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Championshit Saturday
Cold, Hard Football Facts for December 4, 2005
It was supposed to be one of the highlights of the Pigskin High Holidays, that overflowing cornucopia of pigskin that begins before Thanksgiving and ends with college football's national title game. Instead, Championship Saturday turned into an unmitigated disaster, a day so dreadful we’ll hereafter refer to the 2005 edition as Championshit Saturday.
The marquee matchups were all blowouts, and the only half-decent games were the ones nobody watched: Louisville beat UConn, 30-20, in a “Big” East “battle” that aired opposite the Virginia Tech-FSU Atlantic Coast Conference championship game. It was a lousy game, but one of the few that qualified as competitive. Down in I-AA, Northern Iowa (yes, that’s Kurt Warner’s old school) upset No. 1 seed New Hampshire, 24-21. It was a game that, if you did see it, prompted the same reaction all over the country: New Hampshire plays football?
In case you had the good sense to do something more entertaining yesterday, like surgically remove one of your gonads without the soothing benefit of Novocain, here were the scores of all the marquee I-A games on Championshit Saturday:
- Texas 70, Colorado 3 – Big XII title game. Longhorns scored all 70 points in the first 40 minutes of the game.
- USC 66, UCLA 19 – Traditional intra-city rivals. UCLA entered the game No. 12 in the country but was no match for No. 1 Trojans. Reggie Bush had 228 rushing yards and 2 TDs – in the first half. The biggest blowout in the series since 1930.
- Georgia 34, LSU 14 – SEC title game. Bullldogs had 27-point lead with six minutes remaining.
- Navy 42, Army 23 – The fourth straight blowout for Navy. Middies rushed for 490 yards.
- FSU 27, Virginia Tech 22 – ACC title game. Seminoles, losers of three straight, held 27-3 lead before late Hokies run.
Essentially, that meant you could have sat in front of your television for 11 straight hours (and we did!) on arguably the biggest day of the college football calendar without witnessing a single competitive game. It was like watching the old NFC Super Bowl victories over the AFC – three times on the same day.
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What’s it all mean? Well, two things.
1) The BCS only works when you don’t need it
We all know the BCS sucks. But has it occurred to anyone else that the BCS – the computer-generated whiz-bang operation that takes into account every major poll and imaginable variable – only works when you don’t need it?
Right now, there are two undefeated teams: Texas and USC are each 12-0, both blew out their opponents in the regular-season finale, games that theoretically should have been among their toughest of the season, and between the two of them have won 53 consecutive games (34 for USC, 19 for Texas). So, what the f*ck do we need the computers for? Even Bonzo the Idiot Monkey, or a Florida State graduate, could tell us that Texas and USC are the two best teams in the country.
However, if we were to throw in a third undefeated team – or have a season with one undefeated team and multiple one-loss teams – the BCS would be about as useful as a cashless eunuch at a whorehouse. We’ve had split national champions each of the past two seasons: LSU and USC in 2003; Auburn and USC in 2004. Clearly, the BCS is no better than the old slapstick bowl system.
Hell, the old bowl system was not perfect. And, sure, in that old system ,USC would being playing Penn State in the Rose Bowl and Texas would be in the Cotton Bowl or Fiesta Bowl against another Top Five team. But at least the old system didn’t pretend to crown a single champion. The BCS pretends, and then only delivers when you don’t need it. The BCS should be taken out behind the woodshed and stomped to death by the family mule.
2) There was no great conference in football this year
Typically, there are one or two conferences that really rise above the pack each year, a conference that delivers at least two national title contenders and in which there’s a key late-season rivalry or conference title game that alters the national title picture. These are the non-playoff playoffs that usually make college football the most exciting game on the planet; for top contenders, every week of the season is a playoff game.
But, for the first time in many, many years, there was not a single conference that distinguished itself.
- Big XII – Texas proved it was a one-team conference. The Longhorns beat the three toughest teams in the conference, Colorado, Texas Tech and Oklahoma, by a combined 209-49 (Texas beat Colorado twice).
- PAC 10 – USC beat the next two best teams in the conference, UCLA and Oregon, by a combined 111-32. Even if the Trojans lost to the Bruins yesterday, they still would have won the conference title.
- ACC – In the first year of a 12-team conference with a title game, the ACC failed to deliver across the board. The championship goes to an 8-4 Florida State team that limped into the conference title game with three straight losses.
- SEC – This has been the best conference in football the past decade or so, and especially the last two seasons, but every team had at least two losses this season and the SEC title game, which normally has a huge bearing on the national title picture, was meaningless outside the Deep South.
- Big Ten – The Big Ten delivered some memorable games, including Penn State’s momentous win over Ohio State before 110,000 electrified fans in October, and Ohio State’s great victory over arch-rival Michigan in November, but the mighty conference was a non-factor in the national title picture.
- Big East – With Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College gone, the conference is officially dead. Let’s put it this way: Louisville and Rutgers finished second and third in the Big East race. Champion West Virginia, a strong and widely under-publicized team at 10-1, got spanked by its one tough non-conference rival, Virginia Tech (34-17). The rest of the conference is a joke. Syracuse, the program with the greatest history, went 1-10 and did not win a single conference game; 2004 champion Pitt, now led by Dave Wannstedt, went 5-6 and even managed to lose to Ohio.
- WAC, MAC, Mountain West, Conference USA, Sun Belt – Please. Enough said.
Let’s hope Texas and USC deliver on January 4 in the “Granddaddy of ‘Em All.”
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Verne Lundquist, who called the SEC championship game between Georgia and LSU, discussed the dog-bone helmet stickers awarded to Georgia players. Friends of the Cold, Hard Football Facts (Hi, Mom!) might remember that we tackled this very same topic last week.
Lundquist told us, accurately, that players receive white bones for onfield performance and black bones for academic performace. But he said that the tradition began with coach Vince Dooley back in the 1960s.
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