Ohio State jumps into the bracket, sure to cause controversy in the Big Twelve world where TCU—#3 last week and a 55-3 winner over the weekend—fell three spots.
The Buckeyes beat Wisconsin 59-0, which is certainly impressive. The Committee apparently was impressed with the fact that Ohio State "lost two quarterbacks"—even though one of them didn't play a down this season, which is somewhat like a team losing its quarterback to graduation or the NFL.
The decision shows a lot of shortcomings of the Committee, mainly, releasing weekly rankings. Though their final rankings showed they didn't fall into one "trap" of weekly rankings—namely, moving teams up and down instead of re-evaluating—but they did fall into another trap: teams that lose early have a better chance of having that loss "excused." Ohio State's lose to Virginia Tech was by far the worst of the eligible teams, coming at home to a 6-6 team by 14 points.
If the Committee is going to release weekly rankings, they should release point totals to reflect how close the race is; that would have reflected how close the voting between #3 and #6 was. A better solution would be to not release weekly polls at all.
In the end, TCU and Baylor fell victim to not having a championship game, and therefore, in the Committee's mind, no conference championship. They also fell victim to another problem with the Committee: a school's name means a lot.
Let's not fool ourselves: Ohio State is a "name" football school and TCU and Baylor are not. It didn't matter that TCU beat Minnesota convincingly and Ohio State won by 7 points. It didn't matter that Baylor has the best win of any of the top six teams. It didn't matter that Ohio State won the Big Ten, which was pretty atrocious this year. In the end, it mattered that Ohio State was Ohio State, and they had a huge, convincing win at the end that allowed the Committee to say the Buckeyes passed the "eye test."
Here's a question: if TCU and Oklahoma's names were switched on their schedules, would Oklahoma have been dropped from #3 to #6 after beating Iowa State 55-3? And if Oklahoma and Baylor's names were switched, would Oklahoma ever have been ranked behind a TCU team that they beat?
People hated the BCS because of the computers, but mainly because there wasn't a Playoff. Now we're faced with a very arbitrary Committee, and still have teams that might be the best in the nation left out of the Playoff.
Comments