IRVING, Texas — All you folks who hate the Bowl Championship Series and favor a playoff, meet your new hero: Texas Tech coach Mike Leach. He doesn’t want a Plus-One. He doesn’t want an eight-team playoff.
How about 64 teams?
“The thing that always interested me on this is: ‘Oh, my God! This has never been done! How can you suggest this? This has never happened in college football,’ ” Leach said Wednesday on the last day of the Big 12 media days. “Everybody else does it this way. There’s nothing unique in what I’m saying. I’m the mainstream. This other system is not the mainstream.”
Leach’s idea is to cut the schedule to 10 games and run the playoffs through December, like Division I-AA, D-II and D-III and use the bowls in the process.
“Texas high school champion: 16 games,” Leach said. “Division II: 16 games. Division III — and some of them fudge on a game — 15 or 16 games. And everybody thinks I went into a cave and carved all this out.”
Brown against tiebreaker.
It’s no surprise Texas coach Mack Brown wasn’t happy that the Big 12 stuck to its tiebreaker format for three-way ties.
Oklahoma tied for the South Division’s best record with Texas and Texas Tech but won last year’s title because of a higher ranking in the BCS standings.
“I was obviously against the decision,” said Brown whose Longhorns beat Oklahoma, 45-35, but lost at Texas Tech, “not because it happened to us last year but because I thought it was best. It may work for us this year.”
McCoy makes hay.
Quarterback Colt McCoy, Texas’ Heisman Trophy runner-up, didn’t just take the normal route in preparing for his senior season by spending it on the football field. He spent it in a hayfield.
His grandfather had him baling hay on his farm in Brownwood, in the middle of the state.
“I’ve been doing that every summer since fifth grade,” McCoy said. “That was my getaway for the weekend. We hauled about 350 bales from about 4 o’clock to midnight. It is the worst labor a man can do, I promise you. It’s worse than building fences, and I did that earlier in the summer.”
John Henderson, The Denver Post
CU’s Smith going west.
Receiver and kick returner Josh Smith, who left Colorado in the spring, in part because he wanted to pursue a music degree that CU does not offer, will enroll at UCLA in September and redshirt. Under NCAA transfer rules, Smith will sit out the 2009 season and be eligible for the 2010 season. He will have two years of eligibility remaining when he returns to the field.
Denver Post wire services
