There is a new champion in college football and hardly anyone outside of Gainesville, Florida seems all that thrilled about it.
Certainly there is always going to be a little jealousy creeping in anytime someone other than your favorite team wins something of consequence. Thus a little bashing of the Florida Gators, or whoever else might have found themselves in their position, is expected. But this season, just as the season before it and the season before that, the din has grown louder for a playoff system for Division I football. And this season, just as the season before it and the season before that, the folks who bring about the Bowl Championship Series could care less about your concerns.
What most people forget, however, is that Division I already has a playoff system so arguing about creating one is misplaced. The real problem that never gets articulated is that the current playoff system is too restrictive. It’s basically a two-team playoff with those teams picked by a confusing amalgamation of polls.
At some point, the critics of the BCS will get their way. In the current economic environment almost anything that at one time seemed unimaginable is likely to happen. It is easy to envision a collapse of the sacred bowl system on a purely fiscal basis, which would eliminate the major obstacle to a more expansive playoff. But even if that doesn’t happen, eventually those who really control sports in this country, the broadcast networks, will force a comprehensive playoff system on the naysayers and protectionists that refuse to budge to logic and reason.
But until that happens, the best way to fix the BCS is to simply abolish it. On pure merits, a one game playoff will always yield far more controversy than it will solve. There simply is no way to satisfy the number of teams with a claim on one of two slots and far too many variations and lack of comparators to ever insure that those voting in these polls will get the top two teams correct.
This season is instructive but nearly any season in the past 10 would do. To my eyes, USC was the best team I’ve seen this season. I understand they lost to Oregon State, which lost to Penn State. I understand, too, that their head coach, Pete Carroll, keeps finding a way to underprepare his team at least once a season which leads to them being on the outside looking in more often than not. But having watched USC dismantle both Penn State and Ohio State this season, it was easy to see that this is a team with far more talent from top to bottom and side to side than any other team in the country.
Maybe you’re one of those that believe that wins against Big Ten teams are meaningless. But having watched Ohio State do everything right but win against, first Penn State and then a Texas team that was far more highly ranked convinced me that Ohio State wasn’t nearly the patsy that many believed.
The SEC had their share of good teams, including the national champion, again this year. Florida is clearly a very good team. But is it just another good team made better because of the presence of college football’s best player, Tim Tebow? Oklahoma seemed unstoppable heading into the game with Florida, despite its one loss. But a team averaging 50 points a game or more for a good part of the season couldn’t get more than 14 on Thursday night. Florida, too, was having its way with every team prior to Oklahoma, almost scoring at will against them, and yet only managed 24 points against a highly suspect Oklahoma defense.
And let’s not forget about Utah. They dominated Alabama, a number one team for a healthy part of the season.
The point, though, is not to trash any of these teams or to argue against Florida this year. It’s simply to note that the outcome of the Florida-Oklahoma game solved nothing. Florida is still a one-loss team, just like USC and Texas. Utah is still undefeated. Each has a legitimate argument for why it’s better than the other, even if you don’t share their viewpoint.
It’s not as if anyone outside of those with a vested interest in the BCS system thought that the outcome of the Florida-Oklahoma game would solve anything going in. Thus it’s not a surprise they still feel that way coming out. In other words, it’s pure fantasy to say that whoever wins the BCS national championship game is an undisputed champion. It’s not designed to yield that result, no matter its claims.
Given what’s undeniable, why play the game at all? If a playoff in major college football is too logistically complicated for this nation to solve, a nation that solved the logistics of landing men on the moon and getting a package from Anchorage to Poughkeepsie overnight by the way, then stop trying. Stop acting as if the worst thing in life is different polls crowning a different teams number one.
The argument against the BCS is all the more compelling when you consider the unintended consequences this convoluted system has created. Essentially, the BCS system has chosen to sacrifice the value of a winning a conference championship in its quest to bring relevance to one game being played later and later each January. At the same time it’s also rendered meaningless every other bowl game except the self-titled National Championship game.
