The goals of every BCS conference team at the start of the season are two-fold.  First, win your conference and second, make it to the national championship game.  Once the season begins, a side goal is to lose early if you do lose, so as to setup a better ranking at the end of the season.  Three of the six BCS conferences have a championship game and three do not, so the question is whether conference championship games are good or bad for the parties involved.  

Conference championship games are in fact a dangerous thing, especially when one division winner is strong and the other is 8-3 or 7-4. The underdog always seems to have the advantage (just look at what happens in the Big 12 and SEC now & then) in that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Not a good place to be for a top 5 team to be when your opponent is hungry!  

Past history in the Big 12 shows the following:  

1996 – Texas (7-4) defeated #3 Nebraska (10-1) 37-27  

1998 – #10 Texas A&M (10-2) defeated #2 Kansas State (11-0) 36-33 in 2OT  

2001 – #9 Colorado (9-2) defeated #3 Texas (10-1) 39-37  

2003 – #15 Kansas State (10-3) defeated #1 Oklahoma (13-0) 35-7  

So, four out of eleven years, the underdog has pulled an upset four times.  In the SEC, the underdog pulled off the upset four times in fifteen years.  

1994 – #6 Florida (9-1-1) defeated #3 Alabama (11-0) 24-23  

1999 – #7 Alabama (9-2) defeated #5 Florida (9-2) 34-7  

2001 – #21 LSU (8-3) defeated #2 Tennessee (10-1) 31-20 

2005 – #13 Georgia (9-2) defeated #3 LSU (10-1) 34-14  

And finally, in the ACC, we have  

2005 - #22 Florida State (7-4) defeated #5 Virginia Tech (10-1) 27-22  

The underdog winning one out of the two years the championship game was played.  

NOTE:  Records shown were the team’s record at the time of the championship game.  

So what does this tell us?  They tell us that there is no reward without risk in these particular conferences, as the “extra” game leaves open the possibility for a major impact to a team’s bowl placement.  Win and you're in.  Lose and you're most likely out. 

And playing a team you’ve already beaten once that season doesn’t increase your odds of winning a second time, though the team you've beaten will be up for the game to settle the score! 

Me, I'd rather play in a conference like the PAC 10 where every team plays each other, round-robin fashion, where the one with the best in-conference record crowned the champion.  Since teams in twelve-team conferences don't play all the other teams in conference, there really isn't a good way to judge which team is the best.  Just look at Kansas this year.  Had they played Oklahoma or Texas, they might have been exposed early on as a pretender instead of a contender!

The truth of the matter is that it is better to come in second in your division with an early loss to your division's winner. By the end of the season, say your record is 10-1 or 11-1. That alone should have you ranked in the top 15 let alone even in the top 5.

Look at the Big 12 this year which prior to last week had 3 teams in the top 5. It's really too bad that Missouri and Kansas had to play each other in the last game of the season. Looking at it hypothetically, had those two teams played at the start of conference play, and say Missouri had won, they would have identical one-loss records going into the Big 12 championship game. Missouri, having won the head to head match-up, would play OU in the championship game, while Kansas stayed home. But, either OU or Mizzou would lose, so surely Kansas would move up in the rankings without having played a game and would be a preferable selection for a BCS game not having suffered a loss in the championship game. 

The same scenario would work when the other division winner is 7-4. If that 7-4 team won the championship game, they get the automatic BCS bowl birth for the conference. However, the one-loss second place team in the division would most likely be ranked higher than the 10-1 or 9-2 division winner who lost the conference championship game.  This year, Kansas in the Big 12 and Georgia in the SEC have the best shot at being the second team from their respective conferences to make a BCS game.  Georgia may even be lucky enough to move up high enough to play in the national championship game if enough teams ahead of it lose this weekend.   

Surprisingly, Oklahoma is the one exception to a conference championship game loser not making it to the BCS.  Having lost the Big 12 championship game in 2003 to Kansas Sate, OU only fell to #2 in the final BCS rankings and still managed to play in the title game.  Bottom line, it pays to be a traditional national power!

