Playoffs?! Are you kidding me?

We're still a long way from getting a system in college football that makes sense, but for now we can at least join the discussion about playoffs and whatnot.

The Chief Justice wanted to pose this question to the group: "What teams, if you were the college football czar, would you chose to make up a field of 8 play-off teams? Your choices are: Florida, Oklahoma, Ball State, Texas, Utah, Alabama, Texas Tech, Boise State, Penn State, Southern Cal, Brigham Young, Texas Christian, Cincinnati, Ohio State & Tulsa. In other words, teams with either 10 wins or 2 or fewer losses."

After some careful deliberation and consideration, I divided the above teams into two categories: "IN" and "OUT."

2008-09 Playoff Scenario

IN:

#1 Oklahoma (Big 12 champ)
#2 Florida (SEC champ)
#5 Southern Cal (Pac 10 champ)
#8 Penn State (Big 10 champ – tiebreaker over OSU)
#12 Cincinnati (Big East)
#19 Virginia Tech (Technically 9-4, but still the ACC champ)
#3 Texas (at-large bid)
#4 Alabama (at-large bid)

OUT:

#6 Utah – Not in a BCS conference and Texas and Alabama played much tougher schedules. The Utes, on the other hand, nearly lost to Michigan. Get Weber St. out of your schedule, line up another BCS school and try again next year.

#7 Texas Tech - I’d rather go Guns Up than throw in Cinci or VT, but I have to give precedence to BCS conference winners. As the college football czar, you need to maintain some kind of order. That’s the problem when you have three great teams in the same conference and division.

#9 Boise St. – Same as Utah, when you’re in a non-BCS conference you need to schedule better opponents for your non-conference games. You’re already beating up on Idaho, Utah St. and New Mexico St.; there’s no need to play Idaho St. (FCS). And scheduling other non-BCS teams doesn’t help either.

#10 Ohio St. – Didn’t win their conference outright and Texas and Alabama clearly had better seasons.

#11 TCU – Didn’t even win their non-BCS conference. Again, if you want to be considered for national contention, stop playing FCS schools and the worst team in C-USA.

#16 BYU – First, win your conference. Second, get a tougher non-conference schedule. It’s too bad their victories over Washington and UCLA were unimpressive this year, so get N. Iowa out of there and go after someone else to make sure you can get a noticeable win over a BCS opponent.

#22 Ball St. – Even if they did win their conference, they’ve got to do better than Northeastern (2-10 AND an FCS school) in their non-conference schedule. Navy’s ok for an independent, but drop W. Kentucky and schedule better BCS schools than Indiana.

NR Tulsa – This one’s easy. Didn’t win their conference, three losses, didn’t play a ranked team all year and scheduled an FCS school and other shaky non-BCS schools. Oh yeah, and they’re not even ranked.

Now, what about the rest of you? Who are your eight playoff teams for this year's post-season?

Week 16: Would Toward That it Were

It's a shame CBS has the rights to the SEC match-ups. Rather than ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit and Brent Musberger (though I could do without Musberger at times) covering #1 Alabama vs. #4 Florida in prime time, we get the SEC championship in the middle of the afternoon and the one-sided Big 12 championship for the evening game. Kind of anti-climatic.

Of course we all knew which was going to be the better game. The SEC championship was everything people hoped it would be: tough defenses, hard hitting, Alabama's power running game vs. Florida's high-octane option attack. And Tebow ultimately wills his team to victory.

Then there was the Oklahoma/Missouri snooze-fest. The third time we've seen this match-up in a year and we all knew the beat-down was coming. Granted, Missouri kept things slightly interesting through the first 30% of the game or so. But it got really ugly really fast in the second quarter and it was over by half-time. And ESPN, "The number one leader in sports," has their number one broadcasting guy, Kirk Herbstreit, just filling air time for most of the evening. At least ESPN is taking back some of the bowl games from FOX in 2010.

On a different note, I think after Saturday's performances the Heisman race is down to Sam Bradford and Tim Tebow. Sam will likely get the nod given his ridiculous stats and Timmy's numbers aren't as freakish as last year. But we'll see.

Final Standings:

This Week	W	L	(Overall)	GB
A True Blue Husker	11	3	(223-97)	0
The Rev	12	2	(216-104)	7
Chief Justice	10	4	(213-107)	10
Dr. L	9	5	(213-107)	10
Kenny Pickett	12	2	(211-109)	12
The Guvna	8	6	(211-109)	12
O-knee-der	9	5	(209-111)	14

2008-09 College Football Bowl Schedule
EagleBank Wake Forest vs. Navy
New Mexico Colorado State vs. Fresno State
magicJack St. Petersburg Memphis vs. South Florida
Pioneer Las Vegas BYU vs. Arizona
R+L Carriers New Orleans Southern Miss vs. Troy
San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Boise State vs. TCU
Sheraton Hawaii Hawaii vs. Notre Dame
Motor City Florida Atlantic vs. Central Michigan
Meineke Car Care West Virginia vs. North Carolina
Champs Sports Wisconsin vs. Florida State
Emerald Miami (Fla.) vs. California
Independence Northern Illinois vs. Louisiana Tech
Papajohns.com NC State vs. Rutgers
Valero Alamo Missouri vs. Northwestern
Roady's Humanitarian Maryland vs. Nevada
Texas Rice vs. Western Michigan
Pacific Life Holiday Oklahoma State vs. Oregon
Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Houston vs. Air Force
Brut Sun Oregon State vs. Pittsburgh
Gaylord Hotels Music City Boston College vs. Vanderbilt
Insight Kansas vs. Minnesota
Chick-fil-A LSU vs. Georgia Tech
Outback South Carolina vs. Iowa
Capital One Georgia vs. Michigan State
Konica Minolta Gator Clemson vs. Nebraska
Rose Bowl Game Presented by Citi Penn State vs. USC
FedEx Orange Cincinnati vs. Virginia Tech
AT&T Cotton Ole Miss vs. Texas Tech
AutoZone Liberty Kentucky vs. East Carolina
Allstate Sugar Utah vs. Alabama
International Buffalo vs. Connecticut
Tostitos Fiesta Ohio State vs. Texas
GMAC Tulsa vs. Ball State
FedEx BCS National Championship Game Florida vs. Oklahoma

