It is that time of year again. I am not talking about the holiday season, but about the everlasting controversy that is the BCS rankings.
This is the worst postseason in any sport, and the University of Texas and Texas Tech will agree. The Big XII has three teams that are tied for the conference lead – Texas, Texas Tech and Oklahoma – and only one gets to play in the conference championship, earning an automatic bid to a BCS game with a win.
The Big XII is the most screwed up conference this year, and it cost two teams a chance to be Big XII Champions. All three of those teams beat up on each other. Oklahoma beat Texas Tech, Texas Tech beat Texas and Texas beat Oklahoma. So you can already see how this season was going to unfold.
The ridiculous tiebreaker for these teams is the one with the higher BCS ranking gets the nod.
The Sooners were helped by losing earlier in the season. It has always bothered me that it matters when you lose, not to whom you lose. OU was the first team to lose. OU lost to a No. 5 Texas Longhorns team in the Red River Shootout, but that was more than a month ago.
The Longhorns lost to the Red Raiders just a few weeks ago to propel them out of the top Big XII spot. Tech lost to OU two weeks ago and that loss sent them from No. 2 in the BCS all the way to number seven, even though they had beaten a No. 1 team three weeks before that.
Tech’s loss to OU put them out of the national championship picture, but they still held hope in getting an opportunity to play for the conference championship and get to their first BCS bowl game. All it took was OU losing to No. 12 Oklahoma State, whom Tech and UT had already beaten.
A win over No. 12 OSU looks a lot better than a win over UT’s and Tech’s opponents, Texas A&M and Baylor.
But, with OU trailing UT .9209 to .9125 in the BCS rankings, a win over OSU was all but certain to jump them over UT. Guess what happened when the standings came out on Sunday? OU had jumped UT, which put them into the Big XII championship game because of that stupid rule.
So let’s get this straight. UT beats OU and Missouri, yet Missouri – helped by being in the weaker North division – and OU are in the championship. Something needs to be done about this system.
That isn’t the only problem about this situation. In the current BCS format, only two teams are allowed to go to a BCS game from the same conference. So that means that UT will probably be the other representative from the strongest conference in the league, while you have a chance to see Boston College and Cincinnati in a BCS game, which both play in much easier conferences.
Texas Tech is currently ranked seventh, while No. 13 Cincinnati and No. 18 Boston College could be playing in the Orange Bowl. That means that two schools ranked at least five spots behind Texas Tech are going to get possibly $14 million more than Tech. The expected payout for a BCS game is $17 million, while the Cotton Bowl, which Tech is expected to play in, garners a $3 million payout.
Don’t even get me started on Florida having a chance to play for the BCS championship ahead of UT or Texas Tech after losing to a then-unranked Ole Miss team.