For those teams that finish second in the conference and don’t get to play in the conference championship, a BCS berth is most likely, and a national championship berth is a possibility, depending on where the team ends up in the final BCS standings. Of course, the best way to make it to the national championship is to be a BCS conference member that wins out while playing a strong-schedule. 

In 1979, James Burke, a BBC reporter, created a television program, “CONNECTIONS” that examined the eight inventions that ushered in the technological age.  These inventions were: the production line, telecommunications, the airplane, plastics, the computer, the atomic bomb, the guided missile, and television.  Burke was able to explain how simple, sometimes unrelated events, ultimately led to significant technological breakthroughs that pervade our modern society.

 As I’ve watched the 2007 college football season unfold, I've thought of the show “CONNECTIONS”, and in that spirit, I’ve attempted to link 5 events (some significant, some insignificant) in the history of Division 1A college football  events that has brought it to its present perilous BCS state.

 No, I’m not going to be as thorough or as detailed as James Burke, but I'll present five events that have changed college football forever and brought about the parity that exists today.

 NOTE:  I define parity here to mean that “on any given Saturday, any team MAY win.”  At least in the 2007 college football season so far.

 1.  NCAA Scholarship Limits – Yes, it's the obvious, but the NCAA mandate to limit Division 1A schools to no more than 85 scholarships meant that traditional powers like Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, Penn State, and USC can no longer stock up on players just to keep them off of the other guy’s team.  Now schools like Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Rutgers, Kansas, Northwestern, and Washington State have a chance to eat at the adult table, where a whole new venue to display themselves was gaining momentum:

 2.  ESPN – The “Little Network that could” created the ACC and Big East conferences in order to show more relevant programming when college basketball wasn’t in season.  Think about it, before ESPN, who had ever heard of Florida State, Miami, Boston College, or Virginia Tech?

 If it weren’t for ESPN, none of these schools would have gotten as much media coverage as they have over the past 25 or so years.  Doug Flutie never would have been an NFL quarterback, let alone a lousy sidekick to the “Pony”, Craig James.  Thanks to ESPN,  the ACC and the Big East were able to leap over the old school leagues of the Big 10 and PAC 10 (which are stuck with the crappy regional ABC TV contract), to join the Big 12 and SEC with national TV exposure. 

 Prior to this season, hardly ever did you ever see Big 10 or PAC 10 conference games on ESPN (national TV) on a Saturday night.  Instead, ESPN showcases games such as North Carolina State-Duke, Wake Forest-Maryland, or UCONN-Cincinnati!  Does it sound like basketball anyone?  When it comes to football, who gives a rip about these teams?  Show me some real, college football!

 It was this ubiquitous display of ACC and Big East football on ESPN that also led to the dilution of football as a team game.  Say it ain’t so Joe Pa, but now college football is laden with NFL wannabees, individuals looking for attention, and “thug” football, Florida style.

 But, I digress, as that is a topic in itself for another blog.  So, during the time of explosion of college football on ESPN, a school from a backwoods state that produced a Rhodes Scholar president, set in force a chain reaction with repercussions that are still being felt to this day.  That school is:

 3.  The University of Arkansas (no, not like “The Ohio State University”, the “the” is there to begin the sentence properly!) is the school that started it all!  I don’t know how they were able to anticipate the demise of the SWC, but by jumping from the Southwest Conference to the Southeastern Conference, the Razorbacks started the first domino to fall in a sequence that has still not ended.  Though the SWC ceased to exist, the Big 2 and the Little 6 (Big 8 for those of you who can’t spell) allowed only the best schools from Texas to join (sorry Baylor) to form the Big 12.  Seeing this, the Big 10 just had to add one other school to the conference to now be called the “Big 10” (wow, what a concept, 11 schools in the Big 10)!

The upheaval caused by the Razorbacks also led to the creation of the mid-major Conference USA and Mountain West Conference, as well as the dilution of the talent in the Western Athletic & Big East conferences.

 Lest we forget that Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech left the cozy confines of one basketball conference (Big East) to join another (ACC)?  At the time it seemed on paper to make the ACC a better conference, but history has shown, in 2007 at least, that the Big East got the better end of the deal. 