Week 15: BCS Bedlam

No Wolverines to frustrate me this week, just my own mediocre picks. Can't get the close ones to fall my way.

However, we're all still stuck with the monstrosity that is the BCS. Now while I agree that we need a new system (perhaps some form of playoff) in college football, but I don't think this year will produce enough controversy to bring about much change.

The Texas/Oklahoma debate seems to be drawing the most attention at this point, but I blame the Big 12 conference more than the BCS in this instance. If only they used the BCS standings to eliminate the lowest ranked team in the three-way tie and decide the other two by head-to-head like other conferences, then the situation might seem less arbitrary.

Instead, the BCS apologists can say, "Texas safety, Blake Gideon, should have caught that ball that slipped through his arms near the end of the Texas Tech game."

We get real controversy if Texas wins out in the Big 12, Florida takes care of business against Ole Miss, USC doesn't stumble in Corvalis (again) and Penn St. runs the table in a struggling Big 10 conference. Now that would be an interesting scenario for the BCS to sort out, especially with Utah, Boise St. and possibly Ball St. all going undefeated.

And that's the problem with the BCS, it's set up to work only if there are two undefeated teams from BCS conferences. Any other scenario and there's going to be controversy. The system expects you to have a perfect season in order to have a legitimate case for the national championship. But if more than two teams are able to do what's expected of them by the BCS, the system can't handle it. So the best thing the commissioners can do is hope that enough teams lose.

There's nothing "pure" about a bunch of rich guys sitting back, getting richer, and playing the odds with the greatest collegiate sport in the country.

Ok, so I'm not going to talk about playoffs (playoffs?!). But the BCS system as it is could still be much better than its current state and at least reduce the annual controversy.

If the currect system is supposed to act like a playoff in the regular season, then it needs to provide a better gauntlet in which teams can prove themselves. I say the BCS should have at least two more ground rules to encourage every FBS team to play a somewhat difficult schedule. That way calculating strength of schedules is a little less theoretical and subjective.

First: Any FBS school who schedules an FCS school is automatically disqualified from national championship consideration. If "Every week can change the season" then make "every week" count. Eliminate the Div 1-AA "pre-season" and "bye weeks" from FBS competition. And if you really want to inflate your schedule with cream puffs, there are plenty of teams in non-BCS conferences to pick on. The bottom line, no one wants a national champion who played an easy non-conference schedule. At least this way gives potential BCS busters more opportunities for quality wins in their schedule (and weeds out pretenders).

Which brings me to the second rule: In order for non-BCS schools to be considered for a BCS bowl, they need to schedule and beat at least three BCS teams during the regular season. If teams like Hawaii had to actually prove themselves before going to a BCS bowl, they might be spared the national humiliation of getting spanked by teams like Georgia who actually deserve to be there. And hey, it's possible that a non-BCS team could get three or four quality wins against top BCS teams, run the table and go to a national championship.

East Carolina didn't quite finish the way they wanted, but you have to take your hat off to them for scheduling four BCS teams in their non-conference schedule. Early in the season, it was certainly possible for the Pirates to have that perfect season and imagine if West Virginia and Virginia Tech had both won the Big East and ACC titles?!

That's it, just two simple rules would make college football much better than it is. I'd like to see what the sports writers on their playoff soap boxes would say to that.

Standings:

This Week	W	L	(Overall)	GB
A True Blue Husker	18	6	(212-94)	0
Dr. L	17	7	(204-102)	8
The Rev	17	7	(204-102)	8
Chief Justice	18	6	(203-103)	9
The Guvna	16	8	(203-103)	9
O-knee-der	18	6	(200-106)	12
Kenny Pickett	15	9	(199-107)	13

Schedule:

Wednesday, December 3
7:00 PM ET Middle Tenn. St. at Louisiana-Lafayette

Thursday, December 4
7:30 PM ET Louisville at Rutgers

Friday, December 5
8:00 PM ET #12 Ball St. vs. Buffalo*

Saturday, December 6
12:00 PM ET #23 Pittsburgh at Connecticut
12:00 PM ET E. Carolina at Tulsa
12:00 PM ET Navy vs. Army*
1:00 PM ET #17 Boston College vs. #25 Virginia Tech*
4:00 PM ET #1 Alabama vs. #4 Florida*
4:30 PM ET #5 USC at UCLA
7:00 PM ET Arkansas St. at Troy
8:00 PM ET #20 Missouri vs. #2 Oklahoma*
8:00 PM ET Arizona St. at Arizona
8:00 PM ET S. Florida at W. Virginia
11:30 PM ET #13 Cincinnati at Hawaii

*game played at a neutral location