From a fan’s perspective, there simply is nothing meaningful about winning the Big Ten anymore, as an example. All it does is get you in the Rose Bowl. It doesn’t necessarily get a team a leg up on getting into the BCS title game. Indeed, given how little respected the Big Ten is these days, being the Big Ten champ carries all the prestige of being the prettiest girl in shop class.
The same goes for the Pac 10. If any major conference is less appreciated than the Big Ten it’s the Pac 10. USC is almost always a good team and the rest are almost always not. USC has its way in that conference every year, well in every year in which they take each game seriously anyway. It wasn’t the loss to Oregon State that kept USC out of the National Championship game, it was the lack of respect pollsters have for the conference.
But if there was no BCS at all, and it’s not hard to remember when that was the case, winning the conference carried not only prestige but a real chance to be crowned number one by someone, even if not by a consensus. This year’s Rose Bowl would have taken on far more meaning for both Penn State and USC and would have carried far greater implications if it had been on equal footing with all of the major bowl games. But since there was a BCS National Championship game looming with two other teams, it carried all the significance of a Randy Lerner press conference. The same is absolutely true of the Sugar Bowl game between Alabama and Utah. While it may have been sort of fun to watch Utah dominate a SEC team, it carried no meaning.
What I miss most are the days when there was a compelling reason to watch the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl. Now those games are just pictures at an exhibition with the added benefit to the teams of a lot of cash to keep them wedded to the current system.
When the presidents of the major conferences and their surrogates at the BCS say they aren’t interested in a playoff, they really are saying they aren’t interested in bringing certainty. Fine, then it would be great if they’d stop pretending they are by foisting a compromise on the public each year that is actually makes the problem worse, not better. Jettison the BCS games as the failed experiment they have become and really restore meaning to the bowl games you claim to you’re trying to protect in the first place.
Showing posts with label Florida Gators. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Florida Gators. Show all posts
Friday, January 09, 2009
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
A Desert Disaster
The scene is eerily familiar, only this time the local fans don’t have the same rooting interest.
It was a little over a year ago when an undefeated team with but a few close calls during the regular season found its way playing for a championship in the Arizona desert. That team featured the top quarterback, indeed the top player in the game at least that season, and enough skill players surrounding him to make opposing coaches drool. To the extent that the media can ever reach a consensus on anything, it did this time. No doubt this team would finish what they had started and would be anointed one of the great teams of all time.
Making matters seem all that much more inevitable, its opponent was not highly regarded and was thought, at best, to be maybe a year or two away from being a serious contender for a championship. The opponent featured some intriguing players, to be sure, but had barely won its conference. There was also a double digit point spread to contend with. In short, but for a few contrarians dotting the landscape, mainly in the team’s hometown, no one else gave them much of a chance.
But the Florida Gators turned into the little team that could and handily wiped the carpet with the Ohio State Buckeyes at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, capping an improbable year for the Gators and its coach, Urban Meyer.
In many, many ways, this Sunday’s Super Bowl featuring the New England Patriots against the New York Giants is playing to all these same themes. New England is the consensus number one team in the league with the consensus superior talent. The Giants seem lucky to be there.
The parallels, of course, don’t all work. For example, in most ways, Buckeyes head coach Jim Tressel is the anti-Bill Belichick. Tressel isn’t exactly a quote machine himself, but he is very accessible to the media and hardly treats reporters’ questions as if they are an intrusion. As passionately as he wants to win, Tressel hardly seems motivated by the kind of hate and rage that tends to fuel Belichick’s engine. Probably because he’s coaching college kids, Tressel maintains a much healthier perspective on not only what a game means, but what it doesn’t.
Meyer, too, is hardly Tom Coughlin, the Giants head coach. Where Meyer is cool and collected in every situation, Coughlin wears his emotions on his sleeve. Meyer has been nothing but successful at each stop along the coaching trail with no one ever threatening to run him off. Coughlin’s career has had at least as many downs as ups. When the Giants lost their first two games this season, the New York media and Giants fans were already calling for Coughlin to be fired, particularly coming off an 8-8 season that should have been much better but wasn’t because so often the coach and his players seemed to be at each other’s throats all the time.
