Or do. Jim Mora’s quote is hilarious when it comes to beer commercials, but EVERYONE is talking about the big business of bowl season and whether or not there should be a playoff. Even the President-elect. I don’t have all the answers and won’t pretend to. There will always be a team left out of whatever system you choose -- whether it’s the idea of playing all the bowl games, then having the top two left standing duke it out one last time, or some sort of four/eight/sixteen team playoff. No matter what you pick, someone will always be left out. I think one thing is certain about a full-blown playoff system; it would take away what makes unique the regular season of college football, perhaps the only sporting event in America where one loss at the wrong time to the wrong team can cost you all the marbles. Tension. No matter where you stand on the issue you’ve got to love the tension of the regular season. It’s what makes the underdogs hope and the big dogs run scared. It’s what made match-ups between USC, Oregon State, Texas, OU, LSU, Georgia, Texas Tech, Okie State, Penn State, Ohio State, Alabama and Florida so compelling. It’s what made South Florida’s run so interesting last year and … I really hate to say this … thank the BCS gods, Iowa’s win over Penn State this year so important. Utah’s perfect 2008 season: incredible.
I played in the first-ever bowl win for my school…ask any ISU fan, or any other college football fan who has followed his or her team to the postseason, and some of the fan’s greatest memories are from a bowl trip. I love bowl season. While we all want to know who number one really is, there will always be some debate no matter what system is in place. I just hope whichever way the future leads the regular season and bowl payoff at the end don’t get caught in the crossfire.
One thing I haven’t heard too much discussion of in all of this is something I’m fascinated by: the bowl tie-ins. No other part or piece of the bowl equation fits in quite as strangely as the tie-in system. Most people agree parity in college football may be at an all-time high (see App. State vs. Michigan circa 2007). With increased parity comes craziness with match-ups as absurd as SEC #7 vs. C-USA’s champion.
I first became interested in how the tie-ins work when ISU was getting ready to play in the aforementioned Insight.com Bowl. What I found, while it made sense to me on some levels, definitely deserves some additional consideration when you start talking about win/loss ratios of conferences.
Which conference has the best match-ups? How about the worst? When a BCS conference gets two schools in the BCS, everyone else steps up the ladder…their opponents just got a whole lot better. When a non-BCS conference gets a school in, same thing in its match-ups. I graded conference tie-ins like grading o-linemen: “+” for a good play (in our case here, an advantageous match-up), “-” for a bad, and “0” for a tie. This won’t be perfect -- a given conference may have more or fewer teams bowl eligible than tie-ins -- and I didn’t adjust for each exact match-up this season as my curiosity sought simply the general match-up advantage/disadvantage in a given bowl season. While the detail is below, here is the cumulative summary:
ACC = 0, advantages for the upper end teams, disadvantages at the bottom of the league
Big East = +1, big advantage over the SEC, ACC and a smaller advantage on the Big 12
Big Ten = 0, slight advantage over the SEC, Big 12; disadvantage to the ACC and MAC
Big 12 = -4, slight advantage over the SEC; slight disadvantage to everyone else, big disadvantage to C-USA
C-USA = +2, big advantage over the SEC, disadvantage vs. the Sunbelt
MAC = +2, big advantage over Big Ten
Mountain West = +1, big advantage over Pac-10 in two games
Pac-10 = -1, advantage over Big 12 and ACC, disadvantages to MWC and WAC
SEC = -6, disadvantages to everyone, simply put, the hardest tie-ins of any league
WAC = +4. advantages over everyone, the easiest of the tie-ins
So how do these numbers relate to the actual conference results?
The Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC each had two BCS teams, moving everyone else up the ladder. The MWC had one, doing the same to that conference.
The Pac-10 capitalized by going a perfect 5-0, winning its match-up with the Big Ten (a yearly event); its match-up advantages over the Big 12 and ACC were accentuated by the fact it didn’t have a second BCS representative. The key win was Arizona over BYU, helping offset some of the whupping the Pac-10 took from the Mountain West in the pre-season.
There is no reason the Big East shouldn’t be 4-2 with its tie-ins and one BCS contender.
The ACC’s 10 (yes, TEN) teams went 4-6, about like their tie-ins would indicate…wins on the top half of the league, losses on the bottom.
The Big Ten continued to get worse in inter-league play, displaying miserable results (the league was 3-4 in 2006, 3-5 in 2007, and 1-6 this season), but even more disappointing than the Big Ten’s play, given their tie-ins, were the performances of the WAC at 1-4 and the MAC at 0-4.
