Enough!

Different year, same result. The Big Ten Champion waltzes through a cupcake schedule and gets invited to the big dance, only to be physically and emotionally pummeled by its SEC date. Real sad story. I will be honest – this year, I thought it might be different. I suppose I was expecting a repeat of the crappy Jennifer Lopez movie Enough. I’m assuming you haven’t seen it, so I will fill you in (It’s on TNT all the time, give me a break). J-Lo is physically abused and stalked by her jealous ex-husband so she gets desperate and hires a personal trainer, complete with the requisite Rocky-esque training montages. She of course quickly becomes a kickboxing expert and ambushes her overconfident and bullying ex-husband and gets her revenge. I suppose you could call it murder, but somehow that wouldn’t really fit in with the film’s message. Anyhow, I guess I thought after a year of being abused and then enduring endless criticism, Ohio State would have risen to the challenge and fought back a little harder against LSU.

Despite claims otherwise, this result is devastating for the Big Ten. Two consecutive BCS title game blowouts, of the same team no less, will cause voters to view the next Big Ten champ with skepticism. All along, I felt that voters were unfairly giving Ohio State a free pass to the title game simply because they had one loss while everyone else had two. Hawaii was undefeated, but they didn’t get a sniff of the championship game. Why, you ask? Of course, everyone pointed to their schedule and close wins over weak teams. But how was Ohio State any different? I’ve pointed out before that Ohio State clearly lacked a signature win and benefited greatly from playing a weak non-conference and Big Ten Schedule. In the end, both Hawaii and Ohio State were exposed as pretenders. Were it not for Michigan’s unexpected and inspired win over Florida, the Big Ten’s top four teams would have gone a woeful 0-4 in bowl competition.

One thing I will not claim is to know who really should have been in the title game. After Oklahoma’s impressive win over Missouri in the Big 12 Championship, I probably would have selected them and Georgia to play for title. Obviously, in retrospect Oklahoma would not have been the correct choice, either. USC has a lot of support right now, but if you look at their body of work, it doesn’t seem impressive enough to me to say definitively that they deserved to play for the title. Other than the big win over Arizona State, what did USC do in the regular season? And we saw against Texas that Arizona State was clearly a second-rate team. But this is the problem right here. No one can really say with certainty who the top two teams are. Teams rarely play significant games outside of conference, so the criteria for evaluating teams is very limited.

Georgia university president Michael Adams recently proposed an eight team playoff system, which suggests to me that some of the higher-ups are finally starting to realize that the current system clearly does not work. And even more encouraging to me is that someone of Adams influence (he is also chairman of the NCAA executive committee) admits that a plus-one system would not resolve the issue. Of course, it’s easy to say that Adams’ proposal is due in part to Georgia’s title snub, but I think that played a very small part, if any, in Adams’ decision to speak out. Michael Adams has presented a very rational and feasible plan, and I agree with almost everything he says. In fact, I had drafted a playoff proposal earlier this season and found that many of his points mirror my own. I will provide a more thorough breakdown of the proposal in the next week.

As far as this season is concerned, I think it’s safe to say that the SEC was by far the best conference. After going 7-2 in bowls, including a 4-1 performance from its top five teams and two BCS bowl wins, the SEC had the best record among BCS conferences. The Big 12 also took home also a BCS win, although it surprisingly came from Kansas, not Oklahoma, and finished a respectable 5-3 in bowl play. The top five Big 12 teams also went an impressive 4-1. The ACC and Big Ten proved to be losers this year, finishing at 2-6 and 3-5, respectively. Boston College and Wake Forest were the only two ACC teams to win bowl games, with BC’s win coming over a middling Michigan State squad. The Pac-10 and Big East performed decently, finishing 4-2 and 3-2, respectively, and were buoyed by impressive BCS wins from their conference champions.

Next year should be another competition season, as many of the top teams are not losing very much senior talent, such as Georgia, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Florida. Now we can turn our attention to recruiting and wondering why the Big Ten won't allow the rest of the conferences to create a playoff system.