Improbably, though, the Giants turned it around enough to finish at 10-6, the same record as the Browns, and now find themselves in the Super Bowl mainly because they got hot at the right time. The remaining question, of course, is whether the Giants are laying in wait, like the Gators, to deliver another disaster in the desert to what many consider to be an incredible mismatch.
This is where it gets tricky. In the first place, the differences between college and pro football are so vast that at times the only thing the two games seem to have in common is that the scoring plays in each count the same. For example, barring injury you’re never going to see either Belichick or Coughlin use a two-quarterback system just to give the other team a different look.
But the big difference is that it is much easier to make apples to apples comparisons in pro football than it ever will be in college. When the Buckeyes and Gators finally met in the national championship game, what they knew about each other is what they could see on film alone. Not only didn’t they play each other during the regular season, they didn’t have any common opponents. Thus, despite all the talk about the difference in speed in the SEC vs. the Big Ten, it was nearly impossible to tell if that really was the case with respect to these two teams.
Moreover, the talent level from team to team in college football, even when played at its highest levels, is wildly inconsistent. Even really good teams in college aren’t good top to bottom. Thus, what a coach observes on tape about his opponent is difficult, at best, to translate. That stud defensive lineman who seems to dominate may just be a case of facing relatively weak offensive linemen from week to week. That quarterback who never seems to get sacked may just have been playing against relatively poor pass rushing teams most weeks.
In the NFL, the talent level is far more consistent. In a sense, every NFL team is a college all star team. There are differences in talent levels from team to team, but they aren’t substantial. Using this year’s Browns team as Exhibit A, the difference between a team with a losing record and one who went 10-6 is usually one or two players, not 10-12.
But perhaps the biggest difference is that it is not all that unusual for the Super Bowl participants to have played already played each other in the regular season, and if not the current season, then the previous one. One of the most memorable games of this year was the Patriots/Giants game during the final week of the regular season. It not only had historic overtures, but it also essentially sparked a resurgence of the Giants, even in defeat.
But the larger point for this discussion is that each team is well aware of what the other can do, having just played each other a few weeks ago. Each team knows the other’s strengths and weaknesses not just based on what they see on film but what they personally experienced. For each team, their game plan for the Super Bowl will be based far more on actual knowledge than mere guess work than either Tressel’s or Meyer’s game plan for the national championship game.
In a way, Sunday’s Super Bowl is but a continuation of that final regular season game, with the two week run-up to it serving as an extended halftime. Given what each team already knows about the other, the difference maker is less likely going to be pure emotion, as it was when the Gators faced the Buckeyes, and more so on which coach can make the right adjustments.
Indeed, if that is the criteria, the Patriots have a decided advantage. Using just this season as an example, the Patriots have outscored their opponents by a large margin in every quarter. They were +93 in the first quarter, +103 in the second, +46 in the third, and +73 in the fourth. The Giants, on the other hand, were a remarkable -24 in the first quarter, +28 in the second, +1 in the third and +21 in the fourth.
Some simple conclusions that can be drawn from this are that the Patriots were a far more dominant team than the Giants, within each game and from game to game. It also tells you that the Patriots were not often challenged whereas the Giants often played from behind and that their 10 victories were highly dependent on their ability to eke out close games.
It’s also fair to suggest that these figures also underscore that Belichick’s teams were far better prepared for their opponents going into each game than the Giants given the point differentials in the first quarter. Coughlin and his staff eventually made adjustments throughout that helped them ultimately be successful, but Belichick and his staff got off to great starts each week and kept the pressure on throughout. By doing so, the Patriots were able to dictate the tempo of the game and force teams to adjust to them, not the other way around as was the case with the Giants.
It also says something about the game-day coaching abilities of Belichick and Coughlin. An interesting article posted last summer on the web site NFL Stats sought to quantify the impact of game-day coaching by taking the number of wins that a team could expect in a season based on its on-field statistical performance and comparing it to actual wins. When actual wins exceeded expected wins on a consistent basis, the author surmised, one differentiating factor was the head coach and his ability to squeeze more out of the talent at hand.
