Bowl Championship Series Big Craziness Shake-up

Another week, another Bowl Championship Series shake-up. Texas Tech’s huge upset victory over previous #1 Texas vaulted them into second and third in the AP and Coaches’ polls, respectively, and, more importantly, into second in the BCS rankings–in the process leap-frogging several other teams, including fellow unbeaten Penn State. Congratulations to Tech; the football program’s new found prominence is well-deserved.  Playing in the difficult Big Twelve, if Tech wins out, they will have proven themselves more than worthy of a championship game berth.

But when it comes to selection time, will all of the BCS Bowl teams be so deserving?  After all, there is good reason for Penn State to have been passed over in the most recent polls.  No disrespect to the Nittany Lions, but the Big Ten is not a strong conference this year.  USC faces the same dilemna inside the Pac-10 (although recent history as a dominant program on a national scale compensates somewhat for conference weakness in USC’s case).  The Big East is even worse, and the Atlantic Coast Conference is a complete joke this year.

That leaves the Big Twelve and the Southeastern Conference as the only BCS conferences (and, hence, the only supposed “power” conferences) that have really earned their stripes this year instead of resting on their past laurels.  Truth be told, the Mountain West may very well be the third best conference this season based on the strength of currently undefeated Utah and one-loss TCU and BYU (and TCU’s solitary defeat came to then fourth-ranked Oklahoma, hardly something of which to be ashamed).  

Perhaps this will be the season that the Bowl Championship Series finally is embarassed enough to prompt real change.  There are currently six teams in the Bowl Subdivision with undefeated records; only three of those (Alabama, Texas Tech and Penn State) are from BCS conferences.  If these teams can hold on, so much for the regular season being a week-by-week playoff, as the BCS bigwigs like to claim.

Furthermore, in the all important Top 12 of the BCS rankings, three schools (the Mountain West’s Utah and TCU and the WAC’s Boise State) are currently from non-BCS conferences.  Due to the built-in inequities of the BCS system, at least one of those teams and most likely two, will be shut-out of the big dance.  And as Boise State taught us in the Fiesta Bowl a couple years ago, these non-BCS conference schools can be very deserving of one of those big bowl bids.

Potential for egg on the face of the BCS?

Unfortunately, the BCS will still in place even if the final rankings this year are a complete debacle.  I dream of a playoff, but at this point I would settle for a system equivalent to that of English soccer in which successful lower-level teams are promoted to the Premier League and less deserving teams demoted.  The Mountain West has more than proven themselves worthy of such a promotion this year.  As for demotion… well, there are several options.

• December 19, 2008 -- Nate’s Most Intriguing Bowl Matchups (2)
• December 9, 2008 -- Football Coaches Have A Sense of Humor (0)
• January 9, 2009 -- 2008-2009 College Football Wrap-Up (0)
• November 22, 2008 -- Bowl Picture Becoming Clearer (0)
• January 6, 2009 -- Running Up the Score (6)