BCS Whiners

Yes, I know that this a racing blog, but.....

The full lineup of bowl matchups was announced on Sunday night and the whining of the pundits exploded upon the announcement that Northern Illinois had crashed the party and, by rule, had qualified as a BCS at-large selection and will play Florida State in the FedEx Orange Bowl. I won't go into the explanation of THE RULES, and how it happened as you can surely find that elsewhere if you do not already know how the Huskies slipped in, but suffice it to say that the talking heads on ESPN are not happy about it.

The focus of their dismay is on Northern Illinois, however there is little or no discussion of the spot in a BCS game being taken up by an 8-5 Wisconsin team that if not for the Sandusky mess and the coddling of Terrelle Pryor would have never even had the opportunity to club the bejeebers out of Nebraska Saturday night. Nor do they seem to care to discuss the fact that the Big East champion Louisville could not rank ahead of the Huskies because of the fact that their own schedule, including the mediocre schools that are in this conference that still somehow maintains an "automatic qualifier" status, was not strong enough to rank them ahead of the MAC champions.

So when some ESPN blogger is "puzzled" as to how coaches like Mark Richt, Bob Stoops and Les Miles were "left out of BCS bowl games" my first thought is dude, you write for ESPN and you don't even know the rules? (Of course he knows the rules, but he might as well pile on while he can!) Sorry Coach Richt, Coach Stoops and Coach Miles, but the rules are the rules and that is why Wisconsin, Louisville and yes, Northern Illinois, are playing in the big money games instead of you. Coach Miles, you had your chance but lost a couple of close games to Florida and Alabama. Coach Stoops, you lost to Kansas State and allowed Notre Dame to come into your place and win in convincing fashion and Coach Richt, had you or your quarterback had the game situation sense to spike the ball with fourteen seconds left Saturday night, you would have been able to huddle and call not one, but two plays that would have given you a chance to be in the National Championship game instead of having pundits give a bunch of excuses as to why you are not even in the BCS mix. Should you be in instead of Florida who you did beat earlier this season in one of the ugliest college football games ever witnessed? Perhaps, but that big loss to South Carolina and that little clock management issue this past weekend proved otherwise.

Even my favorite college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit went off the deep end Sunday night when he said that Northern Illinois lost to Iowa "who is the worst team in the Big Ten!" Really Kirk? The worst? Yea, the Hawkeyes stunk it up this year but the last I check their two conference wins over Michigan State and Minnesota were technically better than the two wins that Minnesota posted, and was definitely two more than that team to the east of us. Sorry, Illinois, but you were the worst team in the Big Ten this year and if Mr. Herbstreit had taken some of his emotion out of it, he probably would have known that fact.

As you can tell all of this started to irritate me just a bit, but then as they always do, the "experts" said that this fiasco that is the BCS will soon come to an end when the new system of a four-team playoff begins in 2014 and that there would then be no more controversy. Then they started arguing about which four teams would have been in that playoff if it had been in effect for this year and I couldn't help but laugh.