Before the official 2010 BCS standings for week 9 were announced on ESPN's "BCS Countown" show, most NCAA college football fans likely assumed that the University of Oregon would move to the top of the standings following the loss by then BCS No. 1 ranked Oklahoma to Missouri on October 23. Instead fans everywhere were left scratching their heads in plain befuddlement. Auburn University ranked No. 4 in last week's BCS standings, vaulted to the top of the BCS.
BCS Computer Rankings Suspect
From the perspective of one Oregon football non-fan, there are two big problems with Auburn being ranked by the BCS ahead of Oregon. On Saturday, prior to the release of the standings, Auburn defeated LSU in a conference match up of unbeaten teams by 7 points. College football pundits everywhere had expected Auburn to win the game. If there was any surprise at all is was the fact that the margin of victory had been so thin.
In comparison, Oregon completely destroyed Pacific-10 rival UCLA 60-13 in breath-taking fashion. Beyond the comparative scores, Oregon was the consensus No. 1 ranked team in the three human NCAA college football polls for the second consecutive week. Auburn on the other hand was the consensus No. 5 ranked team in all three polls entering the weekend. In the new human polls released ahead of the BCS for week 9, Auburn had moved up to No. 3 primarily due to the Oklahoma loss.
What fans want to know is why a 7-point win by a higher ranked and favored team regarded as No. 3 by those who vote in the Associated Press poll, USA Today Coaches poll and Harris Interactive poll rated a ranking above another undefeated team ranked No. 1 by those same human pollsters two weeks running? ESPN sportscasters explained that Auburn had fared much better in the BCS computer rankings, the same explanation for why Oklahoma took the No. 1 spot in the BCS over Oregon the previous week.
That explanation leads fans to question how a 7-point win by a favored team generates enough difference to the computers to move Auburn ahead of Oregon? Conspiracy theorists among us might begin to suspect that the BCS computers seem to have a definite preference for SEC teams over PAC-10 teams.
Plot Thickens with More Strange BCS Rankings
Oregon fans were likely flabbergasted to learn that for the second week running, a No. 3 team in the traditional college polls vaulted over the Ducks into the top spot in the BCS. They should be forgiven if they are starting to feel a little like Boise State fans, left to wonder what the Ducks have to do to claim the top spot in the BCS version of the best in NCAA college football. But that wasn't all that was strange and perplexing about the week 9 BCS standings.
Undefeated Boise State, left in the No. 3 spot in the BCS rankings for the second straight week is obviously banging against a glass BCS ceiling with no chance to move any higher in the BCS computer rankings unless by some quirk of fate, all the big name schools in the SEC, PAC-10, Big-10 and Big-12 suddenly decide to disband their teams and drop football. Until those more highly regarded conferences run out of ammunition and are unable to continue to marshal unbeaten replacements to take the place of conference teams that lose, the BCS seems bent on jumping lower ranked teams from those conferences over the Broncos.
Certainly all season long Boise State detractors have been loudly criticizing the caliber of Boise State competition. The weakness of schedule issue has clung to the Broncos like a cheap suit all season long. Yet Boise State is finally beginning to get some well-deserved respect from those who cover college football and some overdue acknowledgment as a quality team. The new respect has even been evident this season in the human polls where Boise State is the consensus No. 2 ranked team. Yet those BCS computers, devoid of human emotion and incapable of even watching a football game, rate the Broncos no better than No. 3.
With the BCS scheme a team may as well be No. 25 as No. 3 in many ways since only the first and second ranked teams have a chance to play for college football's national championship. All other teams are consigned to inferior bowl purgatory with not a shred of hope of finishing any better than No. 2 at season's end. It already seems written in stone that Boise will get a repeat engagement with TCU in a second straight consolation bowl.
