Browns OR Buckeyes?

1.) Sustain success and find a way into a major conference/create your own major conference.
2.) Schedule really difficult non-conference games to make up for the 6 cupcakes you’ll play in-conference.

Considering conferences don’t get created every year, that’s a massive hurdle, also major conference teams have proven that they aren’t willing to give smaller schools that truly have a chance at beating them too many opportunities to do so.

BYU may be going a less-proven 3rd way that follows ND. Go independent, create your own schedule from scratch and negotiate with the BCS to give you some love if you are ranked high.

I hope this works for them and other teams start following suit. The future of college football will be the death of the conferences and pointless bowl games.

Instead of expanding the bowls they should have made them tougher to get into or if they wanted expansion they should have created some regional bowl system, so that way teams are playing in their home areas, which will create higher attendance and it can allow smaller schools a chance to shoot for some regional bragging rights at the end of the year which could possibly help with their recruiting in their homebase area. You could match a 4th or 5th or whatever big 10 school against a mac champion or 2nd place mac team in Indy instead of sending them to Arizona or wherever, where no one cares about either team.

To me this is the only way to make the early bowl games relevant again to anyone outside of the two teams playing in them.

Just following through on my point. In 1970 they won the NFF title. It was awarded before their bowl loss, but I believe the University counts it.

In 1973 they were undefeated, but tied Michigan. They crushed USC in the Rose Bowl and were given some title from some other semi-credible source (sporting news?).

I think the major reason money became a big issue in college athletics is because of the more wide-spread media.

It is worth a LOT to televise big games, even more so as the college football fanbase continues to grow.

Tradition? Most of the tradition is being pushed aside for the green. That’s why OSU is wearing those special Nike uniforms for the Michigan game.

You can say that college football shouldn’t be like the pros, but the fact stands that it already is, albeit it’s own version. This is NEVER going to be any less of a business than it already is. Ever.

Agree.

Bill James wrote a really interesting piece on the BCS a few years ago about how the formula was changed because it wasn’t getting the desired outcome for the larger schools (I would be remiss to note that those most adamantly defending the BCS are OSU fans.) He basically called the idea that this “formula” was meant to represent an unbiased approach to determining the top 2 teams a complete joke.

Article here

The BCS has gotten it right more times than the former system. What is wrong with that?

But my point is that if it’s an improvement over the previous system then I don’t think it’s fair to say that it has “failed miserably”, which you said. It has improved the system to it’s not a complete failure. I think that’s a vaild point. You may disagree with me — and we might as well agree to disagree at this point because we’re not going to convince each other — but it’s a fair point to make. It’s not a strawman.

MSU won’t schedule them because the Warriors took some cheap shots at their QB late in the 04 game. Northwestern was victimized by some TERRIBLE penalties in their game vs. Hawaii.

When Hawaii’s competitive, they can make your life miserable. When you’re simply better, you squash them ala 09 Wisconsin (51-10).

And yet, they still went undefeated and seemed to have earned their trip to the Sugar Bowl that year. In a playoff system, they would have been wiped out in the first round.

I’ve seen that to some degree but Miami has sucked recently and Va tech hasn’t been that great. Also the ACC has been declining for awhile now so those teams need all the help they can get.

I will say this, I think OSU is one of the few schools that will play against teams without strictly hoping for easy victories.

When i think major conferences I’m thinking Big 10, Big 12, SEC.

Kinda. Basically you don’t pay any attention to your rankings from the week before and you only rank on what has been done that season.

Here is a decent overview: http://npinopunintended.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/on-college-football-rankings-or-is-doug-lesmerises-an-american-pioneer/

I think he means moving teams in the polls as the season progresses based on their resume (i.e. the teams they’ve beaten). Some people in the polls – not all – think that you can’t drop a team unless they lose, regardless of who they played, which is why teams ranked at the top in the preseason stay at the top.

Doug Lesmeries at the PD went away from this philosophy and ranked teams every week based on who they had beaten so far that season, so he had some pretty unusual rankings at various points of the season (Houston was in his top 5 at one time and some higher-ranked teams who hadn’t played anyone yet were low early in the season). He was taking a lot of flack for it from many fans and media members, but I liked his philosophy and wished that more writers did that. Teams should be ranked based on who they beat on the field and not just following the preseason rankings. That’s why the Harris Poll doesn’t come out until the 4th or 5th week, I believe.

It is a tough balance, but I think it is a fair component in evaluating teams. Maybe the answer is to consider anything more than a 30-point spread (or some other number) the same.

Then let me ask you this: In a plus one format, how do you decide who goes to the championship game without the other two teams feeling snubbed?

I don’t think margin of victory is a fair way to decide it, espeically since different match-ups would result in different margins. I also don’t like how this seems like grandstanding. It’s one thing if a defense can’t stop anything, it’s another to constantly being trying to put more points up, humilating the other team, because you’re afraid that another team might out score you. It becomes less about the game and more about beating indirect opponents, imo.

I think Boise State this year is probably the perfect exception to that. The problem I have is it has taken them years to be able to earn this #3 preseason ranking, whereas I feel a team in a bigger conference can gain such a high ranking, or atleast a top 10 ranking, by virtue of a few seasons of success (for lesser team) and their membership in a bigger conference.