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By PETE THAMEL
Published: October 19, 2009
As the Bowl Championship Series era of college football has evolved, it has become a near-certainty that the formula the sport uses to determine its top two teams will result in controversy. And with the release Sunday night of this season’s first set of standings, the guessing has begun over which fan base will fall apart over the complicated mix of polls and computers the B.C.S. uses to decide its national title game pairing.
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Tricia Coyne/The Gainesville SunFlorida’s close victory over Arkansas, helped by two missed field goals, cost the Gators the top spot in the A.P. poll, but not in the B.C.S. standings.
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David Crenshaw/Associated PressReceiver Austin Pettis (2) and Boise State are fourth in the Bowl Championship Series standings, but their schedule makes a national title unlikely.
There are two ways this season can go for the B.C.S., the easy outcome and the meltdown outcome. If history is any indicator, the B.C.S. and college football, with its fickle nature, rarely take the path of least resistance.
In a perfect world, the conference commissioners would get an outcome that matches Texas and the Southeastern Conference champion. Florida and Alabama, the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the first B.C.S. offering, seem destined to play each other in the SEC title game. If the SEC winner went into the national title game unbeaten and played an undefeated Texas team, there would be relatively little complaining around college football.
“If we win out, we’ll be in the right place,” Texas Coach Mack Brown said. “That’s what we’ve got to do. We found last year that we thought we shouldn’t have dropped when we did. We’re going to try really hard not to let the system put us where they want to this year. We’re not as excited about the system as some.”
But if a Texas-SEC champion pairing does not play out, which history has taught it probably will not, then the chaos that has become inherent to the B.C.S. will ensue.
“It could get messy,” said Jerry Palm, an independent B.C.S. analyst and the publisher of collegebcs.com.
Palm said that there were no significant surprises in the first release of the B.C.S. standings. He said that the two teams with the best shot outside of this year’s Big Three — No. 1 Florida, No. 2 Alabama and No. 3 Texas — are No. 6 Iowa as long as it stays undefeated and one-loss Southern California, which is No. 7. Palm said that because of No. 4 Boise State’s weak schedule, it would take an “Armageddon” situation to move it into the top two. (We have seen that before, as two-loss Louisiana State won the national title at the end of the 2007 season against one-loss Ohio State.)
Palm was also pessimistic about No. 5 Cincinnati’s chances if the Bearcats remain undefeated because of the perception that the Big East is a weaker conference. The Bearcats would probably bump ahead of an undefeated Boise State team because of their tougher schedule, which includes a victory at Oregon State. (Boise’s best win came at home against Oregon.) Palm said that an undefeated Bearcats team going up against a one-loss brand-name team like U.S.C. would be unique.
“That would be an interesting test case,” Palm said. “We have not had an undefeated major conference champion finish behind a team with a loss. It’s never happened. There haven’t been a lot of chances for it to happen.”
Palm said that the teams he felt had the best chances to creep into the top two spots were Iowa and U.S.C. He said that he felt Iowa (7-0), which won at Penn State and at Wisconsin, has been slighted by voters. But the Hawkeyes also played close games against Northern Iowa and Arkansas State and did not start the season in the top 20.
Palm also predicted that if Boise and No. 8 Texas Christian finished the season undefeated, he would expect T.C.U. to finish ahead of Boise because T.C.U. plays in a more difficult conference.
The trick for Iowa will be standing out in a Big Ten that this season has been up and down. With Ohio State losing at Purdue on Saturday, it was another blow to the hierarchy of the conference. Because No. 13 Penn State played a softer nonconference schedule, the Nittany Lions are no longer in the national title discussion after losing to Iowa at home.
Much of this will come down to voting, as humans make up two-thirds of the formula. And the problem with humans, Palm said, is that they do not have a strong track record. This year already, the coaches’ poll has raised questions most weeks, with teams being ranked well ahead of teams that blew them out the previous week.
“There’s a long and well documented history of not much thought being put into voting,” Palm said.
With Florida and Alabama looking like the best two teams in the country, Palm said not to put much credence in the thought that the teams could play a rematch in the national title game after playing for the SEC title.
He deemed it a “pretty unrealistic scenario,” as the voters picked Florida over Michigan after the 2006 season after the No. 2 Wolverines lost an epic duel with No. 1 Ohio State to end the season. “I would say that the voters tend to want conference champions in that game,” Palm said. “They showed us once before when a choice to vote a rematch was there, that they’re inclined not to.”
With seven weeks remaining until the conference title games, most of the possibilities will disappear because of losses or they will be talked about to death. As always with the B.C.S., the only certainties are controversy and complication.
Many of the B.C.S. defenders say one of the positives of the system is how much conversation it generates. And there is little doubt that if the top teams begin to lose their space in the national title game conversation, there will be plenty to talk about for the next seven weeks.
Thayer Evans contributed reporting.