I was going to write about this earlier, but it slipped my mind. The current BCS standings look a little like this:
1. Alabama .9713
2. Oklahoma .9351
3. Texas .9223
4. Florida .8851
5. USC .8076
Depending on what side of the Texas/Oklahoma fence you're on, your wither really happy with this decision, or really frustrated (or your one of the fans that just doesn't care). So the big debate is whether Oklahoma should be #2 or Texas. Why does it matter? It's simple. OK and TX have the same record (11-1 [7-1]) and both play in the Big 12 South. Every year, the Big 12 championship game features the Big 12 North's best team vs. the team from Big 12 South. Ordinarily, who plays in this game is determined by each team's record. When there is a tie for first place, it is determined by who has the best standing in the BCS polls the week of the championship games. This year, it's projected that the winner of this game will move on to the national title game. Big deal here.
What's the controversey? Since both teams have the same records, what tiebeakers are factored in?
- Strength of schedule
- Who beat who
- How big were the wins
- among other things
The two biggest here are strength of schedule and who beat who. Since who beat who is easier to demonstrate, I'll start there.
Texas beat Oklahoma.
Texas Tech beat Texas.
Oklahoma beat Texas Tech.
The argument has been made that since TT beat UT, and OK beat TT (schooled is really the word for it), OK must obviously be better than UT. I beg to differ. UT beat OK, that's only the important line there. There is no other fact you can give that says OK is a better team when they lost to the same folks they are now tied with. This one fact, in my mind at least, puts UT above OK. But, if you must delve further, let's look at some scores.
Texas beat Oklahoma: 45-35
Texas Tech beat Texas: 39-33
Oklahoma beat Texas Tech: 65-21
Notice that Texas only lost to TT by 6 points, and that was due to a last second touchdown. Yes, OK spanked the crap out of TT, but as long as we're judging OK by what their opponents did (not what they did themselves), a 6 point loss is smaller than a 10 point win, and the argument that Texas is a better team holds true.
And no, we cannot judge Oklahoma based on what they did, because they lost to Texas. End of argument.
Moving on to strength of schedule. This is usually determined by comparing the total win-loss record for all a team's opponents, so:
This shows that Texas' oppenents have a better record than Oklahoma's... meaning (from a purely numbers standpoint) Texas' strength of schedule is greater. Even if you only look at Big 12 opponents, Texas has a slight edge.So, no conclusions that OK is better can be drawn from strength of schedule.
Which leaves us with the flawed "I beat the team that beat you" logic. It is only flawed because "I beat the team that beat you... but you still beat me."
Folks who know me personally know that I'm not much of a Longhorns fan, nor do I care much for the Sooners. I do, however, love watching college football as a whole. I love the sport. Love it. But the utterly retarded BCS system leaves me feeling absolutely insane. The fact that a team who is clearly better is being treated like second best kills me a little bit inside. Get rid of the BCS for crying out loud!! Stop allowing computers to determine the best teams and let them do it themselves. 8 team playoff, now.
It'll never happen of course, because eleventy billion bowl games make the head honchos at the BCS mega-bucks (read: $TEXAS).
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