The Living Room Times

College football season is almost underway — the first games are on Thursday, and opening Saturday is one week from today — and it could be a banner year for that favorite Brendan Loy hobby-horse, the mid-majors’ endless quixotic struggle to “bust the BCS.” In the wake of Utah’s virtuoso performance last January vs. the OMG-It’s-A-War conference’s runner-up, Alabama, and their resulting #2 ranking in the final polls, the little guys are getting more respect heading into the season than ever before. The preseason coaches‘ and sportswriters‘ polls each have four — count ’em, four! — non-BCS-conference teams in the Top 25: Boise State (#16/14), TCU (#17), Utah (#18/19), and BYU (#24/20).

That quartet of teams has thus already taken the first step toward BCS glory, one that usually eludes mid-majors until midseason, when they’re belatedly elevated into the ranks of the elite because so many power-conference teams have played their way down the rankings. This year, it’s different: the Broncos, Horned Frogs, Utes and Mormons Cougars have an unprecedentedly good starting position to begin the BCS race. It’s not a “head start,” but it’s closer to a level playing field than we usually see. These teams don’t have to start 8-0 just to get into the conversation.

So… what does this mean? I think it means we can realistically talk about whether one of these teams could make a national championship run.

Preseason articles about mid-majors usually focus on the question, “Can they earn a BCS bowl berth?” But the answer to that question is an obvious “yes,” for all four teams. In fact, just about anybody can earn a BCS berth if they go undefeated, provided there aren’t any other non-BCS teams ahead of them. Take last year’s Ball State squad — if they’d beaten Buffalo in the MAC title game, and thereby finished 13-0, they would have been ranked high enough to go BCS bowling. The only thing that would have stopped them? Utah, Boise State and possibly TCU would have been ranked higher. But if they’d been the highest-ranked mid-major, their undefeated record against a weak schedule in an unheralded conference would have been enough. Bottom line, the system is now set up in such a way that the highest-ranked undefeated non-BCS team, from whatever conference, with whatever schedule (cough cough, Hawaii ’07), will get a BCS berth, unless they finish behind a one- or two-loss non-BCS team that’s better respected, in which case that team will get the berth. So there’s really no use wasting our time wondering whether there will be a BCS buster this year. Yes, there will, unless nobody goes undefeated and the Mountain West really cannibalizes itself.

The far more interesting question is, can one of the Big Four — Boise State, TCU, Utah or BYU — rise by season’s end, not just into the BCS Top 14, but into the BCS Top 2, and thus earn a spot in the national championship game? In past years, this has been a pipe dream (albeit one that I’ve occasionally blogged about at length, notwithstanding its unlikeliness), but this season, because of these teams’ starting positions in the polls, it’s actually a legitimate possibility, if things break just right.

Let’s break it down team by team. Continue reading →