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Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Never will be a perfect bowl system
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Yep, it’s somewhat unseemly when a football team that lost two games to teams in its own conference is saluted as champion of the nation. When the one team with only one defeat (mainland) sails through the Orange Bowl with gusto, unceremoniously disregarded by those in the BCS power seat, probably because its coach is seriously overweight. (Just kidding. The rest of this is quite serious, though.) Is this all it takes to arouse the dander of a college president near to us, Michael Adams of the University of Georgia?
Is this new? Has this not been going on for years? Has there ever been any foolproof system of determining a national college football champion? And the answer is no, and there never will be.
You begin with the first flaw in the Adams Plan: “A committee would select and seed the top eight teams.”
You can stop right there. How is the committee selected, and by whom?
Next, when you speak of “seeding,” once again you get into the area of individual judgment. There is no equalizing the Western Athletic Conference and, say, the Big Ten or the SEC. Take the start of the season, when Appalachian State threw the system into turmoil, beating Michigan in Ann Arbor. Then later lost to two teams in its conference, Wofford and Georgia Southern. After which Michigan beat Florida in a bowl game.
The idea of creating the perfect bowl system is a pipe dream. What these people can’t come to understand is that football is not a tournament sport. No more than the Triple Crown of thoroughbred racing could be turned into a three-day tournament.
There wasn’t an “official” national champion until 1936, when Minnesota won the first Associated Press poll. Various and sundry individuals had created “systems” earlier, dating back to the Helms Foundation in 1883, but nothing drew such general acceptance as the AP poll.
Now, as for the BCS, Adams says, “I’m just convinced that it’s not working and that it’s not going to work.”
Of course not. His forward stance is suspect since his own Georgia team, which also lost to two teams in the SEC, was not among the chosen, a point which he judiciously speaks to. So, why not? Should not the president of a university speak out for the school he represents? No doubt he would not have been so agitated had Georgia not been passed over, nor would he have attracted such attention had he been speaking as president of Auburn or Vanderbilt, just to pick a couple of names. He drew a lot more attention than had he been speaking from the United Nations.
Speaking from one man’s podium, just how much longer can the college football season be spread out? It opens the last week of August and now runs into the second week of January, by which time I’m past caring who is the BCS champion. (After all, Georgia did beat the only unbeaten team in the mix. Declare yourself the champ, Michael.) Worn down to the tread from an overdose of so-called “bowl” games, truly nothing more than postseason stuff. After Michigan beat Florida, giving Lloyd Carr a gracious exit, my enthusiasm waned. Which is neither here nor there.
One of Adams’ observations I do subscribe to: ESPN has too much power over the bowl system. The sports network tells the BCS when to roll over and when to bark. But then, ESPN pays its dues and feeds the colleges’ kitty.
I veer from my original track here, that there is no perfect playoff system, and that to stretch the season into the icy shadows of January is no cure for anything, other than another big dollop for the budget. I can’t see any committee of college presidents buying into that, if their basic obligation is to education. And shouldn’t it be?
Permalink | Comments (76) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
2008 really could be Georgia’s year
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New Orleans — Les Miles pretty much figured this would be LSU’s championship season, but we shouldn’t put great stock in that. “I’ve kind of been wrong,” he said Tuesday morning. “I thought the first two years [at LSU] would be as well, and it ended up I was wrong.”
Miles’ Tigers won the BCS title here Monday night. There’s a good chance Georgia, which finished No. 2 in the final Associated Press poll, will play for the national championship in Miami on Jan. 8, 2009. But as we move from the crazy season just completed to the one that commences in August, we need ask: How do you actually know when it’s your year?
Much of it, duh, has to do with players. LSU had 15 holdover starters but lost four NFL first-round draftees from the team that finished No. 3 in the rankings. Georgia is scheduled to have 17 starters back, which augurs nicely. But LSU had something Georgia won’t have.
