« on: October 12, 2010, 10:01:10 AM »
OSU is #1, unless they're not...
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Ohio-State-is-the-new-No-1-Unless-it-s-really-?urn=ncaaf-276200Mon Oct 11 01:03pm PDT
Ohio State is the new No. 1. Unless it's really Boise State. And that's ... okay.
By Matt Hinton
early halfway through the regular season, 13 I-A/FBS teams still carry perfect records into the turn. All of them are ranked in the latest editions of the mainstream polls. Nine of of them come in among the top 10 in at least one of those polls. Six of them received at least one first-place vote. And for the first time in 21 weeks, none of those votes went to Alabama.
So much for that old-time Crimson Tide consensus, which just last week carried 115 of 118 first-place nods in the Associated Press and Coaches' polls. Your new standard bearer by those standards is Ohio State, for the reason that Ohio State is Ohio State and started out higher than any of the other remaining candidates. The Buckeyes are next in line, so up they go.
As many messages to inbox have pointed out since the polls were released Sunday afternoon, the distinction is definitely not a result of their body of work to date: Unlike, Oregon, Boise State, TCU, Oklahoma, Auburn and LSU, none of OSU's first six opponents is ranked by anyone (though Miami did still get a few votes after its awful home flop against Florida State), and computer guru Jeff Sagarin currently ranks Ohio State's schedule as the 117th-toughest in the nation – the main reason the Buckeyes are sitting at No. 23 in the set of rankings Sagarin submits to the BCS formula. Right now, though, the wisdom of algorithms means less to human voters than the fact that Ohio State is Ohio State: Their most important criterion is still inertia.
As for the algorithms, it seems they prefer Boise State. According to ESPN's mock BCS standings, the first set of rankings next week will be topped by the Broncos, thereby reviving the semiannual torch-and-pitchfork routine for the first time since the great Oklahoma-Texas debate of 2008.
In short: Welcome back, chaos. It's been too long. The logjam potential of the next month-and-a-half is so much greater than usual because only two of the six teams that earned a first-place vote this week have a chance to knock of one of the others: Old-school rivals Oklahoma and Nebraska, if they make their way through unscathed to the Big 12 Championship Game. The other four will all be favored – heavily favored, most of the time – to win every game they play. So will 6-0 Michigan State, which ahs already vanquished Notre Dame, Wisconsin and Michigan and doesn't play Ohio State.
If the rest of the season goes according to the chalk, then, we're looking at up to six unbeaten teams with roughly identical on once of the coveted national championship slots come December, and that's assuming that a run by unbeaten Auburn and/or LSU will be sufficiently dealt with by the brutal gauntlet of the SEC West. At that point, the vagaries and merits of the BCS computers, strengths of schedule and inertia in the polls will be a legitimately big deal.
Of course, we know from many, many years of experience that the net eight weeks are far less likely to be governed by the chalk than by steady attrition, which will only begin to come into any kind of comprehensible focus around Thanksgiving or so. At which point most of the current arguments will be rendered ridiculous in retrospect. Ohio State's schedule is going to get tougher. Boise State's is going to get easier. Multiple frontrunners will go down in stunning fashion, just like Alabama, abruptly closing off promising routes to the crystal ball while opening up brand new ones for contenders whose championship prospects had been left for dead.
Every new poll matters a little more than the last one. With eight polls and dozens of opportunities for chaos to obliterate the conventional wisdom still in front of us the great debates of October aren't worth the brain cells that strain to make sense of them. Not yet.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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