This is a blog about the rest of college sports: that is anything outside of the BCS football conferences. Most sports fans can agree that college football is essentially a joke. The BCS system is a nonsense way to crown a national championship that is 2/3 decided by a small amount of coaches and former players many of whom don't even watch the games. Most BCS supporters get upset that computer rankings make up the remaining 1/3 but if you ask me thats the strongest ranking system of the three. A football playoff is THE ONLY way to decide a real national champion. Schools outside the BCS have basically a 0% chance of winning the national championship. In a year when the Utah went 13-0, defeated 3 ranked teams, and ran the table in the MWC's best year that I can remember (3 ranked teams, better than Big East and tied with the ACC. 2 top 10 teams, matching any conference), they still didn't get a sniff at the BCS title game despite being the only undefeated team in Division 1A college football.
Proponents of the BCS will tout that it is a great system because it makes for the best regular season in sports; or that every game matters. What nonsense is this now. Someone tell last year's Utah team, 2006's Boise St. team, or 2004's Auburn team. Those are 3 teams that played a completely meaningless regular season. The fact is a playoff would mean that more regular season games would be meaningful, not fewer. At the very least this blog will take a look at the myth that the NCAA regular season is full of games that matter to the national championship. And to start out we'll cut the teams outside the BCS that aren't on the preseason Top 25 since Utah had about as good a season as a team could but still missed the championship game. They started on the outside looking in until a week one win @ Michigan. Once the preseason coaches poll comes out we'll take a look at the 5 conferences not considered BCS worthy and see which teams' seasons are already over.
Another popular argument for the BCS is that a playoff just isn't possible. Actually it is. D1-AA already has a playoff. . . of 16 teams! There are automatic bids as well as at large bids too, fancy that. This will be the other side of Underdog Love, looking at the awesome concept of a college football league that ends in a playoff. From there we'll compare which sub-division actually has more games that are nationally relevant as far as the championship goes.
That's it for the start of Underdog Love. It's likely this site wont get cooking until the summer. For right now you can join me in rooting for Xavier, Gonzaga, and Memphis in the NCAA basketball tournament. You know, that one where an undefeated record gets you a pretty reasonable shot at a national championship. I suggest you check it out.
For a great blog looking at the non-BCS schools of the basketball world check out www.midmajority.com
