The Nation’s Media Mourns for the Big East
By Will
Following Thursday’s Rutgers vs. South Florida Big East matchup, at least two national writers lamented that the Bulls were out of the national title race while one-loss teams from more established Bowl Championship Series conferences lived to fight another day.
We’ve no problem with this sentiment, generally. Perhaps it is unfair that Oklahoma, Louisiana State, and Southern California, to name a few, can still dream of a national title while the best West Virginia and South Florida can hope for is a BCS bowl berth. Perhaps it’s also unfair the Big East champion only plays seven conference games while the champions from the SEC, Big 12, ACC, and Pac 10 play nine and the Big 10 champion plays eight.
The point, of course, is the BCS isn’t fair. This is no newsflash. Each team and each conference faces unique difficulties. In such a flawed system, the only time a team can really complain about not getting a title shot is to go undefeated. We can understand Boise State’s frustrations with its glass ceiling, sympathize with our SEC brethren Auburn’s plight in 2004-5, and wonder what else that Kerry Collins-led Penn State team could have done to get a piece of the national title. But we don’t feel sorry for South Florida or West Virgina.
But ESPN’s Mark Schlabach and Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel certainly do. As noted, we’ve no beef with this sentiment. But we do have a beef with inconsistency.
Schlabach writes that an upstart program in a rebuilt league won’t get the second chance an SEC member gets:
The Tigers were given the benefit of the doubt a week ago, after the country’s No. 1-ranked team lost at No. 17 Kentucky 43-37 in triple overtime. LSU fell to only No. 5 in the human polls and was fourth in the BCS standings.
Cal’s surprising defeat to Oregon State last week was the 10th time a top-10 ranked team had lost to an unranked team during this unpredictable college football season. The Bulls became the 11th such victim on Thursday night.
But South Florida will be penalized more than LSU. And more than Oklahoma, which lost at Colorado 27-24 on Sept. 29. The Sooners are back to No. 5 in the BCS standings after beating Texas and Missouri in consecutive games.
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Mandel makes similar points:
When you’re an LSU or Oklahoma, you can lose a tough conference road game, brush it off and return to the top five within a couple weeks as if it never happened. When you’re USF, and you lose a tough conference road game just four days after an already skeptical set of voters tabbed you the No. 2 team in the country almost as an obligation, you can expect the court of public opinion to be somewhat less merciful.
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Such is the still fragile state of the rebuilt Big East. When Kentucky beats LSU, it’s written off as a near-inevitability in the rough-and-tumble SEC. When Rutgers beats USF — just a couple weeks after losing to then-undefeated Cincinnati, which itself turned around and lost to Louisville — it’s an indictment against both program and conference.
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Those polls and computers can be awfully harsh about losses to Rutgers.
If only you’d lost instead to Kentucky.
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Leaving aside the fact LSU’s resume is more impressive than South Florida’s — wins versus then-No. 9* and current No. 11 Virginia Tech, then-No. 12 and current No. 6 South Carolina, and then-No. 9 and current No. 14 Florida with a loss at then-No. 17 and current No. 8 Kentucky versus wins at then-No. 17 and current No. 18 Auburn and then-No. 5 and current No. 9 West Virginia with a loss at unranked Rutgers (Sagarin Rating: 38) — we’d just like to see consistency.
For his part, Schlabach left the Cats for dead after their Thursday night road loss to then-No. 11 South Carolina two weeks ago. He certainly wasn’t concerned the Cats would plummet from the top ten just because they lost to a good team on the road — indeed, he suggested they deserved to by stating they weren’t ready to compete for the SEC East. And when Kentucky did just that and dropped from No. 8 to No. 17, we certainly don’t recall Mandel writing that Kentucky — a program with little noteworthy football history, kind of like South Florida — was being unfairly penalized because it lost a road game after a short week to non-traditional power South Carolina — a program whose rise over the last few seasons is not unlike that of Rutgers.
We also doubt either writer will protest when upstarts Arizona State of the Pac 10 and Kansas of the Big 12 suffer their first losses and plummet in the polls, either.
Oh well. Poor out a little liquor for the Big East’s title chances.
*For simplicity’s sake, we used Associated Press rankings here.