I guess something like, “I applaud what Utah has been able to do _(whispers under his voice, "after the best coach EVAR…me…left”)_ and if it were up to me I would make the system more fair"

follow up question, “but don’t you have a vote in one of the polls that is used as part of the BCS system? You did vote, right? Where did you put Utah?”

ignoring question “theyr’e a heckuva team, a heckuva team”

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/sports_college_uf/2008/11/urban-meyer-tal.html

Then theu SBN Utah site Block U had a thread on it:

http://www.blocku.com/2008/11/17/663948/urban-meyer-hinting-at-sup

He actually said ‘a hell of a team’…. lol
Funny how quickly he found himself on the other side of the fence

because you guys played a Beanie Wells-less who didn’t start Pryor?

Take them out and it becomes 11-13

Gosh, you guys are AWESOME

It’s against every tradition in college football.

after this year, they’d say “hmm, I guess 4 isn’t enough, let’s go to 8 next year”.

I would be interested to know (and it won’t be hard to look up, so maybe I’ll get around to it) the number of teams every year that finish with no more than 1 loss more than the #2 team in the country. I’d bet that it is ~8 or less for pretty much every year (especially in modern era)

And they are in the discussion.

So I’m not following at all.

So what makes Oklahoma so great? Because they beat Missouri and Texas Tech? Who did those two teams beat outside of the conference? A 5-7 Illinois team? Who did Oklahoma beat out of conference? Cincinnati? I put them on par if not worse than Oregon State who has wins over Cal, Arizona State and USC. And how has Oklahoma done in BCS games in recent years?

We only percieve the Big XII to be great because of the lofty preseason rankings. They played lousy out of conference schedules so they were all ranked in the top ten when they played each other. We’ll see how they do in bowl season when they have to leave the nest. I think it’s going to be ugly.

And again, it’s not Penn State’s fault Syracuse went in the tank after they were put on the schedule five years ago. They deserve some credit for putting Oregon State on the schedule last minute. That’s still a better non-conference win than any Big XII team can claim.

Syracuse went 10-3 in 2001. It was just after that they signed the deal to play Penn State in 2008 and 2009.

Go ahead and look it up.

http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/careerteamwinloss

The fall of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois created a power vacuum that has been filled by Northwestern, Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan State. If this changing of the guard is going to be a long term thing it’s going to take some time for it to sink in with the voters.

I love that. No sources too. Lemme try:

You may not like that Boise State is the best team in the land, but those are the facts. I have a bunch sportswriter articles from Idaho to “prove” my point.

There are plenty of people across the country who have different opinions. Any qualified statement such as, “This conference is better than that conference” is an opinion.

You won’t find a more ardent hater of PSU’s non-con scheduling than me, but I will say that in this decade PSU has played on the road at Syracuse, Boston College, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Alabama, and Miami and played the likes of Oregon State, USC, Southern Miss, Virginia, and South Florida at home or neutral sites. All of these teams were highly successful at the time of their scheduling and most maintained that excellence. For all of PSU’s struggles in the middle part of this decade, it never backed out of an opponent when it was clear they would be outmatched.

Frankly, the weakness of PSu’s non-con schedule is a discussion for 2009, not this year.

Penn State played Notre Dame the past two years. Sure they sucked, but they are Notre Dame and I don’t see anyone calling for USC or Michigan to drop them from the schedule. Before that we played Nebraska. Back in the late 90’s we played USC a few times. We also have a series with Alabama coming up and we’re talking to Nebraska about setting up another series after that. To say Penn State is ducking competition is not fair. These are traditional rivals that happen to be going through tough times just as they play Penn State.

You also have to keep in mind that not many SEC schools are willing to come up north and play. By your own argument they don’t have to play tough games out of conference because their conference is so good. So if they aren’t willing to play the Big Ten in the regular season, what are we supposed to do? The bowl games are all we have, and outside of Ohio State’s misfortune the Big Ten has been doing pretty well.

when they are nothing more than the subjective opinions of people who don’t even watch the games for the most part, and who either vote to a) further their agenda (like Urban Meyer), or b) who just follow the general trend, which is essentially laid out by the pre-season polls, which peg where a lot of teams can rise to (based on the ground they have to make up, plus the perceived “quality” of the opponents they played. Just imagine for a second that all the Big 10 teams had artificially high preseason rankings, like say LSU, Georgia, Clemson, Missouri, West Virginia, etc. The teams would have been just as good as they are now, but when we played them it would have “looked” better, and so people would be like, oh, wow, Penn State beat some great teams" and that would have bumped us up further in the rankings.

Using public perception as a means to say how deserving a team is of the national championship is one of the biggest flaws in the system. The fact that teams can put up dominating performances against all their opponents, and have the same record as all the other top schools, yet not even be considered in the talks is one of the dumbest things possible. The only games we didn’t “dominate” were away games against the 7th and 8th ranked scoring defenses in the country. We won one, we lost one (I guess you could say that we didn’t dominate Purdue, either, but there were at least 10 points that we left off the board because of some problems with the turf…but we still won by 14).

And look at the scoring offense and scoring defense ranks of the seven 1-loss teams.
Team / Scoring offense rank / Scoring Defense rank / average rank
Oklahoma / 1 / 57 / 29
Florida / 3 / 5 / 4
Texas / 5 / 20 / 12.5
Alabama / 30 / 6 / 18
USC / 15 / 1 / 8
Texas Tech / 4 / 68 / 36
Penn State / 11 / 4 / 7.5

So it can be argued that the most dominating teams are, in order:
Florida
Penn State
USC
Texas
Alabama
Oklahoma
Texas Tech

All are great teams, but for some reason based on perception which is based off of god knows what (because I can pretty much guarantee that no one has watched all the games of all those teams, and especially of the games of their opponents to figure out where THEY belong) Penn State is completely dismissed from the argument, even though their case is just as valid (or perhaps even more valid) than any other team on that list.

Seven of Penn State’s ten wins came against 5-7 Illinois, 5-7 Temple, 4-8 Purdue, 3-9 Michigan, 3-9 Indiana, 3-9 Syracuse, and FCS Coastal Carolina, whereas four of USC’s wins came against 10-2 Ohio State, 9-3 Oregon, 8-4 Cal, and 7-5 Arizona. Not that it really matters but the argument can be made that the Trojans simply faced a better class of competition throughout the season than the Nittany Lions did this year…Again, to me it doesn’t really mean much as both teams pretty much won the games they should have won except for one in-conference foe on the road.

It happens…

Our two teams are pretty evenly matched…I do not see a blowout for either team in this game. SC gets the advantage for home field (playing in the Rose Bowl) but PSU gets the advantage for having an offense that runs pretty smoothly when compared to USC’s up and down offensive production.

Its gonna be a great game…period!