With the season getting underway in less than seven hours, I’d better publish these now…
• Notre Dame will go 9-3. They’ll barely survive a scare from Nevada, then lose one out of the Big Ten trio (Michigan/MSU/Purdue), then beat Washington to come into the USC game at 4-1. There will be much talk of waking up the echoes. It won’t happen. After the latest Trojan beatdown, the 4-2 Irish will finally beat Boston College (for the first time since the Clinton Administration), demolish Wazzu, and beat Navy. They’ll then lose on the road to either Pitt or Stanford, while beating UConn in between. I’m going to guess the Irish’s non-USC losses will be to Sparty and the Drunken Trees. If so, the loss to Stanford will be particularly crushing, because the Irish will arrive in Palo Alto as BCS contenders, and leave as Gator Bowl-bound pretenders. Will nine wins and a New Year’s Day bowl be enough to save Charlie’s job? Maybe, but remember, 9-3 is not good enough!
• USC will go 11-1. They’ll beat up on San Jose State, expose Ohio State, survive a scare from Washington, steamroll Wazzu, edge Cal, crush Notre Dame, avenge themselves against Oregon State… then lose at Oregon. They’ll win out the rest of the way, and will be very much in the national championship conversation at season’s end. But with Florida being the OMG BEST TEAM EVER playing the OMG EASIEST SCHEDULE EVER* but nevertheless getting credit from the pollsters for playing in the OMG TOUGHEST CONFERENCE EVER (it’s a WAR!), there’s really probably only one spot in the title game up for grabs — and unless the Big 12 produces a two-loss champion, they’ve pretty much got it reserved. Oregon, being Oregon, will of course go 9-3, with losses to Boise State, Utah, and Stanford, but will nevertheless go to the Rose Bowl because they’ll own the tiebreaker over USC. The Trojans will instead go to the Fiesta Bowl, which is awesome, where they’ll play Boise State, which is less awesome. My head will explode, as I’m forced to root for Goliath over David. USC will win, of course, unless Boise is able to suit up Vince Young somehow, because USC only loses BCS bowls when VY is involved. Trojans finish 12-1, ranked #2 in the country, but looking like the best team in the land, as per usual. Fans will once again muse that USC could have won 16 straight national championships, or something, if only they could win a damn game in the state of Oregon. Oh well, maybe next year. Beat the Rainbows!
*Except for Penn State’s schedule.
• Buffalo will not repeat as MAC champs, or even MAC East champs. But they’ll have another winning season, will go to the International Bowl again, and will win it this time. There will be another round of speculation about Turner Gill leaving. He won’t.
• Michigan will go 6-6, forcing MGoBlog to post pictures of kittens at various points throughout the season. But the Wolverines will get to play in a bowl, and comparisons will be made to Notre Dame ’08. They will, however, lose the bowl, to finish 6-7. Rich Rodriguez will start demanding that the players practice 25 hours a day.
• Florida will beat Tennessee by a score of 8,237 to 0. Or thereabouts.
• John L. Smith will slap himself at some point during his first season as Arkansas’s special teams coordinator. Alas, it may not be televised this time.
• Colt McCoy will win the Heisman, because you can’t play quarterback for Texas while having a name like “Colt McCoy” and not freakin’ win the Heisman at some point.
• Tim Tebow will lose his virginity. Okay, this isn’t really a prediction, since I have no way of knowing whether it’s realistic, and it’s unverifiable anyway, but I just wanted to include it because it was fun to write. Ha ha. Tim Tebow’s a virgin. Ha ha.
• South Florida will win the Big East. UConn will do better than expected. Pittsburgh will be a big disappointment, and Dave Wannstedt will be back on the hot seat. Syracuse QB Greg Paulus will get sacked roughly 346 times, and the Orange will finish last in the Big East. Again.
• There will be another three-way tie for the Big 12 South championship, this time between Texas, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State. This will cause the space-time continuum to implode.
