I had to follow up on Josh's response about hating Boise State, so I sent him a personal e-mail and he sent me a personal response that I will now publish to the world. I will edit out the personal things. I thought it was an interesting response.
"Yes—partly from the past. They were ridiculously bad when I was growing up. Joke of the state with their blue turf. So that’s part of it. Then all of a sudden they get good—and I’ll admit they are good—and everyone thinks they’re gods. I hate Jared Zabransky. Like I said, they are good. They need more than that, though to show me they’re here to stay. "
This response makes sense to me. I will always hate that Utah was the first non-BCS team to get into the BCS bowls. I just hate it. Especially because in general, BYU has a more successful program then the Utes. BYU made the WAC respectable back in the day. So, when suddenly everyone in SLC was wearing Ute gear in the Fall of '04 after they had managed to get about 30,000 people to their games in the years prior, I was disgusted. However, I will take issue with two points of Josh. 1) Boise State has been consistently good over the last 5 years, including an undefeated regular season two years ago (they lost by 3 to Louisville who had one loss at the time in the Liberty Bowl). They've put in their dues to be a respected club for preseason polls but are usually left out of them while lesser teams that are not ranked at the end of the season end up ranked again. This relates to my second point...2) Why should a team have to "be there to stay"? Look at the respect Arkansas received received as a BCS team that was absoultely destroyed on their homefield by USC throughout the season. They've had a couple of horrible years, but because they are a BCS team, they shot up in the polls when they did well (and managed to stay in the top 15 despite losing their last two). Why should the criteria be different for a non-BCS team? Why couldn't Idaho go undefeated next year and play in a BCS bowl? Instead, they would have little respect in the polls and would probably have to have three 10 game win seasons before they could go undefeated again and make it to a BCS game. In the pros, no one cares how bad the Saints were last year. The point is they are good this year, so they still got homefield advantage in their first playoff game. Program reputation in college football is overrated. It's why Penn State gets into the top-25 at the end of the year after beating an overrated Tennessee team.
Final thoughts. USC was really good this year. That they only lost to Pac-10 teams says something about the Pac-10 and they really put the beatdown on any non-conference team they played. Impressive. In a playoff system, I would say they win the championship.
3 comments:
Sometimes it's hard to admit when I'm wrong--but this isn't one of those times. You're absolutely right about dogging on my "here to stay" comment concerning BSU. I guess I sometimes fall into the habit of seeing teams on unequal levels (thank you BCS!) when I should simply be looking at D-I teams as a whole. In all sports many a championship goes to smaller teams where everything gels for an entire season or even "Cinderella" teams where things gel but they also get plain lucky. You're absolutely right about the Saints. No one's crapping on their parade. You can't find an entity in any other sports that tries to undermine the playing field. I should sue the BCS for jacking up my sports vision.
P.S. Part of what Doug edited out was me calling Zabransky a pecker. I'll take the liberty to reinstate that right now. I hate Jared Zabransky. What a pecker.
Like the crappy editor I am, I forgot to put in a "..." to indicate I left out part of your quote. Sorry to all the readers
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