that actually wins games and earns something (whether we consider it rightly or wrongly to be lucky) rather than a team that computers or my own opinion may deem to be “better.”
It’s too easy to tell Boise State, “go play that BCS schedule and then we’ll talk” when they have no possibility of doing that. That’s my entire problem with the BCS. How can we crown a national champion of college football when only a predetermined select “elite” group of teams are ultimately eligible. How would things be different if Boise or TCU or even Cincinnati from a couple years ago got a shot in a playoff?
If we just awarded championships to “best teams” than the Miracle on Ice would have never happened, the Patriots would have completed their undefeated season, USC would have beat Texas and Vince Young, and hundreds of other deserving teams would lose their titles. Trophies aren’t handed out for being the best team. Trophies are handed out for winning championships. Champions should be decided by what they do on the field.
Allen: This discussion always gets muddled, because we tend to talk about it in the context of the competing mechanisms that are in place already – a tournament versus the BCS. The truth is that “luck” plays a huge role in either system. Your quarterback spraining his ankle and missing half of a game can be just as damaging to a team’s championship hopes as Butler hitting a miracle heave to beat Duke.
I like to think of the discussion more in terms of which teams are the most deserving. The NCAA Tournament itself is fun, but we’ve seen plenty of ultra-talented teams coast in the regular season, turn it on in the postseason and then win the whole thing. Tom Izzo has pretty much built a Hall of Fame career by treating the regular season like a glorified set of scrimmages.
The one thing I do like about the BCS is that it does tend to reward the teams that have done the most to demonstrate they should be playing in the game. There have been plenty of times in the last decade when I would have favored USC to beat anyone, but the Trojans were fairly punished by the system for what often amounted to taking a week off against an inferior opponent. We’ve also seen cases where the system has punished teams for watering down their schedules.
The fact that teams like Boise and TCU have been shut out of the title game in the past definitely proves that the system isn’t 100 percent fair or without flaws. However, I’m OK with that trade-off if it means we’ll ultimately get a champion that made the best case from start to finish in the season.
Kevin: I don’t care what system we get, so long as we get to see Florida International and Houston. Am I right, guys?
Allen: You and a boardroom full of ESPN suits.