• The Mountain West will cannibalize itself, with TCU, BYU and Utah all going 7-1 in conference play, with losses to each other (and, in BYU’s case, a close loss to Oklahoma). None of them will get BCS bids, because Boise State will go undefeated, and the other at-large spots will go to USC, one of the Big 12 South runners-up, and Penn State, despite the latter’s peewee league nonconference schedule. There is no justice in the world. Back to the Las Vegas Bowl, Mormons!
• These predictions will look totally ridiculous within a few weeks, if not a few hours.
(Go Broncos! Beat Ducks!)
USC will lose at last 2 games. One of them being OSU…only reason I’m saying this is bc it’s at OSU. Who is the QB at USC? Billyjoe Whatshisface? Exactly.
Don’t overlook how easy Texas’ schedule is too. Aside from the OK game they have it pretty easy.
Pete Carroll is smarter than he gets credit for, and that’s saying something, USC will beat Ohio State but it will be closer than Brendan is suggesting. USC’s offensive production in the game will be positively anemic causing pundits to suggest USC will have problems in the scoreboard fireworks conference that is the Pac-10. They won’t. But OSU is in the can’t score conference and USC’s defense will be the story this year. Meaning the anemic USC offensive production in this game will be enough to win.
Hey, I resemble that Penn State remark!
Ummmm . . . yeah. The only comfort I can take on that one is that Penn State scheduled Syracuse, which is a BCS conference opponent which they have history with – and that when the schedule was made, it wasn’t apparant that ‘Cuse would be THIS bad. Oh, and there’s sentimental value in playing Temple. Which doesn’t make sense to me. We should play Pitt.
Yeah, that’s all I’ve got. Its silly.
But, going off that schedule . . .
Penn State will win the Big Eleven. People are giving the conference to Ohio State. But they play a rougher schedule (i.e. they face full football teams for a couple of games), including USC, which usually eats the Big Eleven for lunch these days. They also have to travel to Happy Valley this year. Good luck with that! (Plus, I tend to think Pryor is overrated, although we’ll figured that out this year.) I think that Ohio State loses to Penn State, Penn State loses to a team they should beat (like the Impostor Steelers out there in the state of Iowa – what, can’t you design your own uniforms?), and thus, PSU wins by virtue of tie breaker. Going unbeaten isn’t out of the question, but I don’t think they do that.
Rich Rodriguez will break down in tears at least two more times this season, thus earning the wholly undeserved title of Dick Vermeil 2.0.
GO OWLS BEAT PENN STATE! Actually, Temple needs to get through Villanofun tonight at the Linc. It’s been hyped here in Killadelphia all summer long. I’ll be flipping between that, the Phils, E-a-g-l-e-s eagles, and ncaaf.
I am just so happy that football is back. I really am.
Penn State has a legitimate shot to play for the title…they did last year until they ran into the shonn greene hawkeye express…you are just salty because the hawx won!, I just think USC is too shaky at QB and the game @ Cal looms.
Notre Dame goes 7-5, and Charlie Weis keeps his job.
Tennessee beats Florida
Ole Miss wins the SEC
Joe McKnight wins the Heisman
USC 69 vs. Penn St. 24 in the National Championship (prompting the world to demand a playoff)
Boise St. beats Texas in the Fiesta Bowl
Rich Rodriguez goes to jail before the season ends and nobody cares
Mark May personally insults Lou Holtz so badly that it results in a nasty slap fight that gets both of them fired, and welted pretty badly.
Jim Tressel says a bad word and then washes his mouth out with soap immediately afterwards.
Oregon beats Boise St. tonite in the first of many weekly Thursday night upsets on ESPN this season.
Father Hanrahan, Father Leary and Father O’Malley have at least a dozen conversations about what a tragic, pride-fueled mistake it was for their beloved Notre Dame not to find its way into the Big Eleven when the opportunity was there. These conversations will occur around the same time that the men realize that the marquee Conference Championships (e.g. Big 12, SEC) are a prerequisite to a National Championship slot.
