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Zemek's Weekly Affirmation - 2006  

 By Matt Zemek

CollegeFootballNews.com

Posted Oct 23, 2006

You know young people: they don't always listen... except in Clemson.

By Matthew Zemek

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Last weekend, it seemed that all the teams pursuing Ohio State wanted no part of the No. 2 national ranking. The horn sounded, the trumpet blared, and the call rang forth: make a statement if you really want to be the second-best team in the country. A week later, only Tommy Bowden's Tigers seemed to take the call to heart, and all credit to the Purple Calvin Johnson Eaters for rising to the occasion. Everyone else, though, continued to display the kind of lackluster ball that only serves to reinforce the Big East's argument in the debate that's currently tearing through the college football world.

Let's treat this subject with the depth and detail it deserves--just like any other weighty college football topic. After all, the clash of worldviews involved in the debate between an unbeaten Big East team and a one-loss team from a better BCS conference (if it gets to that point in the race for Glendale) is as profound as it is pronounced. Two deeply-held and very legitimate viewpoints are butting heads here, and they both deserve their due in the court of college football argumentation.

Those who side with the one-loss teams from stronger conferences have many compelling and legitimate arguments on their side. (And it's important for someone who takes an opposing view to represent the other side clearly, accurately and fairly in a given debate. Remember that, college football fans of America.) The best argument is strength of schedule. Ohio State and Texas had the cojones to schedule each other in consecutive years, a fact which rightly puts Mack Brown's Longhorns at the top of the list for Glendale invitees. USC doesn't duck quality opponents in its non-conference schedule--Arkansas and Nebraska are games few other schools would schedule. Michigan annually plays Notre Dame, a strong supplement to any Big Ten slate. If you're a Big East fan, you have to acknowledge that the big boys deserve a lot of respect for what they do... and whom they play. By comparison, West Virginia did play an SEC road game this year... at Mississippi State, the longtime doormat of the league's Western Division.

Before the Big East fans (and especially the wonderful people known as Mountaineers) get all huffy--remember, I am still taking your side in this debate--the obvious must be said: yes, yes, yes--West Virginia didn't know it would be a national title contender when it scheduled this game. Yes, yes, yes--schedule strength levels (see Louisville-Miami) can appear to be substantial but then turn out to be much lower in the weeks after a game is played. Yes, yes, yes--Louisville deserves major kudos for scheduling the Canes, and the dent in UL's strength of schedule rating should clearly not be held against them. But that Miami game is admittedly an exception in Big East circles. The conference needs to make a substantial effort to play big boys in future years when schedule slots are still open. It would solve a lot of questions in the college football world if Louisville could play USC this weekend, and West Virginia could tackle Michigan. Maybe we'll get those matchups down the line; we need them, too, as long as this sport continues to deny its fans a playoff and cling to the insanity and dysfunctionality of the BCS, which is the white elephant in this very big conversation room. But as long as we're stuck with the BCS, teams from lightly-regarded leagues need to schedule top-shelf non-conference opponents. It's just that simple.

Another point made by the advocates of the one-loss teams is that the Big East doesn't yet have quality depth. Among all the other games from this past Saturday, it was a point of professional responsibility for this columnist to devote extra attention to Rutgers-Pittsburgh, in order to discern how the league's two second-tier teams could compete with West Virginia and Louisville down the stretch. After watching two passionate ballclubs fight in Heinz Field with noble intensity--but a paucity of skill position studs on the edges--it's clear that the Mountaineers and Cardinals will go to battle with a lot more offensive potency than their more impoverished conference brethren from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It seems clear that the Big East still lacks the heft and weight possessed by other BCS conferences. Rutgers, the third-best team in the Big East at this point, would seem to be greatly outclassed by the third-best teams in the SEC (Tennessee) and Big Ten (Wisconsin). Pittsburgh, the fourth-best team in the Big East, lost by 28 points (when you ignore two entirely meaningless garbage touchdowns) at home to the same Michigan State ballclub that's been floundering for so much of 2006.

Those are the main arguments working against the Big East and its top teams right now. One hopes the position of the one-loss heavyweights (current or soon-to-be) was represented fairly.