The Top Ten in Week 9 According to BCS Standings 2010
For those who may have not yet seen the standings, the top ten NCAA college football teams according o the BCS standings announced on the ESPN "BCS Countdown" program that aired October 24 are:
- Auburn
- Oregon
- Boise State
- TCU
- Michigan State
- Missouri
- Alabama
- Utah
- Oklahoma
- Wisconsin
More College Football Rankings Chicanery
The University of Missouri, the team that knocked off then BCS No.1 ranked Oklahoma on Saturday preceding the polls was also a big beneficiary of the BCS computer standings this week. Ranked No. 11 in the BCS poll for week 8, the Tigers surged to No. 6 in week 9, passing along the way Ohio State, Utah and Alabama.
Taking nothing away from a great performance by Missouri, all three teams the Tigers passed in the standings also won convincingly on Saturday. That fact coupled with the fact that Missouri was raked no higher in any of the three human polls than No. 16 before beating Oklahoma also leaves fans scratching their heads about the meteoric of the Tigers seemingly that has resulted from a single game.
Again, taking nothing away from them as Missouri played an outstanding game against Oklahoma beating the Sooners in every phase of the game, it was not lost on those who watched the game that Oklahoma played extremely poorly. A young team, the Sooners showed that youthful inexperience time and time again on Saturday. The defense was porous allowing the Tigers to move the ball and score almost at will. The offense was mistake-prone and ineffective, failing to score numerous times when in the red zone. The Sooners committed excessive penalties and the kicking game cost them big with inability to cover kickoffs and missed field goal opportunities. They committed more turnovers in the Missouri game than in all of the team's first six games combined.
While beating Oklahoma might have been a satisfying win for Missouri, the Tigers beat an inferior team that they should have beaten. More than likely that will become even more vividly apparent in Missouri's next game when they play Nebraska. Chances are playing a quality team will reveal the Tigers, a good team are not nearly as good as they looked against Oklahoma and by the same token, will reveal just how bad the Sooners are capable of playing. Oklahoma certainly demonstrated how wrong the BCS system was to rank them No. 1 and a week from now it will likely be just as apparent that Missouri is no more deserving of a No. 6 ranking.
From ESPN Mock BCS Standings to Just Plain Mockery
On October 10, ESPN broadcast the first "BCS Countdown" show a week before the first official BCS standings 2010 were announced, featuring the ESPN mock BCS standings. For those who may be unaware, the BCS standings are only compiled and published the last eight consecutive weeks of the season, as explained in the "BCS Media Guide" available at the official BCS Football web site. To stimulate interest ahead of the release of the first official standings, ESPN's BCS expert Brad Edwards compiled speculative standings of what he believed the BCS standings would have been if released that week.
From ESPN mock BCS standings to kick-off the network's special BCS feature, the whole BCS system is rapidly becoming a complete mockery. How are fans expected to take the BCS standings seriously when there is such dramatic disparity between BCS computer rankings and the traditional human polls that are supposedly the biggest component of the BCS system? Each week that the BCS jumps a team several spots over another team when there is no rational basis for doing so, the system steadily loses what little confidence and credibility it might have had with NCAA college football fans.
The calls for a college football play-off grow louder each season due to general dissatisfaction with the BCS system. Part of that stems from teams like Boise State and TCU being denied the chance to play for a championship even when the indications are there that one or both teams are better than teams selected ahead of them for the BCS Championship game.
America has always stood for fair play and Americans become impatient with entities who don't provide a level playing field for all. The conferences who came together to form the BCS stacked the deck in favor of the elite conferences and as long as the BCS system exists teams like Boise and TCU from non-elite conferences will never get a fair shot at the big game.
For two consecutive chaotic weeks, the BCS standings continued to surprise and continued to disappoint. One can't help but think that if those in the position to make such decisions, insist on denying college football fans a real play-off system, they could at least dismantle the unpopular and ineffective BCS system and just return to the traditional human polls system that preceded it. At least those polls make sense.
Larry Darter - Larry Darter is a freelance writer and published author with three books to his credit. He is a graduate of the Univ. of Central ...