 Speaking of the Big East, how in the world did Cincinnati, Louisville, and South Florida gain automatic entry to the BCS banquet!  Think about it.  Neither the ACC nor Big East has any traditional football powerhouse schools, yet they are considered BCS conferences!  This too is a topic for another blog.

 The WAC increased to 16 teams, but that experiment was doomed to fail, with a cabal of teams departing to create the Mountain West Conference.  That left the WAC to fix the leaking dike by adding the likes of Boise State, Louisiana Tech, Idaho, New Mexico State, and Utah State.  With the exception of Boise State, these new additions did nothing to give the WAC any semblance of strength of schedule.  For that, you can blame the leader of the cabal that formed the MWC:

 4.  Brigham Young University, the only non-BCS school to ever win a national championship.  Any true college football fan knows that an undefeated BYU beat a 6-5 Michigan team in the 1984 Holiday Bowl, finishing the season 13-0.  As BYU was not a “traditional” school from a “traditional” conference, this rankled those “big boy” "traditional" conferences so much (what sacrilege, isn’t Notre Dame God’s team after all!) that they had to put a stop to it!

 Throw in BYU’s Ty Detmer (1990) and Andre Ware (Houston-1989), two deserving players from non-BCS schools winning the Heisman trophy, and the big boys had had enough.  From 1991 forward, no player from a non-BCS conference has even come close to winning the Heisman trophy.  Consequently, the six so called “traditional” conferences got together to and created this mess we call the BCS.

 It’s bad enough that Florida State and Miami were allowed into the picture (yet another blog topic), but the "big boys" couldn’t allow any “inferior” western schools (BYU, Utah, Boise State) to have a piece of the pie.  Can anyone spell lawsuit?

 “A lawsuit you say?”  The BCS bullies were finally intimidated enough to say, “Well, if you can finish in the top 12 or in the top 16 if you are ranked higher than a BCS conference champion, then we’ll throw you some scraps and allow you in as an at-large guest.”  "So it shall be written, so it shall be done" sayeth the powerhouse conferences.  Until Utah broke through in 2004, no non-BCS school ever played in one of the major "traditional" bowl games, nor let alone being considered for the national championship game.  But, even before the non-BCS schools were allowed at the table, what were those BCS conference also-rans going to do?

 Where will those lousy bottom feeding ACC & SEC schools get to play in December and January?  After all, they’ve finished 6-5 or 7-4 and deserve to play somewhere to reward their mediocrity.  Why, why don’t we have a bowl game explosion?  Which brings us to:

 5.  The Dot com bubble.  In the 1990’s nearly every high-flying, high-tech, or self-serving company with money was able to create their own bowl game, thereby allowing every mediocre ACC or SEC team to have a place to in December.  This preponderance of bowls makes even the least deserving, barely over .500 teams feel entitled to a piece of the bowl action.  

 Now you hear #### bloggers saying stuff like, “Eleven out of twelve SEC teams are bowl eligible, but only five of ten PAC 10 teams are!  Our conference is better than yours!”  Give me a break!  Let’s see the SEC play a tougher non-conference schedule, then we’ll see how many are bowl eligible at the end of the season.

 So, in December, you can watch football nearly every night for two weeks straight, where you can see irrelevant games such as the “Chick-fil-A”, “Meinecke Car Care”, “PapaJohns.com”, or “Outback” bowls.  While the rest of us watch the games that matter.  Lest we forget, here are the winning conferences for ESPN’s last three seasons of the “Bowl Challenge Cup”:

 2006 – Big East (5-0)

 2005 – Big 12 & PAC 10 (5-3)

 2004 – PAC 10 and CUSA (3-2)

 Says, a lot, doesn't it?  So, for all the problems of the BCS, strength of schedule, polls, conference standings, etc, it all boils down to five simple events where we can really lay the blame for bringing Division 1A college football to this present mess.  We can only hope that one of these days, some future innocuous event will lead to the creation of a sensible Division 1A playoff system, that in addition, allows those mediocre ACC & SEC teams to play in those meaningless bowls every December.