But now we get to the pro-Big East part of this debate. This is where the one-loss teams and their advocates--especially the presidents of these schools, who stand as the real power brokers and potential movement-makers in college football--need to sit back in their chairs and look at life from the perspective of the little guy. A little sympathy and understanding can go a long way.

If you look at the world through the lens of Big East fans--those patient and under-served folks (in football, not hoops) who were so cruelly raided by an ACC that is so delightfully and deliciously choking on a bone of brutally bad football this year--you'd realize that in the football world, the Big East has had to endure a lot of criticism over the past several years, much of it righteous and, moreover, appropriate. All those decisive Syracuse losses in major bowl games had an effect. So, too, did Pittsburgh's dubious Fiesta Bowl invite at the end of the 2004 season. Without Miami and a side helping of Virginia Tech, the Big East wouldn't have had much of a leg to stand on in the past decade. The conference came in for a bashing... not because people hated the league, per se, but because lopsided New Year's bowl games represented a black mark on a sport that thrives on big games and attractive matchups. Anti-Big East sentiment wasn't personal; it was actually nothing more than the frustration fans rightly felt at being cheated out of better BCS bowl games. People didn't hate Pittsburgh in 2004; they simply hated the fact that Pittsburgh, not Auburn, was playing Urban Meyer's Utah team in Tempe... that's all. But Big East fans felt that these withering criticisms were being leveled at them. Keep that in mind if you're a fan/advocate of Texas, Michigan or USC, someone who might have the inclination to shout down the Mountaineer and Cardinal fans in the room.

What Big East bashers need to realize is that the 2006 Sugar Bowl fundamentally changed the landscape. Just as George Mason's run to the 2006 Final Four should open a lot of eyes about the credentials of so called "mid-majors" in college basketball, West Virginia's win in a de facto road game against Georgia should have transformed a lot of perceptions about the college football world. The Mountaineers' deceivingly convincing 38-35 win over the SEC champions proved that conference superiority (or inferiority) is a myth, a dead-end issue that goes nowhere and proves precious little about anything in college football. More importantly, WVU's Sugar Bowl win showed that a team can come from a lousy conference (which the Big East was last year; Rutgers lacked the heft it has attained this season, and Pittsburgh was nowhere to be found; South Florida overachieved, but then got bageled against a thoroughly average N.C. State team in the Meineke Car Care Bowl) and win a big-time showcase game. Much as lower seeds in the NCAA Basketball Tournament play with a chip on their shoulder and ambush blue-chip programs in the early rounds, so, too, can a motivated team from a bad conference upend an "old-money" power from a more credentialed conference.

All of this raises the age-old dilemma that will haunt and torture college football people until we get that elusive and much-needed playoff: should the little guy be rewarded and recognized for achieving big, even if its schedule is weak, or should the big boys--even with a loss--be respected for the chances they take at the highest levels of competition? Flowing from this question, one must then ask a follow-up: what is the tipping point at which an unbeaten Big East champ would deserve more leverage than a one-loss Texas or the one-loss (eventual) loser of Michigan-Ohio State? That's not a snarky or mean-spirited question, but a query that's entirely central to this debate. I'm genuinely curious. If we take our national title debates seriously in college football--as we should (though not more seriously than issues of politics, poverty and health care)--we must then have legitimate explanations and answers to tough and persistent questions that won't--and shouldn't--go away.

I'd like to know, then: what kind of non-conference schedule would lift West Virginia past a Texas or a Michigan in a potential end-of-season debate? One game at Florida? Two games against Oregon and Wisconsin? Three games against Washington State, Arkansas and Clemson, with two of them being on the road? What would it take? Again, this isn't meant to be snide or sarcastic--we're searching for answers here.

The problem with all this, though--as you can see--is that answers are hard to come by in college football. That's frustrating, but darnit, it's true, and it's a reality people have to level with, hard as it may be to do so.

