Iowa will not play for the national championship. They will either A) lose a game or B) get screwed by the voters. At this point I think they will put Boise State in the national championship game over Iowa or any Big Ten team.

I don’t see Texas losing a game. And either Florida or Alabama will go undefeated. Iowa will go to the Rose Bowl, and We’ll probably end up playing Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl.

Boise, TCU, Florida or Bama, and Texas will all go undefeated. Cincy could too, but I have a feeling they will lose one. The Florida-Bama winner will play Texas for the MNC largely because they started the season at the top. Iowa will play the Oregon-SC winner in the Rose. TCU will have a better resume than Boise and thus play in a BCS game, likely the Fiesta.

It’s that they weren’t ranked in the top 5. PSU would be a left-out at 12-0 this season if tx and fl/ab win out against their very mediocre remaining schedules.

a subpar offense and injured running game.

But I agree that this stuff can be fun to think about. I more or less think the “anti big ten bias” is valid, at least in as much as it would serve to put Iowa behind the winner of the SEC and Texas, should both those teams stay undefeated. Nevertheless, if Iowa is undefeated and left out of the title game—and goes on to win their bowl game against a worthy opponent—say a one-loss USC or the one-loss SEC runner up—than I think we’ve got the best case yet in arguing that the BCS sucks.

My favorite wrinkle on that is to think if the fact that its Iowa—a state with a uniquely powerful position in our electoral politics—will have any bearing on how the whole college playoff system debate vis a vis politics happens going foward. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) held a hearing about the absurdity of the BCS earlier this year—as Utah got screwed last year—but Iowa, as a rep. of the big ten and as a more important state politically than Utah—might make more traction.

If Iowa makes the MNC, I don’t think it necessarily signals that the worry about preseason rankings are irrelevant. As long as the pre-season rankings can be shown to be a) full of bs—which they are and b) somewhat determinative of the final BCS rankings, then I think they remain worrisome.

is winning the least you can do to be a champion.

It’s been said one hundred gazillion times: the system sucks.

I’m in the minority in thinking the government has to intervene. You’re talking about LOTS of money being exchanged between public (some private) institutions and corporations, utilizing facilities paid by taxpayers, student athletes who are basically used (and treated sometimes) as slaves for corporate and broadcast benefits (without pay), exclusion of smaller universities from profits, questionable accountability of conference leaders and university presidents (most considered to be government employees) and gasp referees, and over all collusion between entities stated above that prevents fair competition in favor of $$$.

A lot of people say sports should be the least of the government’s worries, but college football is a running monopoly and a business that operates to the detriment of quality to a sport that means so much to a lot of people.

isn’t going to stop the whining. Do you think that in a playoff situation South Carolina isn’t going to spend the rest of the year complaining about how they were screwed by the refs? Or the rankings that kept a team out at spot #13. Or the weather, or a turnover, or an injury.
Yes, it’s more definative than what we have now, but everyone will never be happy.

How about this. We use the BCS to rank every bowl eligible team 1 to ~64. Then the bowl matchups are dictated purely by 1v2(title game) 3v4, 5v6, until all 32 bowls are filled up.

The only way this changes is if a conference has two teams slotted for the same game, then they would switch with the next one. i.e) if Iowa ends at 9 and we end at 10, Iowa would play 11 and we would play 12 instead.

The order that the bowls receive these teams would be similar to now. There would be a few tiers of bowls, and the games within those tiers would rotate yearly. I.e) after the Title game, the other BCS games get the 3-10 matchups. The rose, orange, sugar and fiesta would rotate who gets the 3-4 game and so forth. The next tier would be the cotton, capitol one, etc.

This way, we get different bowl matchups every year instead of the same stale conference tie-ins. Every game would be about as evenly matched as can be predicted and it would be kind of exciting to see the final standings to find out where your team is headed to play.

I would like to see a playoff, but putting that aside, the #1 thing I want to destroy are conference tie-ins, it is so freaking boring playing the same conferences and teams year in and year out.

Do you really think Iowa could defeat Florida, Bama or Texas?

I mean, I think their defense is pretty good, but I don’t see their offense scoring many points on any of those teams….. well maybe Texas.

They have Ohio State’s grind-it-out style from their MNC year not long ago. Miami was supposed to KILL Ohio State that year because Ohio State was viewed as less of a complete team.

Here’s the problem: voters see Iowa as having a defense, but no offense. There are no shades of gray. Suppose Iowa’s D-line is good enough to get pressure on whoever they’d play in a bowl…so much so that their pedestrian offense can still be enough to win. Voters would never see that. They just see “good offense, no defense. Can’t win without Nintendo offense. They don’t deserve to play in the game end of story.” It’s a shame and a playoff would fix it.

1986 Good guys, 1992 Alabama, 2002 Ohio State

Also interesting.
1985 Oklahoma beats Penn State for a national championship
1986 Penn State beats Miami for a national championship
1987 Miami beats Oklahoma for a national championship

don’t say this to anyone who thinks the spread option is something new.