Back when Florida State was a factor, Bobby Bowden used to say, “You can have a national-championship team but not a national-championship schedule.” (He pronounces it “SKED-jule.”) The Tigers had the requisite series of high-profile games, and four of what appeared to be their six toughest games were staged in Baton Rouge.
The Bulldogs, by way of contrast, must face South Carolina, Arizona State, LSU and Auburn on the road and Florida in Jacksonville. (They also have to go to Kentucky, which won’t be as formidable next season.) Only two or three of Georgia’s eight toughest games — Alabama, Tennessee and, depending on how well and how quickly Paul Johnson works, Georgia Tech — will be played in Sanford Stadium. That’s a really rutty road.
Georgia, however, might well be strong enough to negotiate it. It’s probably too much to ask that a team with such a schedule go undefeated, but LSU just proved that even two losses — provided they’re honorable and provided everybody else keeps losing, too — is no barrier to a national title. And the Bulldogs will have the same thing working for them that worked for the Tigers, and that’s the ever-expanding aura of the SEC.
This was Miles late Monday night, his team having thumped Ohio State: “The SEC isn’t a league where you’re just going to have dominant games week after week after week. You’re going to have to play competitively, play from behind and take risks. I think that puts the SEC champion in a game like this with some comfort. Down 10, there’s no panic in this team. Are you kidding me? We’ve been down 10 before. We understand how to play.”
As frustrating as LSU could be to watch — all those penalties! — there was an undeniable toughness about these Tigers, about Matt Flynn and Early Doucet and Ali Highsmith and Jacob Hester. And that, Miles concluded, was how he knew LSU’s time was at hand. “This team in this instance,” he said, “saw it as their year.”
Will Georgia develop that same tenacity? Will Knowshon Moreno and Matthew Stafford and Rennie Curran see a national championship as their manifest destiny and refuse to accept anything less? Will they play with the same verve as they did that transforming day in Jacksonville? Will they see all those road games not as banana peels but as launch platforms?
We can’t know that now, no more than Miles could know anything for sure five months ago. All that’s knowable today is that Georgia figures to enter the 2008 season no worse off than LSU entered 2007 — the Tigers were No. 2 in preseason behind Southern Cal — and that we’re assured of seeing the game next season we were denied this time.
Georgia and LSU will meet in Baton Rouge on Oct. 25 and perhaps again in the Georgia Dome on Dec. 6. The Bulldogs might or might not have been as strong as LSU this season. Next fall they’ll have ample chance to prove their point.
Permalink | Comments (256) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: I don’t know if there’s any chance of him pulling this off. But before Arthur Blank hires a new general manager or coach, he needs to take a shot at bringing one legend back into the Falcons’ organization: Joe Gibbs.
9: Gibbs, who retired as Redskins coach Tuesday, sat on the Falcons’ Board of Directors before leaving in 2004 to return to the sideline with Washington. The fact he never returned the Skins to glory - though they did make the playoffs this season - doesn’t diminish the man’s depth of football knowledge. Should Gibbs coach the Falcons? No. Should he be the GM? No. But if there’s any possibility of Blank getting him involved in the hiring process, it would be his best move of the off-season.
8: What was the final score of the BCS title game? I went to sleep at 11:15, or roughly a half-hour after Ohio State.
7: Just guessing out loud here: If ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit doesn’t leak that Les Miles is going to take the Michigan job - which clearly blew up the process and Miles’ obvious intentions - the Tigers might not be national champions today. There’s a good chance the distraction of Miles’ impending departure would be too great for the team to function. And if he had left, the team would’ve been coached by an interim replacement.
6: According to a sports gambling website (bodoglife.com), “Other” is even money to be the Falcons’ starting quarterback next season, followed by Joey Harrington (3-2), Chris Redman (2-1) and Byron Leftwich (5-2). Who is this Other guy, and did he have a better bowl game than Colt Brennan?
5: Dr. Phil met the other day with Britney Spears. He later said he will not do a TV special on her mental breakdown, but plans are in the works for an examination on the Falcons’ coaching search.