In that analysis, which did not even include the 2007 season, Belichick in New England (as compared to Belichick in both Cleveland and New England) led the pack. In New England, his teams consistently win over two games more per season than on-the-field performance otherwise bears out. Indeed, anyone watching the Patriots this season had to marvel at the team’s ability to win when not playing its best. Coughlin’s teams, in both Jacksonville and New York, tended to win slightly less games than expected. Neither of these results is much of a surprise.
None of this means that Coughlin is a lousy head coach and thus the Giants have no chance. But it does point to an X factor to consider when placing your Super Bowl wagers. And while all this may be just another elaborate set up for the ultimate downfall of the seemingly superior team, this isn’t Ohio State vs. Florida either. There very well could be a disaster in the desert. Just don’t look for it from the underdog this time.
It was a little over a year ago when an undefeated team with but a few close calls during the regular season found its way playing for a championship in the Arizona desert. That team featured the top quarterback, indeed the top player in the game at least that season, and enough skill players surrounding him to make opposing coaches drool. To the extent that the media can ever reach a consensus on anything, it did this time. No doubt this team would finish what they had started and would be anointed one of the great teams of all time.
Making matters seem all that much more inevitable, its opponent was not highly regarded and was thought, at best, to be maybe a year or two away from being a serious contender for a championship. The opponent featured some intriguing players, to be sure, but had barely won its conference. There was also a double digit point spread to contend with. In short, but for a few contrarians dotting the landscape, mainly in the team’s hometown, no one else gave them much of a chance.
But the Florida Gators turned into the little team that could and handily wiped the carpet with the Ohio State Buckeyes at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, capping an improbable year for the Gators and its coach, Urban Meyer.
In many, many ways, this Sunday’s Super Bowl featuring the New England Patriots against the New York Giants is playing to all these same themes. New England is the consensus number one team in the league with the consensus superior talent. The Giants seem lucky to be there.
The parallels, of course, don’t all work. For example, in most ways, Buckeyes head coach Jim Tressel is the anti-Bill Belichick. Tressel isn’t exactly a quote machine himself, but he is very accessible to the media and hardly treats reporters’ questions as if they are an intrusion. As passionately as he wants to win, Tressel hardly seems motivated by the kind of hate and rage that tends to fuel Belichick’s engine. Probably because he’s coaching college kids, Tressel maintains a much healthier perspective on not only what a game means, but what it doesn’t.
Meyer, too, is hardly Tom Coughlin, the Giants head coach. Where Meyer is cool and collected in every situation, Coughlin wears his emotions on his sleeve. Meyer has been nothing but successful at each stop along the coaching trail with no one ever threatening to run him off. Coughlin’s career has had at least as many downs as ups. When the Giants lost their first two games this season, the New York media and Giants fans were already calling for Coughlin to be fired, particularly coming off an 8-8 season that should have been much better but wasn’t because so often the coach and his players seemed to be at each other’s throats all the time.
Improbably, though, the Giants turned it around enough to finish at 10-6, the same record as the Browns, and now find themselves in the Super Bowl mainly because they got hot at the right time. The remaining question, of course, is whether the Giants are laying in wait, like the Gators, to deliver another disaster in the desert to what many consider to be an incredible mismatch.
This is where it gets tricky. In the first place, the differences between college and pro football are so vast that at times the only thing the two games seem to have in common is that the scoring plays in each count the same. For example, barring injury you’re never going to see either Belichick or Coughlin use a two-quarterback system just to give the other team a different look.
But the big difference is that it is much easier to make apples to apples comparisons in pro football than it ever will be in college. When the Buckeyes and Gators finally met in the national championship game, what they knew about each other is what they could see on film alone. Not only didn’t they play each other during the regular season, they didn’t have any common opponents. Thus, despite all the talk about the difference in speed in the SEC vs. the Big Ten, it was nearly impossible to tell if that really was the case with respect to these two teams.
Moreover, the talent level from team to team in college football, even when played at its highest levels, is wildly inconsistent. Even really good teams in college aren’t good top to bottom. Thus, what a coach observes on tape about his opponent is difficult, at best, to translate. That stud defensive lineman who seems to dominate may just be a case of facing relatively weak offensive linemen from week to week. That quarterback who never seems to get sacked may just have been playing against relatively poor pass rushing teams most weeks.
