...talk about football today. From a girl that loves sports, this is the time of year I hate to see college football coming to an end. Sure you have a little pro football left, but college basketball is really starting to ramp up, and after that, the NBA starts to get serious. So technically, I am well entertained until the NBA finals in early summer.
Surely by now you have heard about what happened last night. If not, I am here to tell you about it. The university of Oklahoma throttled the university of Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. They didn't win it in the last second. They didn't pull ahead in the second half. They dominated most of the game by two touchdowns in a contest that Alabama was picked to win by 17 points. I have my own theories about why Alabama was picked to win.
A) Sportswriters and analysts tend to forget that every year and every season is a new one. They seem to think that "team x" was the 'national championship winner' (even though we don't have a national championship system) last year, and they have most of the same players, so that makes them the favorite.
B) Sportscasters, namely espn and the network that owns them, ABC, have this preconceived notion that the sec is the dominant conference in football. Really not sure how they come up with that calculation.
C) When you have 14 teams in your conference, you cannot possibly play them all every year -- so you play half of them.
Then you fill your schedule with whatever teams have open slots on your open dates. Granted, the sec has some ranked teams in their conference, but the actual strength of schedule is not there. The whole strength of schedule thing is muddled by who had a good or great team last year, or even possibly in 1987. This year Alabama played what looked to me like a pretty "meh" schedule. I am saying this as politely as I can. They didn't even play a top 10 team until LSU late in the season, and as a #1, they then lost their conference championship to Auburn, a #4 at the time. How can you rank a team #1 when they play nobody to earn it? *eyeroll*
In the Big XII, we currently play every team in our conference every year. This year, 7 of our 10 teams were ranked in the Top 25 at some point in the season.
This position is kind of like politics. I am not going to change anyone's mind, but I am of the opinion that the Big XII plays among the toughest conference schedules every year. This argument can only be driven home by the fact that Missouri, Texas A & M, and Colorado have recently left, and they have had very surprising success in other leagues. As I recall, they weren't consistent powerhouses in the Big XII. Just saying.
One more thing. It's time for Lou to go. Lou Holtz still works at the commentator's desk at espn even after shamelessly plugging Notre Dame, even last week he described them as being in "a class by themselves," (Whaaaa?), and then after being reprimanded by the espn powers that be, about 5 years ago, he picked a new team to gush about, East Carolina University. I'm not sure if he ever said his eldest son, Skip, was the coach there. But it was his blunt reference to Hitler a while back that should have put him into permanent retirement. Yes, he is knowledgeable of the game, but the guys with clear bias have got to go.
He is not the only one.
I love college football so much, I just turn down the volume.
You can't make me listen to those goobers.
Your thoughts?