4: It’s impossible not to like Brad McCrimmon, whom the Thrashers say was “promoted” from assistant coach to associate coach. But for what it’s worth, I punched “assistant” into my Word thesaurus and it came up with three meanings: helper, subordinate, associate.
3: While “associate” coach conveys some pecking order in NHL-speak, the title change means next to nothing, unless general manager/coach Don Waddell suddenly leaves the bench and allows McCrimmon to run things. Is McCrimmon next in line as coach? Probably. But that would’ve been the case, anyway. And if Waddell loses his job after this season, the next general manager will determine the next coach.
2: Concerns about the Rose Bowl not wanting to be a part of Michael Adams’ proposed college playoff system - or any playoff system - will go away if the Big Ten and Pacific 10 say goodbye to the Rose Bowl.
1: Sorry. I still don’t believe Roger Clemens.
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New playoffs push comes at right time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Possibly college football’s best regular season ever ended six weeks ago. Possibly college football’s worst bowl season ever ended Monday.
This is what the BCS has become. Imagine dining on steak and lobster, only to finish off with a HoHo.
Enough already. It’s time. It’s not time because fans are screaming. It’s not time because networks need another 41/2-hour game that stretches into the next morning. It’s time for a playoff because the landscape has changed. The parity, the upsets, the weekly makeovers atop the rankings that we witnessed this season might just become college football’s new norm. Polls, computer rankings and darts just won’t get it done anymore.
This week, University of Georgia President Michael Adams will discuss an eight-team, seven-game playoff at the NCAA meetings in Nashville. Some might consider an eight-team playoff too big of a leap, considering college presidents are having a hard enough time convincing people that academics, not television dollars, remains their top priority. A “plus one” scenario following bowl games — set under the old bowl system — would be a safer transition from the BCS. Even a four-team playoff might not stretch things too much. But at this point, even a series of coin flips would be an improvement (and more competitive).
Adams has long been an opponent of a playoff system. In an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he admitted it has taken him “11 years of watching it up close” to pull a 180. His body couldn’t fight off the BCS virus any longer.
“There have been growing doubts by a lot of us [college presidents],” Adams said. “I think you have to keep this in perspective. I don’t think the fate of the Western world is resting on this decision by any means. But what has gotten me there more than anything is the fairness quotient. I feel some responsibility to at least leave thinking we’ve given [players] a fair chance of achieving their goals.”
He understands this may be viewed as another money-grab. He understands some will see it as “sour grapes” because Georgia was snubbed for the title game. That would be shortsighted. Forget the Ohio State-LSU game. This year’s BCS bowls were nonsensical at the start and unwatchable at the end.
A non-BCS bowl (Florida-Michigan) was more entertaining than anything else on New Year’s Day, save Hawaii’s pre-game war dance. Adams didn’t need any of his three degrees to conclude, “They ended up with some really screwy games.”
The whole concept of the BCS was flawed from the outset. Even when achieving its objective of a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup, which has been rare, other bowls are rendered meaningless. In the old bowl system, six to eight teams in four major bowls could rationalize having a shot at the “mythical” national championship. The games were better and actually meant something.
The lone downside was that the “champion” was determined by polls. But it worked. The emphasis on the regular season and the arguments over the polls were what made college football great. But that was fine when the debate was just over a few schools like USC, Oklahoma and Notre Dame. Now the debate is over a dozen. Of the top 12 teams in the pre-bowl AP rankings, 11 had one or two losses.
Guessing is futile.
Roy Kramer, the former SEC commissioner, has tried to convince everybody the BCS is the answer. Adams’ response is appropriate: “I have great respect for Roy Kramer. … But I just think he’s dead wrong on this one.”
In the old bowl system, we could’ve sat in front of our televisions on New Year’s Day and watched USC vs. Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, LSU vs. West Virginia in the Sugar, Oklahoma vs. Georgia in the Fiesta, and Virginia Tech vs. Missouri or Kansas in the Orange. That, with a “plus one,” may be the best compromise for college presidents.
