1) One tendency that always drives me crazy in college football will manifest itself tonight when the latest polls come out: Fresno State played USC to the wire, could have won that game, and gave the two-time defending champs and one of the greatest college football teams of all time their greatest challenge yet. Fresno State came into the game ranked 16th. Anyone who cares about football would have to say that they closed that gap, and despite the loss they deserve to be ranked higher. What will happen? Everyone who votes will look at the end result and in knee-jerk fashion will drop Fresno a few spots. That is absurd. Fresno does not deserve to drop from 16th to, say, 20th.
2) I think I am the only person in the country left who feels this way, so take it for what it is worth, but if I had a vote for the Heisman Trophy I would vote for Matt Leinart. Don't get me wrong -- Reggie Bush is an awesome, awesome talent. But the burden of running that team, of making sure that winning streak is intact, of defending the championship again, all fall on Leinart's shoulders. He has been a rock for that team, and everyone seems willing to forget Bush's 80 yard games while elevating performances like last night, despite the fact that on two connected plays last night Bush jeopardized that winning streak -- the first on a return in which he fumbled, the second on a personal foul on the subsequent kickoff return after FSU scored as a result of the short field Bush's fumble gave them. Of course if USC loses to UCLA and Texas finishes the pre-Bowl season strong, Vince Young will walk away with the trophy.
3) I do not want to hear any more about the supposed "East Coast Bias" prevalent in sports. Here is the deal: It is not the east coast media's fault that the bulk of the population and media lives east of the Mississippi. And so if you have a game with the #1 and #16 teams in the country, and it is on the west coast, and you schedule that game for 7:45 local time, guess what? No one is going to get to see it. I live in Texas, far from the centers of east coast bias, and here that game ended at 1:30 am. It ended at 2:30 on the East Coast. Dumb scheduling on your part isn't the rest of the country's problem.
4) Supporters of the BCS are going to claim that their bizarre system works if USC and Texas end up undefeated. Really? Is anyone else asking whether or not a system really works when the #16 ranked team in the country can take the supposed clear #1 down to the last minute? Shouldn't we ask ourselves if maybe, just maybe, teams that play different conference schedules and widely variant nonconference schedules should not have their seasons judged by the simplistic matrix of going undefeated or not? And if that is our standard wouldn't it be wise to look at other NCAA sports and see if in, say, the last five years the team going into the postseason tournament with the best regular season record won it all? And if the answer is "no," shouldn't we be more than a bit curious why we then think that such a reductionist plan works for NCAA DI football? I'm just asking. I am always shocked when announcers and pundits who have been wrong as often as they have been right in their pronouncements and predictions over the course of a season pronounce with certainty that the system worked if two undefeated teams match up at the end of the season. A 16 team playoff is the only viable solution.
5) I just realized that I will be in South Africa for the entirety of the bowl season. I leave December 12 and get back January 16th. Maybe I should be easier on West Coast teams for dumb scheduling. Nah.
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