College Football Week 5: Conference Debates

Just a couple short weeks ago, I thought the Pac-10 was the 2nd-best conference in college football. I had the hated SEC at #1, but after that I thought it was a close tie for second between an overrated Big 12 and an underrated Pac-10. Big 12 had great teams like Oklahoma and Missouri, but I wasn't convinced by Texas and Texas Tech, whereas the Pac-10 had probably the best overall team, USC, followed by what I thought were underrated teams in Oregon, Arizona State, Cal, and a UCLA team that I thought would find a place in the top 25.

Needless to say, I was completely ass backwards wrong. Turns out that the Big 12 is so awesome that 4 of its teams are in the top 10, and while I'm still not convinced that Texas and Texas Tech deserve to be there, there's no doubt that they're both good teams. And oh, the Pac-10? Yeah, it's USC and the Nine Dwarfs all over again. USC is still #1, but the rest of the conference is so bad that none of them is ranked and only Oregon is even in the ballpark of almost having enough votes to be ranked.

But now the question isn't whether the Pac-10 is the 2nd best conference, it's whether it's even the 5th or 6th best conference. Almost every other major conference has multiple ranked teams; the SEC has 6, the Big 12 has 5, the Big 10 has 4, and the ACC has 2. Here's the thing, though: the Mountain West Conference has 3 ranked teams and is undefeated against the Pac-10 at 5-0, and the Western Athletic Conference has 2 ranked teams, both of which have beaten or will surely beat Pac-10 teams (Fresno State plays UCLA this weekend)! Yeah, the MWC and the WAC have more competitive teams than we do. And the Big East (which sucks even more than the Pac-10 right now) and Conference USA have the same number.

Here's how I'd ranked the conferences right now:

SEC
Big 12
(blank)
Big 10
Mountain West
ACC (holy crap... the ACC is better than the Pac-10)
WAC
Pac-10 (only above the rest because of USC)
Big East
C-USA


I think this calls into question the whole BCS format. Sorry to the MWC, WAC, and C-USA, but only 1, maybe 2 of your 6 ranked teams, a quarter of all currently ranked teams, will make it to a BCS bowl. The rest of you are just gonna have to settle for something crappy like the St Petersburg Bowl or the Hawaii Bowl, where a WAC juggernaut might take on a Pac-10 pansy.

With the kind of parity we have now, or at least with the awesomeness of a couple conferences and the horrible suckiness of some others, separating the conferences into BCS conferences and non-BCS conferences is now a stupid idea, and arranging bowl games by saying a certain bowl game is supposed to be X Conference v Y conference is just as dumb. Make all conferences into BCS conferences and rank the bowl games so that, for example, the Holiday Bowl is no longer an ok Big 12 team vs an ok Pac-10 team but rather the 15th ranked team in the country against the 16th, or whatever.

The crappiness of the Pac-10 also totally sucks for USC. They're probably the best team in football, but if I'm gonna be totally honest, their schedule this year is easier than TCU's by a considerable margin. USC played Ohio State, which, like everyone who watches college football but doesn't vote in the polls has been saying for 2 years, is a just ok team, and then because the Pac-10, Virginia, and Notre Dame are so bad, effectively nobody else. By contrast, TCU has to play #11 Boise State, #17 Utah, a couple other teams that beat Pac-10 teams, and #2 Oklahoma. If TCU runs the table (and I'm sure they won't, but let's just say they do), shouldn't we be talking about putting them in a better bowl than USC gets? Heck, if BYU runs the table against TCU and Utah and a couple teams that beat Pac-10 teams, shouldn't they be placed above USC as well? But the real question, the one that might actually matter, is shouldn't whoever comes out of the SEC and Big 12 automatically get bids to the national championship game? Maybe they're not as good as USC, but I know it'd be hard to tell an Oklahoma team that faces Missouri, Texas, Texas Tech, Kansas, and TCU or Georgia, which faces Florida, LSU, Alabama, Auburn, and Vanderbilt, that USC, which faces Ohio State and nobody else, should get into the national championship game ahead of them.

I can't say I'm sorry to see USC get crapped on, I hate those guys, but I'm also a Pac-10 fan, and I don't want my conference to get crapped on. It's just that given the strengths of schedules and the way bowl games are set up, I don't think they deserve to get into the national championship game, even if they might be the best team in the country.