An eight-team playoff would overlap with the spring semester. That makes Adams uncomfortable. He realizes approving 12-game schedules made college presidents look bad enough. But he’s willing to suggest the reversal of that decision.
Another obstacle will be getting the Rose Bowl to sign off on this. But Adams senses this year’s debacle — USC 49, Illinois 17 — has altered the climate, even in Pasadena.
He termed the system “fundamentally flawed.”
The regular season was great. It deserved a better ending.
Enough already. It’s time.
Permalink | Comments (44) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
SEC’s dominance is evident
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New Orleans — After all LSU had been through — trailing Alabama with three minutes to go, trailing Florida with two minutes left, trailing Auburn with two seconds remaining — this was nothing. Having fallen behind Ohio State 10-0 not six minutes into the BCS title game, the swaggering Tigers fairly laughed at the deficit.
That’s LSU’s nature. It laughs when lesser teams would cry. It entered the SEC championship game ranked No. 7 in the BCS standings, and somehow it wriggled free of Tennessee in the Georgia Dome — naturally, the Tigers trailed the Vols with 10 minutes left — and by the time their charter landed in Baton Rouge they’d learned Nos. 1 and 2 had lost. When it’s your year, it’s your year.
And this was LSU’s night, that early hole notwithstanding. The Tigers needed barely a quarter to catch and pass Ohio State, and once behind, the Buckeyes were done. For the ninth time they’d met an SEC opponent in a postseason game, and for the ninth time they’d lost. Big Ten loyalists will insist to their dying breath there’s no difference in conferences, but clearly there is.
The SEC is superior, and LSU was the SEC champion.
Whether Georgia could have beaten the Tigers had they met in Atlanta will remain unknowable, but it’s apparent from the way the Bulldogs played in this building six nights earlier that they’d have handled the Buckeyes.
That’s the distressing part of college football: No matter how loud and vibrant a BCS title game is — and the atmosphere at these rivals even the exalted Final Four — you’re never sure if the right teams are playing. That could well be subject to change, and such a change would be a blessed event. Because there will be a chorus of voices this morning wondering why Ohio State was here at all.
Once again, the Buckeyes jumped ahead. Last year Ted Ginn Jr. returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown; this time Beanie Wells took the game’s fourth snap 65 yards. (Memo to Jim Tressel: Next time, let the other guy score first.) And then Ohio State kicked a field goal, and at that moment you could feel the pressure tightening on the Tigers, roundly favored and playing a mere 80 miles from home.
Only thing was, the Tigers didn’t feel it. They simply started playing — they scored on five of their next six possessions, the exception being when they ran out the clock before halftime — and when they play at peak capacity, they’re a joy to behold. Their offense spreads the field and Matt Flynn makes every tough throw and, even as you’re watching in utter wonder, a tiny voice in your head keeps whispering: “How’d these guys lose two games?”
“We were the first two-loss team to play for the national championship, so I have to give great credit to some divine intervention that allowed us to be in the position,” Les Miles said afterward, but once here LSU made sure luck played no part. The team that ranked next-to-last in the nation in penalties wasn’t flagged once in the first half, while buttoned-down Ohio State came undone, getting a field goal blocked and being called for five personal fouls in the first three quarters. The first two gave LSU’s comeback a rolling start, and the fourth — a roughing-the-kicker call against Austin Spitler on fourth-and-23 when Spitler did everything except block Patrick Fisher’s punt — was essentially the clincher.
Soon it was 31-10, and the LSU fans were chanting, “SEC! SEC!” and Ohio State was exactly where it was a year earlier, a cruiserweight being pummeled by a bigger and stronger and swifter opponent. No, the Buckeyes weren’t as wretched as they’d been in the desert a year ago — they gained 353 yards this time, as opposed to 82 — but it made no real difference.
The SEC is the gold standard of college football. If you win the SEC, you’ll probably win the BCS title. If you’re Georgia, you can hardly wait for your chance 366 days hence.
Permalink | Comments (139) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
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