This is not because the SEC or Big 12 are superior, mind you. Rather, because every sports fan essentially understands that the last meaningful game/match before the championship is the semifinal. As a result, a one-loss team from the Dr. Pepper Big 12 Championship or the Home Depot SEC Championship will always have a substantial advantage, winning a semifinal, vs. a one-loss USC, Penn State, or Notre Dame, who didn’t.
Of course, those priests won’t be dreaming of a one-loss Notre Dame in the Weis era. But that’s as good as they might realistically ever hope for, and one-loss won’t cut it for any team not playing a semifinal, that is, any team not in the SEC or Big 12.
The team that is most victimized by lack of marquee ‘semifinal’ is USC. Notre Dame probably only has themselves to blame, and the Big Ten is surely already in negotiations with schools like Rutgers or Syracuse to add the last team necessary to have their own marquee championship game.
The Big Ten has any number of plausible (if not Paulus-ible) schools nearby to round out the required twelve. But where would the Pac-10 get their last two schools? Seems like they basically have to choose from the fifteen or so colleges that Sarah Palin attended, none of which are all that appealing.
The Pac-10 could pick up Hawaii. That wouldn’t be all that bad. But I’m not sure where you find the twelfth team. Could pick up Colorado… But that’s going quite a way’s inland. The Pac-10 is it is broken five pairs of rather intense rivalries. That situation gets a bit clouded if you don’t add two teams as a set.
Also, on the point of new untested quarterbacks. I recall the last time USC put in a new, untested quarterback, with a questionable arm, and low experience. Matt Leinart worked out all right for us. So I’m not too worried.
The most obvious “set” would be Utah and BYU, and those teams are presently closer to the Pac-10 level of play than Hawaii and Colorado anyway (though Colorado certainly has the tradition and history that one would expect it will eventually return to a higher level). BYU would be a bit of an oddity, as a private religious school. But then, Stanford is a private school too.
And so is USC, lol.
You’d think I would have thought of my own alma mater first. 🙂
Hmm, you’d need to do a PAC north (ish) and a PAC south (ish). Hard to keep the side strengths even without splitting rivalries though…
Also, it amuses me when people say Pac-10 conference… For the same reason saying the Sierra Nevada mountains are snowy is funny.
I’d like to order the soup dejour of the day, please!
I don’t think it’d be that hard. Put Arizona, ASU, UCLA, USC, Cal and Stanford in the Pac-10 South, and Oregon, OSU, Washington, Wazzu, BYU and Utah in the Pac-10 North. In the present football landscape, given the current strength of the new programs from Utah, I think that’s a reasonable split. Sure, the South might be a bit stronger, thanks mostly to the presence of USC, but it’s certainly no more imbalanced than the Big 12, where the South is a LOT stronger, or the SEC, where the West currently has a significant edge, Florida notwithstanding. And these things are cyclical — in a few years, the North might be stronger.
Basketball might be a bigger problem; my proposed Pac-10 South is really a lot stronger than the North. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be split into divisions for basketball.
And of course, the bigger problem than all of this, football-wise, is that a two-divisions-with-title-game format is actually INFERIOR to the current Pac-10 format, which is to crown a champion based on a complete round-robin. Of the 6 major conferences, only the Pac-10 and the Big East do this. It’s clearly the fairer system, given the scheduling imbalances inherent in two-division system, where everybody plays everyone in their division plus 3 of 6 teams from the other division. Florida, for instance, gets lucky this year, playing only LSU out of LSU/Alabama/Ole Miss/Auburn in the SEC West, and getting the bottom-feeders Arkansas and Mississippi State.
If the Pac-10 were to switch to a similar system, they’d be sacrificing a BETTER system for one that arguably helps them in the court of public opinion while sacrificing competitive balance. And yet I’m not even sure you’re right that championship games are necessarily a ticket to greater glory. One-loss USC finished ahead of one-loss LSU in 2003, and undefeated USC finished ahead of undefeated Auburn in 2004, even though both sets of Tigers won their championship games. I think it’s very difficult to *leapfrog* a team in the rankings that has a title game in its final week, simply because they’re playing & beating a quality opponent. But if you’re ahead of them to begin with, you’re not necessarily going to fall behind just because they won a “semifinal.”
