Let's Go Rockets (and another gripe about the BCS)

[Bill McBlueState]

We'd like to thank the Miami Redhawks for participating in the 2004 edition of the

Mid.

American.

Football.

Conference!!!!

Hmm. I don't think there's really a way to say "Mid-American Football Conference" and make it sound dramatic.

Toledo showed they can run as well as pass, racking up 437 total yards, nearly 200 of them on the ground, as the Rockets beat Miami 35-27 to win the eighth MAC Championship game. And here's the shocker: Toledo QB Bruce Gradkowski threw three of his TD passes with a goddamn broken hand. I can say with little exaggeration that Toledo is probably the second best football team in Ohio, placing behind only those heroes of chili-topped pasta, your Cincinnati Bengals. Please flame me.

I have to include the obligatory gripe about college football's "postseason." For winning what is clearly the best mid-major conference in the country, Toledo goes on to play UConn in the Motor City Bowl. So, about three weeks from today, the Rocket football team trudges back to glorious Detroit, to play a second game in front of some 20,000 fans in a full-sized NFL stadium. If they win, they're 10-3 for the year, probably ranked low in the top 25, and that's the end of the story. No matter how well this team does, they'll never have a shot at a national championship, and season after season ends the same way, with a trip to a bush-league bowl game. There needs to be a sixteen-team playoff, with automatic bids for all conference champions (11 spots) and five wildcards. That way, teams like Toledo and Boise State can keep playing until they lose on the field, and everyone will know exactly how good they are.

Without a real playoff system, it's hard to get that excited about college football.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

1. I agree with a playoff system, however...

This year's Toledo team would most certainly not qualify under any system I'd go for. Utah, and possibly Boise State, would though.

[Bill McBlueState]

2. they did win their conference

Toledo is probably between 25th-30th in the country by any objective ranking, and wouldn't end up in a 16-team tournament by overall ranking. But I think any team that wins its conference should get a shot at the national title. Admittedly, the teams from C-USA, the MAC, the Sun Belt conference, etc., won't make it past the first round four years out of five.

This really points to a bigger problem, the two-tier system in Div. I-A. If half of the teams in I-A will never have a shot at a national title because of the conference they're in, the whole conference system needs fixed.

[davidinalameda]

3. how many bowl spots did the MAC get this year

something like 4?

amazing

[Bill McBlueState]

5. 6?

I heard it could be as many as six, though Akron will likely get left out.

[RoyGBiv]

4. 10 - 3?

I'm sorry, but did you say they'll be 10-3, if they win, in the same sentence with the phrase "national championship"?

I agree partly with your overall point. The ranking system is broken, and it has been for a long, long time. It will likely remain broken to one degree or another for a long, long time. There are too many factors, too many teams, and too much money to have it all boil down to anything that is completely fair to all teams potentially involved.

But, 10-3? Regardless of whether they won their conference, that shouldn't qualify for a spot in any playoff system that could be reasonably derived, not in a year that has major unbeaten teams and quite a few teams with one loss that lost their games to those unbeaten or other 1 loss teams.

Furthermore, one of the problems with the current system is that so many schools, smelling the cash cow, decided they just had to be a part of the NCAA even though the teams they field cannot and likely will never be able to compete on a consistent basis with traditional powerhouse teams. Several former NAIA schools joined the NCAA due to the lure of money and the superficial promise of prestige. Many of those schools regularly competed for national championships in that association. Now they're whining that they never get a shot. Yeah, they win, but they're still playing the same teams they played while a part of the NAIA. When on the rare occasion they play a powerhouse like OU or Miami or whatever, they end up getting trounced. As a result, those powerhouses will never treat the games as anything more than an early-season warm-up, and the pollsters and odds makers will never take them seriously.

Another problem is exemplified with teams like Baylor, which is related to a point another poster made. They wanted to be a part of the Big-12 and lobbied hard for it. Why? Money. They regularly get their butts handed to them by every other team in the conference. They have no business being in it. There are other teams in inferior conferences who would fit much better in the Big-12, that is they'd be competitive. But, there is no room, so those teams are either independent or belong to conferences with a relatively low degree of talent overall, and they get overlooked because of it.

Yeah, something needs to be done to make the system more fair, and a playoff is a part of that. I do not, however, buy the argument that any old conference champion automatically gets a bid, not when such a thing could potentially leave out a Texas or an Auburn or a Florida State that some years win all their games save one, the one game that determines the conference championship. A 10-3 team that wins its conference when that conference is overall low in quality does not deserve to get a shot at a national title when Texas, for example, has only lost one game, that one game being against another national title contender.