In the NFL, the talent level is far more consistent. In a sense, every NFL team is a college all star team. There are differences in talent levels from team to team, but they aren’t substantial. Using this year’s Browns team as Exhibit A, the difference between a team with a losing record and one who went 10-6 is usually one or two players, not 10-12.
But perhaps the biggest difference is that it is not all that unusual for the Super Bowl participants to have played already played each other in the regular season, and if not the current season, then the previous one. One of the most memorable games of this year was the Patriots/Giants game during the final week of the regular season. It not only had historic overtures, but it also essentially sparked a resurgence of the Giants, even in defeat.
But the larger point for this discussion is that each team is well aware of what the other can do, having just played each other a few weeks ago. Each team knows the other’s strengths and weaknesses not just based on what they see on film but what they personally experienced. For each team, their game plan for the Super Bowl will be based far more on actual knowledge than mere guess work than either Tressel’s or Meyer’s game plan for the national championship game.
In a way, Sunday’s Super Bowl is but a continuation of that final regular season game, with the two week run-up to it serving as an extended halftime. Given what each team already knows about the other, the difference maker is less likely going to be pure emotion, as it was when the Gators faced the Buckeyes, and more so on which coach can make the right adjustments.
Indeed, if that is the criteria, the Patriots have a decided advantage. Using just this season as an example, the Patriots have outscored their opponents by a large margin in every quarter. They were +93 in the first quarter, +103 in the second, +46 in the third, and +73 in the fourth. The Giants, on the other hand, were a remarkable -24 in the first quarter, +28 in the second, +1 in the third and +21 in the fourth.
Some simple conclusions that can be drawn from this are that the Patriots were a far more dominant team than the Giants, within each game and from game to game. It also tells you that the Patriots were not often challenged whereas the Giants often played from behind and that their 10 victories were highly dependent on their ability to eke out close games.
It’s also fair to suggest that these figures also underscore that Belichick’s teams were far better prepared for their opponents going into each game than the Giants given the point differentials in the first quarter. Coughlin and his staff eventually made adjustments throughout that helped them ultimately be successful, but Belichick and his staff got off to great starts each week and kept the pressure on throughout. By doing so, the Patriots were able to dictate the tempo of the game and force teams to adjust to them, not the other way around as was the case with the Giants.
It also says something about the game-day coaching abilities of Belichick and Coughlin. An interesting article posted last summer on the web site NFL Stats sought to quantify the impact of game-day coaching by taking the number of wins that a team could expect in a season based on its on-field statistical performance and comparing it to actual wins. When actual wins exceeded expected wins on a consistent basis, the author surmised, one differentiating factor was the head coach and his ability to squeeze more out of the talent at hand.
In that analysis, which did not even include the 2007 season, Belichick in New England (as compared to Belichick in both Cleveland and New England) led the pack. In New England, his teams consistently win over two games more per season than on-the-field performance otherwise bears out. Indeed, anyone watching the Patriots this season had to marvel at the team’s ability to win when not playing its best. Coughlin’s teams, in both Jacksonville and New York, tended to win slightly less games than expected. Neither of these results is much of a surprise.
None of this means that Coughlin is a lousy head coach and thus the Giants have no chance. But it does point to an X factor to consider when placing your Super Bowl wagers. And while all this may be just another elaborate set up for the ultimate downfall of the seemingly superior team, this isn’t Ohio State vs. Florida either. There very well could be a disaster in the desert. Just don’t look for it from the underdog this time.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
The Edge of Emotion
There is a palpable sense of dread in the air as the Buckeyes begin their final preparations for Monday night’s BCS national championship game. It’s the kind of dread that most Cleveland fans certainly recognize having lived with the “please don’t let my team lose another big game” feeling most of their lives.
Call it a hangover from brutal 41-14 loss to the Florida Gators if you want, but it’s also fueled by a sense, largely unspoken among Buckeyes fans anyway, that this year’s Buckeyes team is not worthy of its current status and thus it’s bound to disappoint.