Personally, I’d prefer to kick Washington State and Oregon State* out of the Pac-10, replace them with BYU and Utah, and maintain the 10-team round-robin format. Make the Apple Cup and Civil War into annual nonconference rivalry games, and let Washington and Oregon be each other’s main conference rivals. Granted, this would effectively decrease the number of elective nonconference games UW and UO can schedule each year from 3 to 2, but that’s probably a good thing for the Huskies, who really need to stop annually committing ritual suicide by scheduling a nonconference slate of LSU, Ohio State and the New England Patriots. 🙂
*Why no, I don’t have an ulterior motive for wanting to get Oregon State out of the Pac-10, none whatsoever, why do you ask?
In characterizing the conference championship as a semifinal, I was implying that the SEC/Big 12 conference championship games have recently become as much, or that this sentiment lies behind the recent ‘OMG the SEC rulzzzz’ mentality that seems to spring up the last few Decembers. So by their age alone one could arguably dismiss the 2003 LSU and 2004 Auburn examples.
(Indeed, if this dynamic had been obvious in 2003, one imagines Notre Dame would have found its way to the safety of the Big Ten by now).
But the 2004 Auburn example is useful for another reason: the undefeated Tigers were shut out because everyone “knew” that Auburn just wasn’t that good a team, certainly not as good as mighty USC. Indeed, like arson investigators in Texas, your average – and even educated – college football fan doesn’t trust things like computers or objective analysis, preferring instead their hunches about who’s good and who isn’t. This largely drives the increased emphasis on polls (and witchcraft) in the BCS circa 2009 vs. the original from earlier this decade.
As such, I’m sticking by my assessment – the framework through which fans perceive sports is that the last meaningful game before the championship is a semifinal. This may not objectively be true, and it may lead to the scheduling injustices noted above, but I doubt that many interested parties care much about all that. In these days, where the national-championship is triaged through the increasingly subjective BCS process, you may have to play along to increase your chances of holding up that crystal football at the end of the season.
BTW – interesting comments about the Pac-10 rivalries. Folks in flyover country don’t think of that unique feature of the Pac-10. How about UNLV/Nevada? UNLV has had a resurgence in football of late, and Weis is going to find out how good Nevada is tomorrow. Nevada also had a good NCAA tourney run recently.
Though I could easily imagine the Pac-10 preferring Mormons vs. the possibility of what happens in Vegas, not staying in Vegas.
Jazz, the Pac-10 is limited to research universities so that eliminates some schools like Fresno State and I believe Boise State. Not sure about Nevada or UNLV. I believe both Utah schools qualify. The other tricky part is you have to take into account other sports as well.
Interesting observation, David – because this phenomena directly impacts my family, I went ahead and looked up the Pac-10 schools as well as the four proposed schools in question.
(Assuming it works), this link shows the schools that are considered “Research University/Very High” (RU/VH) – what used to be known as “Research 1” schools.
As you suggest, David, 9 out of the 10 Pac-10 schools are RU/VH. The black sheep? Those slugging rogue bastards at Oregon. Find them under RU/H – Research University/High – or what used to be called Research 2 schools.
Of the four new schools in question, only University of Utah is RU/VH (Research 1). The other three, Brigham Young, UNLV and Nevada, are RU/H (Research 2). If the Pac-10 can endure Oregon (on so many levels!), they might be able to bear a RU/H Brigham Young if they get RU/VH Utah with it.
Oh, and Boise State? Glorified undergraduate institution. Not gonna happen.
The one that surprised me on the RU/VH list was Colorado State. Assume the Pac-10 would have no trouble pulling Colorado State out of the Mountain West, though it would be quite a bit more difficult getting Colorado out of the Big 12.
But if the Pac-10 could get the two Colorados, that would mean two more RU/VH (Research 1) institutions. That alone should at least keep the Colorado possibility on the back burner.
Pingback: Twitted by brendanloy