If you think the Bowl Championship Series system has all the credibility of a banana republic election, you’ll hate it more after you read what could happen Sunday. Say Oklahoma, third in the BCS rankings, beats a good 12th-ranked Oklahoma State team on the road Saturday night. No. 7 Texas Tech also beats Baylor.
The Big 12 South will finish in a three-way tie with No. 2 Texas having beaten Oklahoma, Oklahoma beating Texas Tech and Texas Tech beating Texas. The winner, the one advancing to the Big 12 championship game and likely one step from the BCS title game, will be determined by the highest BCS ranking. One third of the BCS formula is the USA Today coaches poll made up of 61 coaches.
Two of the six Big 12 coaches with votes are Texas’ Mack Brown and Texas Tech’s Mike Leach. Can you imagine Brown and Leach possibly looking at Sunday’s vote the least bit objectively? With a possible national shot riding on their vote, can you blame them for looking out for Numero Uno?
The fate of coach Bob Stoops’ Sooners could be at the mercy of his two biggest competitors this year. That’s why I asked him during Monday’s Big 12 conference call how much faith he has in his colleagues across the country. Just read between the lines, folks.
“I hope everyone does their job,” he said. “I know it’s hard to do. It’s always interesting because it’s our lives. It’s what we do. It’s hard not to have those biases, your own agendas. You just have to deal with it.”
Stoops had a chance to vote this year and declined. He wouldn’t say why, but when he said, “I don’t want that to be the story,” the answer was pretty obvious. At some point in his career, he got the shaft. When he was asked if he regretted turning it down, he said, “Probably.”
If form holds, this will be an interesting vote, and it screams for cold, hard logic, not dollar signs and agendas. I don’t buy the argument that Texas Tech eliminated itself with the 65-21 loss at Oklahoma on Saturday. What, the Red Raiders’ 39-33 win over then-No. 1 Texas four weeks ago no longer counts?
In this week’s coaches poll, Oklahoma is second and Texas is fourth. Don’t for a minute think that an Oklahoma win Saturday would inspire Brown to credit those beloved Sooners and move them up a notch in his poll.
In the BCS rankings, Oklahoma trails Texas by a mere .0084. That may amount to one or two votes in the coaches or Harris poll, which, along with the computers make up the three elements of the BCS. If Oklahoma beats Oklahoma State on Saturday — and I don’t care if it’s by one point or 100 — and it remains a three-way tie, I would hope Oklahoma leapfrogs Texas into the coveted second spot in the BCS rankings.
“The most logical thing is who’s doing what down the stretch,” Stoops said. “That’s what we’re doing right now.”
Don’t blame Stoops for getting on the soapbox. This is the inane system we have. You’ll see more campaigning from coaches this weekend than you saw from politicians during the entire fall. Hey, it works. In 2004, when the BCS formula included The Associated Press writers’ poll, Brown called reporters and told them why they needed to vote Texas higher.
Sure enough, an idle Texas moved ahead of California, despite the Golden Bears’ win at Southern Mississippi to end the season. The Longhorns went to the Rose Bowl while deflated Cal sleepwalked through an awful Holiday Bowl loss to Texas Tech.
I never blamed Brown. He was doing his job. It’s a job he finds as distasteful as you and I do.
“There are voters that we don’t know and computers that weren’t at the game, and we’re asking coaches to run up the score to get more style points,” Brown said. “In 2004, I was criticized for saying our team was good enough for a BCS game, and, my gosh, suddenly I was a politician and a whiner.
“What the system is doing is making coaches say why their teams should be voted, and that’s unfair to the coaches.”
Since we have a better chance of expanding the scholarship limitation than we do getting a playoff system, here’s one tweak of the current system: Punt the coaches poll. The Texas-Oklahoma rivalry is vicious enough. Why should Brown alienate Stoops by voting from his heart rather than his head?
Perfect bowl pitch: Unbeaten Boise St. vs. unbeaten Ball St.
Not even the BCS championship game can claim what the Western Athletic Conference and Mid-American Conference could have: two unbeaten teams playing each other in a bowl game.
The conferences want to pit ninth-ranked Boise State of the WAC with No. 15 Ball State of the MAC if they stay undefeated. Boise State (11-0) hosts Fresno State (7-4) tonight, and Ball State (12-0) plays Buffalo (7-4) in the MAC title game Dec. 5 in Detroit.
The Fresno Bee reported that the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise would like to end its contract with the Atlantic Coast Conference a year early and invite Ball State instead. However, MAC commissioner Rick Chryst said Boise’s home-field advantage would be a deterrent.
Other possibilities are the Motor City Bowl in Detroit or the Independence Bowl if Colorado loses to Nebraska today and Auburn loses to Alabama on Saturday. Karl Benson, commissioner of the Englewood-based WAC, doesn’t think the Boise site should be a drawback.
“There’s always going to be a home-field advantage, whether it’s Boise or Detroit,” Benson said Wednesday. “There’s been a home-field advantage in a lot of bowl games, whether LSU is playing in New Orleans or UCLA or USC is in the Rose Bowl.”
John Henderson, The Denver Post
National game of the week
Oklahoma at Oklahoma State
The Bedlam Series hasn’t been this big since 1984, when Oklahoma State was 9-1 and Oklahoma was 9-1-1. The Cowboys match up well, with Kendall Hunter leading the nation in rushing, but he’s coming off a quadriceps injury. OK State needs him to keep Sam Bradford from adding to his Heisman resume and convincing voters to send the Sooners to Big 12 title game.
