Many of us college football fans were looking forward to Boise State and TCU crashing the BCS party this year finally and officially exposing the BCS as a joke. It is a very valid argument that the BCS Championship game does not determine a true national champion. Instead it determines the winner of a game played between two teams who won the national popularity contest. Of course you can’t win the popularity contest without winning games but that is only a part of the equation, unfortunately not the whole equation.
Boise State’s loss to Nevada, another very good mid-major program, effectively eliminated the possibility of them playing in a BCS game. Somewhere the BCS honks are exhaling and everywhere college football fans are groaning. The BCS’s stranglehold on college football and destruction of true competition will live to see another day.
Boise lost the game to a very good team who did not quit on themselves and came out with a vengeance in the second half. The first reaction is to blame Kyle Brotzman, the Boise State placekicker for his two missed chip-shot field goals. However, as many from the Boise camp stated it wasn’t those two plays that lost them the game, but rather the accumulation of missed assignments and missed tackles throughout the second half that really killed them. Speaking of reactions, Nevada coach Chris Ault, still riding his high from the win called this game “the greatest win this university has ever had” and also said his team was a team of destiny. Way to act like you have been there before coach!
I have heard people say that this game proves that the mid-major conferences are better than we thought, that maybe the competition isn’t so weak. Others say that it proves that Boise wasn’t actually good enough to play for the national championship because they couldn’t even beat the only other good team in their conference. It actually doesn’t prove either. To prove either of those theories you need to have a standard, the only way you arrive at a standard is to have teams from different conferences play each other regularly. Ohio State, Alabama, USC, Oklahoma, Nebraska, LSU and their “football powerhouse” buddies refuse to play Boise State. The reasons are many, but the powerhouse schools in the BCS conferences don’t have much to gain by playing Boise State, the money (TV ratings) for the immediate game wouldn’t be a factor. But more importantly they might lose and lose their shot at the championship game and at the same time validate Boise.
This fear of the power mid-majors was no more evident than with the highly ignorant comments by Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee. He dismissed Boise State and TCU by referring to their opponents as “Little Sisters of the Poor”. Ohio State has played 2 ranked opponents this year; TCU has played 2 and Boise has played 3. Mr. Gee, I know you said you don’t know anything about the X’s and O’s, so why don’t you go make yourself useful and lower your schools inflated tuition rates.
There are still a lot of games to be played and a lot of things yet to happen this year in college football, finding out who the real national champion is will not be one of them.
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