The Dying Art Of The College Football Upset
October 5, 2008
I’m amazed at the parity of college football. Week in and week out, top 25, top 10, and top five teams are falling to teams they just shouldn’t lose to on paper.
Sometimes the recruiting star system shudders, and every time an Oregon State takes down a USC, the gurus and Rivals and Scout take another hit to their credibility. They’ve taken so many cheap-shots in the past few seasons that I write off the stars and the blue chip label.
What Joe Blow recruiting expert doesn’t factor in is heart. It doesn’t have anything to do with how compatible players might be in an online dating service or how compassionate they are, but rather how they’ll perform when given an impossible task.
When the number one team came rolling into Corvallis, they were coming off an easy win in the most monumental early season game college football has ever seen. USC crushed Ohio State, and Oregon State was just the next team on the Trojans’ easy road to another BCS Championship game.
85,713 orange-clad Beaver fans had a different idea of what the college football landscape should look like, and their intensity fueled the home team to a decisisve upset victory of USC. Forget that USC is loaded with five-star recruits and future Sunday playing prospects.
Oregon State wanted it more, and that offsets any amount of stars a website can award for running a 4.40 and playing at California’s best high school. Even though most every USC player would start at their position at Oregon State, the Beavers found a way to prove the paper wrong.
The USC/Oregon State situation is becoming the norm rather than the exception in college football. Nobody saw Ole Miss beating Florida, and on a similar level, Appalachian State surprising Michigan last season.
How do Utah and BYU assemble the teams they have now? The student athletes on those teams could just as easily be playing for a quality Big XII or Pac 10 team, but instead they play for the lesser Mountain West Conference. Thank the recruiting services for passing them all over.
Without the sketchy and biased recruiting ratings, we might not have as many upsets. Boise State wouldn’t be able to sneak behind Washington’s back and steal enough two and three stars to field a BCS winning team, and Utah wouldn’t be the staple sleeper that seems to creep up on the big time every so often.
But that’s the glory of a messed up system. Between the Coaches Poll, preseason rankings, the BCS “power conferences” and recruiting, college football is full of questionable practices.
While the experts try to fix those practices, I’ll continue to enjoy the unpredictability of the world’s best football league and keep rooting for the underdog. That is, if there’s really such a thing.
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