Ouch. Not the best Saturday for you. This will also derail any shot of the Mountain West shot at becoming a BCS conference. Losing to an ACC team will do that, fair or not. I’m with you. Sigh.
Utah lost to Oregon too, right? I was hoping that BYU/Utah was going to be a national game with national title implications. Alas. Like I said, today was not a good day to be the comissioner of the Mountain West.
Brendan Loy
Indeed. Though it was a great day to be Boise State. Between Oregon winning, and Utah and BYU losing, the Broncos are now most definitely the “BCS buster” front-runners.
C. Bassett
The MWC still has some hope with TCU. I think that they could potentially overtake even an undefeated Boise State in the polls. TCU seems incapable of getting through a season without a loss(five 2 loss seasons and one 1 loss season this decade, and their last undefeated season was 71 years ago), but they’ve got a lot of potential. They play @ Clemson next week.
Brendan Loy
TCU certainly has a chance to go BCS bowling, but I can’t see them reaching the national championship game. As I wrote in my preseason overview of the mid-majors’ title hopes, TCU has the weakest nonconference schedule of the Mountain West’s “big three,” as well as the weakest “street cred” based on their name, so their title hopes were always dependent upon the conference itself being hugely well-respected, such that their wins over Utah and BYU would be enough to vault them into consideration. With the Utes and Cougars losing in nonconference play today — the Cougars in a rout that’s even more deflating after all the (deserved) post-Oklahoma hype, the Utes to a Pac-10 team that most pundits don’t really consider elite — I can’t see that happening.
But yes, TCU and Boise are now the front-runners for “BCS buster” status. If they both falter, then it gets interesting. Does Houston or Southern Miss claim the spot if one of them goes undefeated, or does a one-loss Mountain West champion get it, by virtue of their early poll position? Or does nobody get it? I seriously doubt the latter — I think one-loss BYU or Utah finishes in the Top 14, or if not, then in the Top 18 and ahead of the Big East/ACC champ. For there to be no “BCS buster,” I think it would take no mid-major going undefeated + the Mountain West champ having two losses + possibly Boise having two losses (depending on when they lose).
Brendan Loy
(Let us remember — I sometimes forget this — that only non-BCS conference champions are eligible for the auto bid. This could become relevant in a three-way tie situation in the Mountain West, though I don’t know what their tiebreakers are. But anyway, it’s not like Utah, BYU and TCU will all be competing for “buster” status at season’s end, based on their BCS ranking. Whoever is the Mountain West’s champion, THAT team will be competing against the WAC champ, the C-USA champ, etc.)
Well, so much for all of my BYU national championship talk. *sigh*
Ouch. Not the best Saturday for you. This will also derail any shot of the Mountain West shot at becoming a BCS conference. Losing to an ACC team will do that, fair or not. I’m with you. Sigh.
Utah lost to Oregon too, right? I was hoping that BYU/Utah was going to be a national game with national title implications. Alas. Like I said, today was not a good day to be the comissioner of the Mountain West.
Indeed. Though it was a great day to be Boise State. Between Oregon winning, and Utah and BYU losing, the Broncos are now most definitely the “BCS buster” front-runners.
The MWC still has some hope with TCU. I think that they could potentially overtake even an undefeated Boise State in the polls. TCU seems incapable of getting through a season without a loss(five 2 loss seasons and one 1 loss season this decade, and their last undefeated season was 71 years ago), but they’ve got a lot of potential. They play @ Clemson next week.
TCU certainly has a chance to go BCS bowling, but I can’t see them reaching the national championship game. As I wrote in my preseason overview of the mid-majors’ title hopes, TCU has the weakest nonconference schedule of the Mountain West’s “big three,” as well as the weakest “street cred” based on their name, so their title hopes were always dependent upon the conference itself being hugely well-respected, such that their wins over Utah and BYU would be enough to vault them into consideration. With the Utes and Cougars losing in nonconference play today — the Cougars in a rout that’s even more deflating after all the (deserved) post-Oklahoma hype, the Utes to a Pac-10 team that most pundits don’t really consider elite — I can’t see that happening.
But yes, TCU and Boise are now the front-runners for “BCS buster” status. If they both falter, then it gets interesting. Does Houston or Southern Miss claim the spot if one of them goes undefeated, or does a one-loss Mountain West champion get it, by virtue of their early poll position? Or does nobody get it? I seriously doubt the latter — I think one-loss BYU or Utah finishes in the Top 14, or if not, then in the Top 18 and ahead of the Big East/ACC champ. For there to be no “BCS buster,” I think it would take no mid-major going undefeated + the Mountain West champ having two losses + possibly Boise having two losses (depending on when they lose).
(Let us remember — I sometimes forget this — that only non-BCS conference champions are eligible for the auto bid. This could become relevant in a three-way tie situation in the Mountain West, though I don’t know what their tiebreakers are. But anyway, it’s not like Utah, BYU and TCU will all be competing for “buster” status at season’s end, based on their BCS ranking. Whoever is the Mountain West’s champion, THAT team will be competing against the WAC champ, the C-USA champ, etc.)