Krieg said:
I would say that it has done a poor job of that as well. Texas & Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl while Big Ten & Pac Ten champs are forced elsewhere? USC & Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl while the Canes & Gators play in Georgia?
The bowl tradition is already dead and from all objective standpoints the BCS has been a failure at it's "stated" mission.
What are you talking about? Oklahoma didn't play in the Rose Bowl. Michigan, the Big 10 champ, went there same as always. Oklahoma is going to the Orange, where the Big 12 champ -- and Big Eight champ before -- always goes.
If USC hadn't been the BCS' No. 1 ranked team, it would have gone to the Rose Bowl as the Pac 10 champ. It wasn't 'forced' anywhere -- it got a promotion to the national championship game.
Miami didn't have an automatic berth with the Orange Bowl. They were independent for several years, and played in lots of Orange and other Fla. citrus fruit bowls because the people who run those bowls knew that lots of local fans would travel to see the team play in close-by bowls, thus ensuring sell-outs. The Big East's auto berth is with the Fiesta, primarily because of the strength of Miami when the conference was formed. The ACC, Miami's conference now, would not have an auto berth in one of the BCS bowls without the existance of the BCS.
Florida is part of the SEC, a conference whose champion always plays in the Sugar Bowl. Georgia is a shorter trip than New Orleans for them. Plus, the Gators didn't win their conference, so they weren't going to the Sugar anyway.
People bitch and moan about the BCS taking a Rose Bowl berth away from Cal. It didn't. If there wasn't a BCS, USC would be playing in the Rose Bowl and Cal would still be going elsewhere.
And a few voters changing their votes in the AP and Coaches polls had nothing to do with Texas passing Cal in the BCS rankings. Cal was still ranked ahead of Texas in both polls. If you go back and look at the polls, Texas lost ground to Cal in both the AP and Coaches polls the week after Mack Brown made his plea for the voters to give Texas a shot at a BCS berth.
The fact is, if you do the math, the difference between Cal and Texas was the computer scores, based in part on strength of schedule. Texas had a much tougher schedule this year than Cal. Texas boosted its BCS ranking late in the year by convincingly beating a ranked Texas A&M team. Cal hurt its ranking by struggling to beat a weak, unranked Southern Miss team. As the Holiday Bowl showed, Cal was overrated by the AP and Coaches polls for most of the season. If they had played in the Big 12 South, they'd be no better than .500.
