and the more I think about the BCS thing the more likely it seems to me that it will be needed. With two misses a year and all these cupcake wins everyone is scheduling, there probably aren’t going to be a lot of situations where teams have the same BT record but a different one overall.

Say Minny does go to the Rose Bowl in that scenario, but us and Ohio State are like 11-1 teams. We’ll I’d almost declare that a good thing, b/c who-ever wins the head-to-head will get a sweet BCS bid. Hell both teams might get a bid in that case.

I’ll just say it: I hate the Rose Bowl. I think having a conference tie-in to a BCS game is the stupidest thing ever. I would much rather have played Alabama or Texas or even Utah then any PAC-10 team. In my mind Ohio State lost at home to us, but still claimed the B10 title, and got a better BCS game.

PSU used to be an independent team, a team that didn’t have affiliations and so we built really cool rivalries all over the country. Alabama, WVU, Miami, FSU, ND… but now we’re in the stupid B10. So we give up all those traditional matchups for these teams I could care less about, our damn AD won’t schedule any of them OOC, and to top it off we have 0 chance of playing any of them in a BCS bowl game b/c unless it’s the NC game we HAVE to play a PAC-10 team (oh, unless we don’t actually win the conference but are good enough to get a bid).

It’s like if you’re not going undefeated and to the NC game, you might as well drop a game to get T-1st in the B10 so you can go out and play a game people actually want to see.

I’ve done this before, but put our normal Big Ten Schedule up against our old 1980’s schedules. The Big Ten schedule is tougher, every year.

Even if you assume we played Alabama and Notre Dame every year (even though we didn’t), now we play Ohio State and Michigan every year. 9 years out of 10 that’s at least a wash, keep in mind that Alabama has been good for exactly two of the past 15 years. OSU and Michigan (and Penn State and probably Wisconsin too) have been much better than both Alabama and Notre Dame since we joined the Big Ten.

The rest of our so called traditional rivals were nothing more than peice of shit schools we bullied up and down the easter seaboard. While everyone always says we used to play Alabama every year, they ignore that we played Cincinnati just as often, if not more so, during that period of time. There was also no shortage of East Carolinas, Browns and William & Marys on those schedules as well.

It’s a down year for the Big Ten and this is the off year schedule. Don’t want your season tickets anymore? I’ll take them, and never give them back.

This is not a Penn State problem. This is a college football problem. Penn State isn’t doing anything different than what every other BCS school is doing. Look at the out of conference schedules for the Big XII south last year. They were a joke too.

Would it be better to play Baylor, Iowa State, Washington, and Virginia or Akron, Eastern Illinois, Syracuse and Temple?

One group of teams is ranked 40-60 in the nation. The others are ranked 80-110. Does it really matter? We should beat them all, but both schedules are horrible.

same with the ‘Cuse — we didn’t know they’d we the worst team in the worst conference when we scheduled them… But looking forward, Virginia and Nebraska are both teams that could suffer a similar fate. I know Nebraska turned it around a little this season, but I’m not sure about Virginia. I get the feeling one of those two teams is going to be a repeat of what happened with Syracuse.

They were supposed to be our marquee matchup in 08 and 09. They were just coming off a 10-3 year when we signed that contract. Who knew Greg Robinson was going to run them into the ground over the next five years? And give PSU some credit for going out and getting Oregon State last year to make up for it.

My biggest complaint is not that we schedule cupcakes. It’s that we schedule the weakest cupcakes out there. I would rather play the bottom feeders of the ACC, SEC, Big East and Big XII than play the bottom feeders of the MAC and FCS.

I find it ridiculous that we added in the “BCS rank” as a tiebreaker after what we saw happened in the Big 12 last year, but when I try to think of a better tiebreaker (one that has a higher probability of sending the better team to the BCS game) I can’t think of anything. As much as I gripe about the BCS system, and even the BCS formula, it at least does a decent job of things. It even takes into account SOS (explicitly through the computer rankings, and implicitly through the human polls), which should be some deterrent against scheduling cupcakes.

I think having the “team with most FBS opponents” should have been a good deterrent against scheduling the cupcakes, but it obviously doesn’t work out as all the big teams still do it. And in the end, what really matters is W’s, and teams see that (plus the added bonus of the extra $$$ with the extra home game), and so we keep getting all these wonderful FCS schools on our schedule. What they should really do is just have a blanket rule that games against FCS schools don’t count at all in the rankings systems, and are just used as exhibition games (or just ban them completely).

Having a season with 3 or more undefeated teams isn’t that common, and I don’t see any undefeated BCS team being jumped by a 1-loss team (though who knows with the way the Big 10 has looked the past couple years). I do agree, though, that amongst other teams with similar records, unless we win all our games by an average margin of 40 points, we’ll be snubbed.

But just look at last year, with pretty much as poor an OOC schedule. We jumped up to #3 in the country, and if we hadn’t lost to Iowa, we would have been in the MNC game. It just goes to show that having a poor OOC schedule won’t hurt you if you win more games than any other team. And heck, even if we had a good OOC schedule, if we still come across as the 3rd best undefeated team (because maybe we didn’t blow out our opponents as much), we’ll still get snubbed.

or is that reaching just to bring the picture back into it?

Penn State would completely cease scheduling home-and-home matchups with decent teams. You’d have alternating years of four home conference games and three abject pansies in the non-con, or five home conference games with three abject pansies in the non-con. You’d never see another top 20 team come to Beaver Stadium again, and for damned sure, you’d never see PSU playing a tough away game before October.

If they’re going to add games, just go to ten conference games and two cupcakes. Doesn’t that fix the math problem from a scheduling standpoint? From a monetary standpoint, it would never happen. The big boys of the conference would want those eight home games every other year.

…if the cupcake OOC games were not selling out at Beaver Stadium. But they are. So sure, while they’re not getting the national media hype, they’re still getting the same $$$ in ticket revenue. That’s all they care about. If people want to encourage them not to keep scheduling cupcakes, and to start scheduling teams that at least have a pulse, then they shouldn’t buy tickets to those cupcake games. But if you’ve already bought your season tickets, then they already have your money, whether or not you show up. They couldn’t care less about having 105,000 in the stands (but all the tickets paid for) vs having 110,000 in the stands. Probably what will have to happen before they change their habits is they’ll have to get burned, and lose out on a BCS bid or an MNC bid. If they lose out on a few million dollars by missing out on a big bowl game because of their cupcake schedule, maybe they’d realize it’s not such a wise investment.

and we are shamed by it.