With only twelve games in a season--four of them out of conference--we just don't have the diversity of competition that can provide a sufficient level of cross-pollination in non-conference matchups. Athletic directors at various schools--who schedule a lot of games years in advance--can't tell in 2002 if 2006 is going to be a national title year for their football program. Similarly, ADs who schedule big-name opponents in 2002 or 2003 (or whenever) can't tell if those big boys--again, see "Louisville versus Miami" for a classic example in this regard--will fall off the map four years later, thereby hurting their BCS ranking. All those schools who moved to the ACC couldn't have known how awful the conference would be this season. Without a playoff, there's just no way of denying it: answers are not plentiful in the currently structured college football world. Such a reality can make the simplest questions--"what will it take to make a Big East team's schedule worthy of a national title game appearance?"--seem loaded with attitudinal edge and overall nastiness. In actuality, though, there's no meanness at all; it's just a search for (re)solutions that are few and far between, and it's that lack of satisfying answers which makes fans unceasingly angry at football writers, not to mention opposing fans from conferences with different places on the college football food chain.

Yes, the Texases and Ohio States of the universe demand and deserve leverage in BCS arguments for playing each other. You are supposed to be rewarded for playing non-conference games of that nature, and it should be a powerful tiebreaker in a season-ending debate. But Big East fans--while also citing West Virginia's win over Georgia, proof that a good team from a bad league can make good when given its one big chance in the spotlight--will turn around and say, with a lot of credibility, "what about these other BCS conferences, anyway? They're not exactly lighting up the night with their level of play."

Indeed, the anti-Big East argument--made credible by the strength of schedule and quality depth arguments--is substantially countered by the 2006 Sugar Bowl and the mediocrity of name teams in all the sexier conferences. While--as said above--Rutgers would suffer if compared to the third-place teams in the SEC and Big Ten, it is just as true that Greg Schiano's Scarlet Knights would rate as well as--if not better than--the third-best teams from the Big XII (Oklahoma sans Adrian Peterson), Pac-10 (Oregon), and ACC (Georgia Tech). Just as the Big East lacks quality depth, it happens to be true that the other conferences are simultaneously deteriorating in much the same way. The Big XII--which used to have RC Slocum's Wrecking Crews, Bill Snyder's loaded K-State Cats, Frank Solich's Nebraska squads powered by Eric Crouch, Bob Stoops' title-winning troops, Gary Barnett's running Ralphies, and Mack Brown's ten-win Texas teams (even if they regularly lost to Oklahoma back then)--was ridiculously stacked for several seasons running. The SEC of 1998--when Florida massively underachieved and yet rolled to an easy BCS bowl victory (an indicator of quality depth)--had teams from Mississippi State and Arkansas that would dwarf the current ballclubs fielded at those two schools. The SEC of 2001 boasted similar depth, as the quality of quarterbacking from that year drastically overshadowed the current offerings of decidedly shaky Southeastern Conference signal callers. All conferences have off years (Pac-10 in 1999, Big Ten in 2000, SEC and Big XII last year, ACC this year), but it seems as though the conferences--up and down the line--lack the aura they possessed just five to eight seasons ago. As an example, I can distinctly recall the 2004 season (and my November writings from that season), when an unusually large amount of lower-tier bowl slots went to Mid-American Conference teams and other "mid-majors," all because the seventh- and eight-place teams in the SEC and ACC (and perhaps other conferences) failed to become bowl eligible. Conference mediocrity--across the board and far beyond the Big East--has been a consistent and emerging theme in college football over the past three seasons, if not more. As a result, the Big East should not be the punching bag it currently is, even if its teams don't play the schedules they should. Moreover, the prevalence of conference mediocrity suggests that the teams at power conference schools can't expect to rely on their reputations alone when the BCS selection show comes along on the first Sunday of December. Speaking to these big boys, the following must be said (and repeated) after another weekend in which no one (except for Clemson) seemed interested in making a big statement: if you want to differentiate yourself from the field--not to mention an unbeaten Big East champion--go out there on the field and do it. Without that clear point of differentiation--which only Clemson was willing to make on Saturday--this is an entirely subjective, stylistic, and preference-based debate we're having.

Mind you, subjective debates (in the spirit of honest analysis) are grounded in facts. Yes, both sides in this larger debate have many facts and realities to point to; saying that a debate is subjective does not mean that information and truth are absent from the debate. What this does mean, though, is that at the end of the day, there's no college football court of law that can definitively determine which is the inherently better or more meritorious set of arguments. There's no court of arbitrati