The Conference Argument

            As I was scrolling through the comments on an article about Bob Stoops’ recent comments regarding the SEC/Big 12, I came to a few realizations.  These insights have led me to change the way I think that the creatively named College Football Playoff should be instituted, as well as the whole “conference argument” in general. 

            In case you have not seen, Bob Stoops recently made headlines saying that “propaganda” has led the public to believe that the SEC is more dominant even though the dominance is held to just the top tier of teams.  This has led to backlash from SEC country with the main argument that “Stoops is a sore loser” after OU got whooped up on in the Cotton Bowl by A&M.  However, I get where he is coming from.  The SEC definitely has a few dregs in the cellar of its conference that provide for easy conference wins.  The best way to show this is looking at the Vanderbilt team from last year. 

On the outside, Vandy was a 9-win team from the “toughest” conference in the country.  When you look closer, Vanderbilt only beat two bowl teams all season.  One was a 6-7 North Carolina State team and the other was 7-6 Ole Miss.  Okay, so they beat a bowl team in-conference.  Well who did Ole Miss beat?  Yes, just a single bowl team, Mississippi State (while losing to middle of the road Big-12 Texas by 35 at home).  Mississippi State had 8 wins so that should make them a solid team right?  Mississippi State did not beat a single team that finished at .500 or above all season.  This is what happens when there is unbalanced scheduling with only 8 conference games.  All you have to do is schedule four gimmes against the directional schools of the country and then beat a couple of the cellar-dwellers in your division.  Some years, the scheduling gods work in your favor and you get all four of the worst teams.  So can one really argue that Vanderbilt, Ole Miss and Mississippi State were really that good of football teams?  Moreover, does it even matter?

The reason I started with that comparison is that I am tired of hearing from people about their conference being “the best” and bragging that their team made a bowl in the “best” conference in the country.  What I have realized is that the majority of the people saying these things are not from the fans of the reasons that they perceive their conference in these ways.  The SEC is a great football conference because Alabama, LSU and Florida have combined for 6 of the last 7 National Championships and 8 of the last 10 (I personally feel that the Cam Newton year at Auburn was an anomaly that will be stricken from the record books and does not really fit within any of these arguments).  Yet the people that are heard from most often are fans of the teams that get beat by those three on their way to glory.  So in reality, these people are cheering for the teams they are competing against… Why? 

No other conference cheers for its rivals more than the bottom feeders of the SEC.  Those fans of Auburn and South Carolina that want every SEC team to win every game against a non-SEC team have come to bewilder me.  I refuse to cheer for OU.  Ever.  I do not care if they are facing aliens threatening to take over the planet (my UT hate is a little different and much more multi-faceted).  I do not see why people want their rivals to succeed.  They like to think it makes their own team look better, but does it really matter if the team that beat you by 45 is ranked No. 1 or No. 20?  You still lost by 45.  You should hate them.  This can be carried over to the NFL; I remember Cowboys’ fans wanting the Giants to beat the Patriots a couple of years ago.  I absolutely loathe the Giants/Redskins/Eagles and will never want them to win any game ever.  I just do not get how people try to logically convince themselves that their rivals winning after beating their own teams make them look better.

            I will not argue that the top of the SEC was quite strong last season.  Six of the top fourteen in the final AP poll shows that strength, but after that I see a drop off (but it is hard to tell how good they are since they all do not play each other- Alabama did not play Florida, LSU did not play Georgia, Texas A&M did not play South Carolina, etc.).  Who is to say that the 9-4 Commodores were a better team than the 7-6 TCU Horned Frogs?  In the current system of polling and non-uniform conference scheduling, a team gets punished for losing to a team that is better.  TCU had five conference losses: four of them to teams they were looking up at in the standings (the other was against Iowa State in which TCU had to transition to a freshman starting quarterback).  If Vandy had to play all of the teams above it in the SEC, then there would have likely been three more losses on their resume.  Instead, Vanderbilt got to avoid Alabama, LSU and Texas A&M, arguably the three best teams in the conference.  Vandy’s best win was over Ole Miss by one point…. A team that lost at home to TCU’s best win, Texas, by 35.  Trying to compare these two teams in impossible let alone the entire conferences.

            That last realization led me to my new stance on the upcoming playoff: only conference champions should be involved.  This is where the SEC blow-hard comes at me with the “well then the best team, Alabama, from 2011 would have been left out!”  To that, I think it was an abnormality.  Just last year if Notre Dame would have lost then Florida (the same exact scenario as 2011) would have got to play for the title.  Florida proceeded to get spanked by Louisville, champion of the perceived “worst” conference of the BCS 6.  Besides, Alabama had their shot, as does every SEC team every year, to win the conference and it lost (at home mind you).  When there are years such as 2011, or the years when UT/OU is a toss-up, let it be decided on the field, in that one game.  The Cowboys did not get a do-over after losing to San Francisco in the 1994 NFC Championship Game, even though they were the best two teams.  It was decided and everyone moved on.

            There in lies the last problem: six BCS conferences and only 4 spots.  Obviously the easiest thing to do would be to make it 8 and add 2 at-larges to shut everyone up, but that will come in due time.  As it stands now, I think the Big East should be dissolved into the Big 12 and ACC and the mid-majors (Boise St.) and Independents (Notre Dame, BYU) need to pick a conference.  That would leave 5 major conferences that will have the best team in the country in one of them.  Play out the season and the four best conference champions are selected to the playoff.  Almost every year there is one BCS Conference Champion who backed their way in, and could be excluded from the playoff.  Just like in every other sport on the planet, there are divisions (conferences) to find division winners to play off for the championship.  So who cares if the SEC is the best conference?  Only the winner should matter when determining who the best in the country is; otherwise what is the point of even playing out the conference season? At the end of last season, it is common knowledge that either Oregon or Ohio State was the second best team, but neither might have had a shot if Florida gets to get drilled by Alabama. 

            So please, enough with the conference arguing.  There is no way to change someone’s mind from the other side.  Both sides of every argument can pull stats out of their asses that back them up.  There will never be a true consensus and it will never matter.  Just send the champions of each to play each other and let that decide.  I can guarantee you though, that if the champion of the Big 12 is not my school I will not be turning my back on Tech and rooting for our rivals.