When half a season often passes between the last game of the regular season and the beginning of the bowl season, particularly the BCS bowls, whatever momentum that existed has long since been stilled. But if the Buckeyes do lose on Monday, it won’t likely be a question of talent. More likely it will be their inability, once again, to find the emotional edge that is often the difference in these college bowl games.
Consider this year’s bowl season. Start with the Rose Bowl. USC ran roughshod over Illinois egged on mainly by a lingering feeling that it had the best team in the nation this year but was thrown off track by injuries. The Illini, on the other hand, seemed to lack any emotion whatsoever. Surprised as anyone at how their season turned out, the Illini never expected to be in the Rose Bowl in the first place and played like it. They brought a wide-eyed sense of optimism but not much else and the 49-17 final score aptly reflected the emotional gulf between the two teams on Tuesday.
The Georgia/Hawaii game went much the same way. Georgia had been reeling since it was rightly snubbed for the BCS championship game. Their argument, with some appeal if not merit, was that they were more highly rated than LSU and thus should have been the SEC team that benefited when Missouri lost to Oklahoma and Pittsburgh beat West Virginia at season’s end. At the time, Georgia was number four in the rankings and LSU was seventh. But with LSU playing in and winning the SEC Championship against Tennessee while Georgia was sitting at home, the victim of having lost to both South Carolina and Tennessee earlier in the season, the pollsters ultimately determined that the rankings were just wrong and pushed LSU to number two and into the BCS title game.
This slight, perceived at best, was more than enough against a Hawaii team that looked like it would struggle against the MAC champion. Hawaii, another Western Athletic Conference champ like Boise State last year, may have had a little Boise State sort of edge about them entering the game, but that was hardly enough to overcome a bigger, stronger Georgia team with a bigger, stronger emotional edge. It showed in the 41-10 score.
The same story line continued on Wednesday night in the Fiesta Bowl. Despite having essentially been humiliated by a supposedly lesser opponent in Boise State the year before, the Oklahoma Sooners learned nothing from that experience. Instead, for the second straight year they walk away from a BCS game suffering another really bad loss.
It would have appeared entering the game that Oklahoma, like Georgia, had developed a chip on its shoulder about being left out of the national championship game. But whatever edge that perceived slight created was more than dulled by the self-inflicted perception that the Moutaineers would be little competition, reeling as they were from first suffering a crippling loss to a really bad Pittsburgh team, and second having lost the oily and overrated Rich Rodriguez as their head coach, a loss that has been controversial to say the least.
Meanwhile the Mountaineers, under a well liked interim coach practically begging for the job permanently (which he got) found a way to channel their rage and frustration against an Oklahoma team that should have known better but didn’t. From the first snap to the last play and the four hours in between, the Mountaineers literally ran the Sooners ragged, drilling them 48-28.
Even the Capitol One Bowl match up between Florida and Michigan followed much the same script. Florida was the fat and happy squad with the Heisman Trophy winner and the arrogant swagger of a team that figured once it showed up, its Big Ten opponent would crumble, kind of like Ohio State last year in the BCS national championship game, despite Florida already having lost three times this season.
The overmatched Michigan Wolverines, reeling from a season of coaching missteps and blown opportunities, were lucky to make it to a New Year’s Day bowl game at all. Added to the mix was a retiring coach who seems more beloved now than he ever did and an opportunistic third choice coach-in-waiting hovering over the proceedings like a kid waiting for his parents to leave on vacation already so he can drive the ‘vette.
But on the way to cementing his status as the latest genius, Florida head coach Urban Meyer couldn’t find a way to solve a Michigan offense that could only get 91 yards against Ohio State. As a result, he and his vaunted Gators, the beasts of the SEC and clearly faster and better than any team ever in the history of the Big Ten, found themselves on the losing end of a game in which they were the recipients of four Michigan turnovers.
The difference maker, obviously, was emotion. The Wolverines, with aspirations for a national championship before the season started, found themselves without anything much to play for after the season’s first game. But given a chance to send Lloyd Carr solidly into retirement with a warm and fuzzy feeling, not to mention the chance to lance the boils of big game failures by the likes of Chad Henne and Mike Hart, the Wolverines overcame a litany of poor tackling, dropped passes and turnovers early in the game to suddenly dominate when the game mattered most—in the fourth quarter.
