I have seen a lot of upset people in the Bulldog Nation including writers who are supposed to be unbiased. They are incensed that LSU jumped Georgia and is playing for a national title, much the way Michigan fans were upset last year when the Wolverines were leapfrogged by Florida.
Please, let me explain.
The BCS is not a perfect system. It never will be a perfect system. We will never have a playoff so stop making your head hurt trying to come up with a format. The best we can hope for is a plus-one game sometime around the time “American Idol” is cancelled.
But what we do have is a system that is becoming predictable.
On Saturday night as West Virginia and Missouri were losing, a colleague turned to me and said, “Georgia could be your national champion.”
And I proceeded to explain to him why that could not happen.
“You have to understand that this is the first coaches’ poll that the coaches really take seriously,” I said. “And when they sit down to vote, they will look at LSU with two triple-overtime losses and a conference championship in the toughest conference in America and they will jump LSU over Georgia. I assume the same thing will happen with the Harris Poll voters.”
And that is exactly what happened.
Meanwhile, the Big Ten’s plan worked out this year the same way it didn’t last year. By finishing early in 2006, Michigan was hurt by its inactivity. This year, Ohio State was helped because of the carnage around the Buckeyes. Remember that Florida won twice after Michigan’s last game in ’06.
It’s definitely a system where what you have done lately gets weighted heavily one way or the other.
Whether it was Georgia or LSU facing Ohio State, it’s still the worst-case scenario for the Buckeyes. The one loss OSU had this year was to a faux SEC team in Illinois. Now, Jim Tressel’s team will face a real SEC team. I think it’s another tough night for Runner-up U.
