2008-2009 College Football Wrap-Up

Another college football season has come and gone, and the Florida Gators are the unanimous national champions. I was hoping against hope that the AP would go out on a limb and name Utah #1. Not surprisingly, that possibility didn’t realize, but the Utes did garner the AP’s #2 spot, in the process grabbing an impressive 16 of 65 first place votes, just under 25%. How Utah is still only ranked #4 in the Coaches’ Poll defeats me.

Who would not like to see Utah square off against Florida? What a great game that would be! Ah, but for a playoff! Allow me to be wistful…

With the season over, I thought I’d revisit some of my college football predictions and analysis and see just how accurate I happened to be.

Looking back at the bowl games, I went 18-16 in picking the winners. Not great by any means, but since a .500 record was good enough to win one of the NFL divisional races this year (and a mere two games over .500 good enough for yet another division crown), I’ll take it. I’m much happier about my record in the games I highlighted in Nate’s Most Intriguing Bowl Matchups: a healthy 3-1 (the one loss came in the BCS Championship game). I picked TCU over Boise State, Oregon State over Pittsburgh, and Utah over Alabama–yes, I called Utah!

Picking the biggest upset of the bowl season isn’t nearly as surprising as it might seem to be when you consider the fact that I’ve been touting the merits of the Mountain West Conference all season. In my very first Deep Into Sports article about college football back (posted November 2), I remarked how the Mountain West may very well be the third best conference overall this year, trailing only the Southeastern Conference and the Big 12. Take a look at both the final AP and Coaches’ Polls: the Mountain West has two teams (Utah and TCU) in the Top 7 of each poll. The only other conferences so represented are the SEC (Florida and Alabama) and the Big 12 (Texas and Oklahoma). The seventh team rounding out that top tier–and the only one not from those three conferences–is USC.

(For those naysayers who want to point out that November 2nd is past mid-season, I fully acknowledge that fact. But Deep Into Sports didn’t even come into existence until October 29th, so I didn’t have a forum to spread the Mountain West gospel until that time.)

This was the first season of a four-year cycle in which the BCS will be re-evaluating which conferences should receive automatic bids. Considering who actually runs the BCS, it’s hard to believe that any of the current six so-called power conferences would relinquish their ability to score the big bowl bucks. Such a recommendation is a distinct possibility if any said re-evaluation were actually to be legit. After all, looking at this season, the Mountain West should be upped to elite status and either the ACC or Big East downgraded. But does anyone really believe that might actually happen? I seriously doubt it, though if we college football fans are to be perpetually saddled with this terrible system, we can only hope this is an honest effort.

• December 19, 2008 -- Nate’s Most Intriguing Bowl Matchups (2)
• December 9, 2008 -- Football Coaches Have A Sense of Humor (0)
• January 6, 2009 -- Running Up the Score (6)
• January 8, 2009 -- Fierce And Nerdy: The BCS Championship Game – Oklahoma Sooners vs. Florida Gators (0)
• December 18, 2008 -- P.K.’s Most Intriguing Bowl Matchups (1)