The Buckeyes can choose to learn the lessons of these games by osmosis or can simply take a look at the film of their game against Florida last year. The beating they and the program took should be lesson enough as to exactly how much of a part emotion plays in the outcome. Many of the Buckeyes who played in last year’s game now admit they had lost their edge somewhere between the thrilling victory against Michigan and the improbable run and minor controversy that resulted in Florida getting into the game. The Buckeyes were heavily favored, had every accolade to enjoy and felt that they couldn’t be beat.
Florida, guided by Meyer, used the Buckeye’s arrogance against them to develop an underdog mentality that had, as its goal, proving that they not only belonged on the same field with the Buckeyes, but that they could beat the Buckeyes. When Ted Ginn, Jr. returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, it turned out to be the worst thing that could happen to the Buckeyes, and not simply because Ginn got hurt. The Buckeyes falsely assumed the rest of the game would be a similar cakewalk all the while the Gators were planning their revenge, which they ultimately extracted in spades.
The real question facing the Buckeyes on Monday is how they will use last year’s loss and their underdog status, despite their ranking. Can head coach Jim Tressel funnel it into intensity, concentration and execution or will the team succumb to the weight of expectations? Certainly Tressel has been trying to pull the right levers on this score, even to the point of having a DVD made of all the negative things being said about the Buckeyes nationally. But will it be enough?
Last year’s loss was as much a psychological blow to the Buckeyes program as it was to the Big Ten overall and also hurt Tressel’s reputation, whether or not it should have. A win cures all. That won’t happen, however, if the Buckeyes and Tressel cannot find enough in this entire emotional quagmire to create a razor-sharp edge. And if they cannot, that dread fans are feeling now will continue unabated because the bashing they’ve been currently taking, as painful as it’s been for Buckeye fans, will turn out to be well deserved. And nothing hurts worse than the truth.
Call it a hangover from brutal 41-14 loss to the Florida Gators if you want, but it’s also fueled by a sense, largely unspoken among Buckeyes fans anyway, that this year’s Buckeyes team is not worthy of its current status and thus it’s bound to disappoint.
When half a season often passes between the last game of the regular season and the beginning of the bowl season, particularly the BCS bowls, whatever momentum that existed has long since been stilled. But if the Buckeyes do lose on Monday, it won’t likely be a question of talent. More likely it will be their inability, once again, to find the emotional edge that is often the difference in these college bowl games.
Consider this year’s bowl season. Start with the Rose Bowl. USC ran roughshod over Illinois egged on mainly by a lingering feeling that it had the best team in the nation this year but was thrown off track by injuries. The Illini, on the other hand, seemed to lack any emotion whatsoever. Surprised as anyone at how their season turned out, the Illini never expected to be in the Rose Bowl in the first place and played like it. They brought a wide-eyed sense of optimism but not much else and the 49-17 final score aptly reflected the emotional gulf between the two teams on Tuesday.
The Georgia/Hawaii game went much the same way. Georgia had been reeling since it was rightly snubbed for the BCS championship game. Their argument, with some appeal if not merit, was that they were more highly rated than LSU and thus should have been the SEC team that benefited when Missouri lost to Oklahoma and Pittsburgh beat West Virginia at season’s end. At the time, Georgia was number four in the rankings and LSU was seventh. But with LSU playing in and winning the SEC Championship against Tennessee while Georgia was sitting at home, the victim of having lost to both South Carolina and Tennessee earlier in the season, the pollsters ultimately determined that the rankings were just wrong and pushed LSU to number two and into the BCS title game.
This slight, perceived at best, was more than enough against a Hawaii team that looked like it would struggle against the MAC champion. Hawaii, another Western Athletic Conference champ like Boise State last year, may have had a little Boise State sort of edge about them entering the game, but that was hardly enough to overcome a bigger, stronger Georgia team with a bigger, stronger emotional edge. It showed in the 41-10 score.
The same story line continued on Wednesday night in the Fiesta Bowl. Despite having essentially been humiliated by a supposedly lesser opponent in Boise State the year before, the Oklahoma Sooners learned nothing from that experience. Instead, for the second straight year they walk away from a BCS game suffering another really bad loss.
