With one week to go in the college football regular season, LSU and Alabama sit atop the Bowl Championship Series. For all intents and purposes, there is a significant chance the two teams will play again in the BCS championship game in January.
The question on everyone’s mind, then, is should they?
Before I unpack the question of whether the national championship should be a competition between two teams that have already played, I want to get Oklahoma State, the current No. 3 team, out of the minds of college football fans as a possible usurper of the No. 2 spot.
Looking at the breakdown of the BCS standings, it seems very difficult for Oklahoma State to jump Alabama for several reasons. The first is the polls themselves.
Both the USA Today Coaches Poll and the Harris Poll have OSU at No. 5 – as in, behind both Stanford and Virginia Tech. If, at this point in the season, most pollsters have OSU behind Virginia Tech, who lost the only game they played against a currently ranked team (Clemson), it seems unlikely voters will have a massive swing in OSU’s favor following next Saturday.
The second reason is the BCS. Oklahoma State sits .08 percent behind Alabama. A small number, to be sure, but a massive obstacle to overcome from a BCS perspective, particularly when one considers the fact that Alabama sits .045 percent behind LSU, the only remaining undefeated team from an automatic-qualifying BCS conference.
Finally, the assumption that Oklahoma State will beat Oklahoma in Bedlam this Saturday is a dangerous one. Mike Gundy has never beaten Bob Stoops, Oklahoma has won eight straight meetings and OSU has only won this game 16 times in its history.
With all this in mind, for the sake of argument I’m going to lump OSU in with Stanford and Virginia Tech as potential one-loss teams that, presumably, the anti-rematch crowd would place ahead of Alabama.
The question becomes whether Alabama should be ranked behind one of these teams because they are a worse team or because they just shouldn’t have the opportunity for a rematch.
Virginia Tech’s case is based around a team that is in the top five if only because attrition knocked out everyone else. Tech isn’t ranked in the top 25 in any major offensive category, and while their scoring and rush defenses are both in the top 10, one must take into account the anemic offenses that populate the ACC.
Stanford, on the other hand, has an explosive offense, but in their games against the only two in-conference opponents on their schedule with fewer than five losses they gave up 48 and 53 points.
It’s important to note that, in comparing these two teams with Oklahoma State as one-loss contenders, both Virginia Tech and Stanford lost to teams who are currently ranked, while OSU fell to unranked Iowa State. It is for this reason that Oklahoma State, barring an unprecedented blowout victory over Oklahoma, will not jump these two teams in the human polls.
What all this establishes is that these three teams are not better football teams than Alabama, which brings us to the second part of the anti-rematch question: Why should the Crimson Tide get a second chance?
Under no circumstances should a previous result determine the participants in the national championship game. Detractors to this sentiment may point to 2006, when an undefeated Michigan lost to an undefeated Ohio State in the last game of the regular season for both teams. Michigan went on to play in the Rose Bowl while Ohio State faced Florida in the national championship.
Michigan did not play Ohio State in a rematch not because they shouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to do so, but because voters believed the one-loss Florida team (defeated that year by an Auburn team that finished with two losses) was in fact a better team than Michigan. And, if the case could be made that Oklahoma State, Stanford or Virginia Tech is a better team than Alabama, I would happily concede that one of these teams should play LSU. But they aren’t, and voters recognized this by unanimously placing LSU and Alabama No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, following last Saturday’s games.
The absence of the widely regarded second best team in the nation in the national championship game would make a farce of the entire BCS system. For better or worse, the BCS was implemented to create a game between the two best teams in the nation. If Alabama is let out simply to avoid a rematch, the entire concept of a championship game is corrupted. At that point the NCAA may as well go back to the old system, where all the bowls play out with equal significance and the national champion is determined by a poll.
The belief that a playoff would somehow “fix” this situation is unjustified, as well. What would happen if, in an eight-team play-off, Alabama and LSU met in the final? As the NFL, NCAA basketball tournament and even the 2011 Big Ten championship game matchup have taught us, it isn’t just that you win; it also matters when you win.
The notion that Alabama should not play because they did not win the SEC is also a moot point, because in 2003 Oklahoma was defeated in the Big 12 championship game by Kansas State, 35-7, and still went on to play LSU in the national championship.
The anti-rematch argument hinges on one of two (or both) points: that Alabama isn’t the second best team in the nation, or they don’t deserve a second chance against a team they already lost to. The first point is, as discussed above, wildly untrue. The second is ludicrous on the basis that the championship game is a matchup of the two best teams in the nation, which as of right now are LSU and Alabama.
