04/25/24
May 23, 2010
If Troy Falls, Auburn Should Be Champs: As the college football world awaits the ultimate ruling on whether or not USC will be hit with severe NCAA penalties and, beyond that, whether those penalties will include a forfeiture of the 2004 national title, the BCS has already announced that there is a system in place to remove a title.
I really hate that there are preseason rankings in college football in polls that matter that affect how things are decided at the end of the season. I'm not sure how I feel about selecting a champion from the other competitors in the event that the winner of the championship game is stripped of their title, but given the way that the college football champion is crowned, it wouldn't be out of the norm at all. In this situation, Auburn is clearly deserving.
posted by bender at 10:58 AM on May 23, 2010
2004 was Auburn's year. The preseason rankings should mean less than nothing.
posted by yzelda4045 at 08:29 AM on May 24, 2010
I don't think the preseason rankings do mean anything. It is the reluctance of the voters to change their preseason rankings unless a team loses that causes the problem.
posted by bperk at 08:46 AM on May 24, 2010
I don't think the preseason rankings do mean anything. It is the reluctance of the voters to change their preseason rankings unless a team loses that causes the problem.
That is exactly the reason that they are a problem. Auburn was ranked lowly in the preseason and didn't work their way past USC and Oklahoma because those two didn't lose. Naturally, with 3 teams going undefeated, one of them was going to be left out, but Auburn was a better team that Oklahoma and should have been in the championship game. The low preseason ranking is the reason they didn't get there.
posted by bender at 11:15 AM on May 24, 2010
I'm not really disagreeing with you. The thing is you can't really stop the AP from issuing pre-season rankings. Hopefully, though you can encourage the voters to issue rankings anew without considering where they were the previous week. The BCS doesn't start ranking until a little later in the year.
posted by bperk at 01:43 PM on May 24, 2010
I think you can, though. If the NCAA were to go to AP and the Harris Poll and say, "We want to continue using your poll in our BCS rankings, but you have to wait until October before you publish your first one," I think they would go along. If not, NCAA would devise a new poll (like they did a few years ago with the Harris Poll when the Coaches' Poll wanted out) and things would move along.
posted by bender at 04:01 PM on May 24, 2010
If there was ever a case to be made for retroactively crowning a champion, Auburn's 2004 team would be it. They steamrolled through the season and were only kept out of the championship game because of the unfair practice of ranking teams authoritatively before they've played a single down.