It would have appeared entering the game that Oklahoma, like Georgia, had developed a chip on its shoulder about being left out of the national championship game. But whatever edge that perceived slight created was more than dulled by the self-inflicted perception that the Moutaineers would be little competition, reeling as they were from first suffering a crippling loss to a really bad Pittsburgh team, and second having lost the oily and overrated Rich Rodriguez as their head coach, a loss that has been controversial to say the least.
Meanwhile the Mountaineers, under a well liked interim coach practically begging for the job permanently (which he got) found a way to channel their rage and frustration against an Oklahoma team that should have known better but didn’t. From the first snap to the last play and the four hours in between, the Mountaineers literally ran the Sooners ragged, drilling them 48-28.
Even the Capitol One Bowl match up between Florida and Michigan followed much the same script. Florida was the fat and happy squad with the Heisman Trophy winner and the arrogant swagger of a team that figured once it showed up, its Big Ten opponent would crumble, kind of like Ohio State last year in the BCS national championship game, despite Florida already having lost three times this season.
The overmatched Michigan Wolverines, reeling from a season of coaching missteps and blown opportunities, were lucky to make it to a New Year’s Day bowl game at all. Added to the mix was a retiring coach who seems more beloved now than he ever did and an opportunistic third choice coach-in-waiting hovering over the proceedings like a kid waiting for his parents to leave on vacation already so he can drive the ‘vette.
But on the way to cementing his status as the latest genius, Florida head coach Urban Meyer couldn’t find a way to solve a Michigan offense that could only get 91 yards against Ohio State. As a result, he and his vaunted Gators, the beasts of the SEC and clearly faster and better than any team ever in the history of the Big Ten, found themselves on the losing end of a game in which they were the recipients of four Michigan turnovers.
The difference maker, obviously, was emotion. The Wolverines, with aspirations for a national championship before the season started, found themselves without anything much to play for after the season’s first game. But given a chance to send Lloyd Carr solidly into retirement with a warm and fuzzy feeling, not to mention the chance to lance the boils of big game failures by the likes of Chad Henne and Mike Hart, the Wolverines overcame a litany of poor tackling, dropped passes and turnovers early in the game to suddenly dominate when the game mattered most—in the fourth quarter.
The Buckeyes can choose to learn the lessons of these games by osmosis or can simply take a look at the film of their game against Florida last year. The beating they and the program took should be lesson enough as to exactly how much of a part emotion plays in the outcome. Many of the Buckeyes who played in last year’s game now admit they had lost their edge somewhere between the thrilling victory against Michigan and the improbable run and minor controversy that resulted in Florida getting into the game. The Buckeyes were heavily favored, had every accolade to enjoy and felt that they couldn’t be beat.
Florida, guided by Meyer, used the Buckeye’s arrogance against them to develop an underdog mentality that had, as its goal, proving that they not only belonged on the same field with the Buckeyes, but that they could beat the Buckeyes. When Ted Ginn, Jr. returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, it turned out to be the worst thing that could happen to the Buckeyes, and not simply because Ginn got hurt. The Buckeyes falsely assumed the rest of the game would be a similar cakewalk all the while the Gators were planning their revenge, which they ultimately extracted in spades.
The real question facing the Buckeyes on Monday is how they will use last year’s loss and their underdog status, despite their ranking. Can head coach Jim Tressel funnel it into intensity, concentration and execution or will the team succumb to the weight of expectations? Certainly Tressel has been trying to pull the right levers on this score, even to the point of having a DVD made of all the negative things being said about the Buckeyes nationally. But will it be enough?
Last year’s loss was as much a psychological blow to the Buckeyes program as it was to the Big Ten overall and also hurt Tressel’s reputation, whether or not it should have. A win cures all. That won’t happen, however, if the Buckeyes and Tressel cannot find enough in this entire emotional quagmire to create a razor-sharp edge. And if they cannot, that dread fans are feeling now will continue unabated because the bashing they’ve been currently taking, as painful as it’s been for Buckeye fans, will turn out to be well deserved. And nothing hurts worse than the truth.
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