The Living Room Times

I just wrote an e-mail to Stewart Mandel’s podcast about the possibility of Boise State, having been leap(horned)frogged in the polls and BCS standings by TCU, being left out of not just the national title game, but the big-money bowls altogether. This is the same fear as last year, except: 1) It’s more likely to actually happen, because it doesn’t look likely that all of the other attractive at-large candidates will drop like flies, as they did last year — and also the Fiesta Bowl, the most Boise-friendly of the BCS bowls, has the last at-large pick, and thus will be saddled with Pittsburgh and so can’t help Boise; and 2) If it does happen, it’ll be a much bigger scandal, what with Boise being potentially on a 26-game winning streak, ranked #3 in the country (if TCU is #2), having been in the national title discussion all year, etc.

I’m now half-rooting for a Oregon-or-Auburn vs. TCU national title game — with the Horned Frogs winning — while Boise gets relegated to the Kraft Hunger Bowl, or else not bowling at all, I outline below. That double-whammy, with a team that Boise beat last year (with basically the same players), a team that’s at best a hairbreadth ahead of them in the standings based on a totally subjective determination of merit, winning the national championship, while Boise isn’t even offered a seat at the kids’ table, has to be the worst-case scenario for the BCS, because it would simultaneously prove that, yes, the little guys can compete with the big boys on the biggest stage, and yet also that they don’t have a fair shot at doing so. The debate over whether it’s better for BCS-haters to root for or against the “little guy” thus ends with the answer: Both! We can have our cake and eat it too.

Anyway, rather than doing a whole new blog post about this issue, I thought, for now, I’d just publish my e-mail to Mandel:

Stewart,

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we’ve gone from debating Boise State’s championship merits to wondering, just like we did last year, whether they’ll get passed over by the BCS altogether, and dumped in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl against either 6-6 Cal or some at-large team?  Ugh.

A couple of thoughts on this.  First, I wonder whether those who are projecting that the Sugar Bowl will pick Ohio State over Boise State are adequately considering the enormous political pressures that such a scenario would bring to bear.  Normally, I’m the first person to assume that the BCS bowls will take the path of maximum revenue, whatever the merits, without regard for any notion of fairness or justice.  And I understand that the Sugar Bowl, which holds the key to this whole thing, is desperate for a high-powered matchup the likes of which they haven’t had since LSU vs. Notre Dame in 2007, what with Hawaii and Utah and Cincinnati crashing the party the last three years.  But at the same time… leaving a potentially #3-ranked Boise State team on the curb, while giving bids (of necessity, by rule, but most people don’t understand that) to a possibly unranked Big East champ and a Virginia Tech team Boise beat, plus (voluntarily) a pair of teams that didn’t win their conference (obviously it would help if those teams have 2 losses instead of 1 — GO BIG TEN NOVEMBER CHAOS!), would be an absolute nuclear bomb dropped on the budding antitrust situation, wouldn’t it?  Utah AG Mark Shurtleff could hardly dream up a better scenario.  Nor could Dan Wetzel, for his book sale numbers.  Here’s a team on a 26-game winning streak, that’s won BCS bowls 2 of the last 4 years, with basically the same starting lineup as last year’s team that beat both TCU and Oregon (your potential national title contenders), a team that we’ve been talking about as a national title contender all year, and suddenly they’re going to…. the Kraft Hunger Bowl?!?!?  It’s unfathomable.

…so unfathomable that the pressure on the Sugar Bowl to “do the right thing” might be too much to overcome.  Not BECAUSE it’s the right thing, of course, but because the very survival of the BCS could be at stake.  If unbeaten, 26-game-winning-streak-holding, #3-ranked Boise is left out, and sent packing to a fourth-tier bowl, that might finally be the tipping point that kills the BCS, the trigger — because it primarily involves money, not competitive national-title nonsense — that gets the government involved, or at least seriously threatening to get involved if the BCS doesn’t change its ways.

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