The Big 12 and SEC have something yet to prove in the championship game. Not only do both have to look better than Utah to keep me from going temporarily insane, they have the opportunity to stake their league’s claim as the best conference in the land this year.
I can feel the tension now...
Big Ten
Rose (0) -- #1 team vs. Pac-10 #1
Capital One (0) -- #2 team vs. SEC #2
Outback (+1) -- #3 team vs. SEC #3/4/5
Alamo (+1) -- #4 team vs. Big 12 #4/5 (this year number 5 Missouri)
Champs Sports (-1) -- #5 team vs. ACC #4
Insight (0) -- #6 vs. Big 12 #6
Motor City (-1) -- #7 team vs. MAC #1
ACC
Orange (0) -- #1 team vs. at-large
Chick-fil-A (+1) -- #2 team vs. SEC #3/4/5
Gator (+1) -- #3 team vs. Big 12 #4
(-1) -- #3 team vs. Big East #2
Champs Sports (+1) -- #4 team vs. Big Ten #5
Music City (+1) -- #5 team vs. SEC #6/7/8
Meineke Car Care (-1) -- #6 team vs. Big East #3
Emerald (-1) -- #7 team vs. Pac-10 #4/5
Humanitarian (-1) -- #8 team vs. WAC #1
Big 12
Fiesta (0) --#1 team vs. at-large
Cotton (+1) -- #2 team vs. SEC #3/4/5
Holiday (-1) -- #3 team vs. Pac-10 #2
Gator (-1) -- #4 team vs. ACC #3
Alamo (-1) -- #4/5 team vs. Big Ten #4
Sun (-1) -- #4/5 team vs. Pac-10 #3
Insight (0) --#6 team vs. Big Ten #6
Independence (0) -- #7 team vs. SEC #6/7/8
Texas (-1) -- #8 team vs. C-USA #3/4
Big East
BCS (0)
Gator/Sun (+1) -- #2 team vs. ACC #3, Pac-10 #3 or Big 12 #4
Meineke Car Care (+1) -- #3 team vs. ACC #6
International (-1) -- #4 team vs. MAC #3
PapaJohns (+1) -- #5 team vs. SEC #9
St. Petersburg (-1) -- #6 team vs. C-USA #5
Pac-10
Rose (0) -- #1 team vs. Big Ten #1 (probably should be considered +1 based on recent history)
Holiday (+1) -- #2 team vs. Big 12 #3
Sun (+1) -- #3 team vs. Big 12 #5
(-1) -- #3 team vs. Big East #2
Las Vegas/Emerald (-1) -- #4 team vs. MWC #1
(+1) -- #5 team vs. ACC #7
Hawai’i (-1) -- #6 team vs. WAC #2
Poinsettia (-1) -- #7 team vs. MWC #2
Mountain West
Las Vegas (+1) -- #1 team vs. Pac-10 #4/5
Poinsettia (+1) -- #2 team vs. Pac-10 #7
Armed Forces (0) -- #3 team vs. C-USA #3
New Mexico (-1) -- #4 team vs. WAC #3
C-USA
Liberty (+1) -- #1 team vs. SEC #6/7/8
GMAC (0) -- #2 team vs. WAC or MAC #2
Armed Forces (0) -- #3 team vs. MWC #3
New Orleans (-1) -- #4 team vs. Sun Belt #1
St. Petersburg (+1) -- #5 team vs. Big East #6
Texas (+1) -- #6 team vs. Big 12 #8
MAC
Motor City (+1) -- #1 team vs. Big Ten #7
GMAC (0) -- #2 team vs. WAC or MAC #2
International (+1) -- #3 team vs. Big East #4/5
EagleBank (0) -- #4 team vs. Army or Navy (this could swing from a –1 to a +1 depending on the academy team coming into the game)
SEC
Sugar (0) -- #1 team vs. at-large
Capital One (0) -- #2 team vs. Big Ten #2
Cotton (-1) -- #3 team vs. Big 12 #2
Outback (-1) -- #4 team vs. Big Ten #3
Chick-fil-A (-1) -- #5 team vs. ACC #2
Music City (-1) -- #6 team vs. ACC #5
Liberty (-1) -- #7 team vs. C-USA #1
Papajohns.com (-1) -- #8 team vs. Big East #4/5
WAC
Humanitarian (+1) -- #1 team vs. ACC #8
New Mexico (+1) -- #2 team vs. MWC #4
Hawai’i (+1) -- #3 team vs. Pac-10 #6
Poinsettia (+1) -- #4 team vs. Pac-10 #7
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