Let’s play a game.
Let’s take a look at the college football standings and see which teams have a shot at finishing the season undefeated and heading to the national championship.
Only two teams go to the national title game. Right now there are eight undefeated teams: No. 1 Texas, No. 2 Alabama, No. 3 Penn State, No. 6 Texas Tech, No. 10 Utah, No. 11 Boise State, No. 18 Ball State and No. 19 Tulsa. The only game pitting two of these teams against each other is a showdown in Lubbock, Texas between Texas and Texas Tech this Saturday.
That means we could theoretically have seven undefeated teams at the end of the season. Seven! Since 2002 only once have there been more than three undefeated teams at the end of the regular season.
Of course, it’s likely that at least a couple of these teams will be upset in the remaining three or four weeks of their schedules, plus the conference championships. But that could still leave four or five teams with immaculate records.
Interestingly, it’s the four remaining undefeated major-conference teams that have the toughest shot at running the table. Texas and Texas Tech not only play each other but have some dangerous games looming. The Texas Longhorns face Kansas on the road, while the Texas Tech Red Raiders still have Oklahoma and Oklahoma State on the horizon, both of whom are ranked in the top 10. Not to mention there’s the Big 12 championship, which could very well host a rematch between the two Texas teams.
Alabama has a home game against Auburn and an away game against No. 15 LSU to topple before it can approach perfection. Penn State seems to have the easiest path to 13-0 — its biggest threat is a home match against No. 22 Michigan State — but the schedule is still no pushover.
Nevertheless, if Texas can overcome Texas Tech this Saturday, we might see the Longhorns and Penn State’s Nittany Lions in the Jan. 8 BCS title game.
But let’s suppose for a moment that each of the four teams from major conferences that are still undefeated suffer a loss before bowl bids are announced, and suppose Utah, Boise State, Tulsa and Ball State all finish off the season undefeated. Each of these teams has consistently been putting up convincing victories, so a prediction that these four win out isn’t quite as presumptuous as it might initially seem.
What would happen? Would each of these teams get a bid to one of the major BCS bowls? Would any of them get a nod for the title game?
As much as I love the underdog and as much as I think these teams should at least have a shot at a title if there was any justice in the world, it’s likely that none would head to the title game. It’s even possible Tulsa or Ball State would be locked out of the premier bowls, regardless if they finished their seasons with a bang.
Is that fair? On the one hand, these teams have conquered every challenge placed in front of them so far. Boise State and Utah in the past have proven that the mid-majors can hang with the big boys in bowl games.
On the other hand, each of these teams plays a patsy schedule compared to any team from a major conference. For a team from the Southeastern Conference or Big 12 to escape any season with just one loss and maybe some narrow victories is probably more of an accomplishment than someone wiping out a mid-major conference.
To put it another way, suppose I challenged my 10-year-old brother in a round of golf and beat him badly. Meanwhile, suppose my dad challenged Phil Mickelson to a round of golf and lost. My dad is still probably the better golfer. That he lost and I won is clearly irrelevant. Likewise, questions about football superiority aren’t simple questions to answer, even by looking at the loss and win columns.
And debates like this really do matter. Hypothetical who’s-better-than-whom arguments are a little bit different and more significant in college football than they are in the NFL or in college basketball since the outcome of your season in the NCAA football ranks is determined by polls.
On most levels of most sports, such polls and power rankings are just a fun distraction for small talk until the postseason rolls around. In college football, they define the postseason and thus the legacy of a team. How good people think a team is ends up being just as important as how good the team actually is.
In case you’re not familiar with how it works, a bunch of these polls and computer-generated rankings are rolled into one mega-ranking to determine who has a shot at the national championship and who gets considered for the big-money and big-coverage bowl games. This “mega-ranking” is known as the BCS ranking.
Taking a look at the current BCS rankings, it seems that any team from a major conference that finishes without a loss will get top billing for the title game and, should at least three of those four teams fall, then the one-loss teams — Oklahoma, USC and Georgia — are next in line to take a spot. Well below them are the other undefeated teams. A two-loss team like Ohio State or Missouri might even have a shot at sneaking in ahead of a undefeated team from a smaller conference.
Did I mention how silly all of this is, how I wish discussions like this didn’t have to occur? It would be so completely logical and elegant to set up a playoff bracket with the conference champions against each other.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the Dallas Cowboys. But if there’s two things I hate, it’s the Cowboys and college football’s postseason system. Any discussion about which NCAA football teams are the best and deserve a championship ultimately reach one conclusion: We don’t know and we can’t know until there’s a legitimate playoff.
Like I said at the beginning of the column, all of this guessing and projecting is just a game that you play. So much is unpredictable and so much changes that even guesses made in late December might be proven wrong by early January.
In the meantime, though, keep pulling for the Ball States and the Utahs out there. The harder these undefeated teams crash the BCS, the faster they’ll get the playoff system they deserve.
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