I just think there's an unfair bias. If you look at Auburn's schedule, it's not really that much tougher than Oregon's. Take their game against LSU for example. That team was waaaaaay overrated, but they were ranked really high, so Auburn gets the points from that. People constantly bring up that Auburn has beaten all these ranked teams, but my contention is that these teams didn't deserve to be ranked that high in the first place. LSU gets a high ranking based entirely on past experience. Virginia Tech is a PERFECT example of that. Boise State points to beating VT, but VT obviously never deserved that ranking at the beginning of the season.
I agree... I think that biases that exist to start the year never really get a chance to go away. Does the SEC have a bunch of big non-SEC victories this year? It seems they pretty much load up on cupcakes in non-conference play. Don't get me wrong... they're good, but the system is flawed. Ed O.
It's just an east coast thing. These teams are on television all the time back east, so they are seen more often. People on the east coast just aren't going to stay up late to watch the Ducks. The Blazers have the same problem. I think the entire Pac 10 gets a bad wrap as being weak, but pound for pound I think this conference has some of the most talented players and coaches. How many Pac10 guys are in the NFL or NBA? They just beat up on each other, which makes it that much harder to impress the rest of the country. I'm just hoping that the Ducks can somehow run the table, get to the NC, and stomp whoever comes out of the east. It would be sweet justice and it should shut some people up.
Part of the problem relates to the beloved concept of sample size. The coach's poll has 59 voters; the Harris has 114. So a few voters putting Oregon low doesn't impact the whole all that much. The computer rating has only 6 components, so just 2 or 3 of these computers can have a much bigger impact. I would rather they used something like the Massey comparison, which uses 115 different computer rankings, thereby reducing the impact that a single system can have. Some of them provide some ridiculous results (the "smart" system has Oklahoma #52; "Daniel Curry 2" puts Virginia Tech #3), but in the end it averages out to something reasonable. BTW, if these 115 rankings were to constitute the computer third of the BCS, the rankings would look like this: 1 Oregon 2 BSU 3 TCU 4 Auburn 5 Alabama 6 Missouri 7 Michigan St 8 Utah 9 Ohio St 10 Oklahoma
Good post. I agree. SEC gets a lot of love due to their "Strength-of-Schedule" against other SEC opponents that are preconceived as "great teams". So when your conference has a half dozen top-25 schools because everyone is in love with them, simply going through your schedule skews the computers. So you need better variety like the Massey to blend out those anamolies that happen earlier in the BCS season like we see now.
That's what I've been saying all along. The Pac10 gets raped because there's such a bad opinion of the conference itself.
That said, the SEC teams still DO play themselves throughout the year and DO have a conference playoff. So I think the thing a lot of fans (and mainly people that oppose the BCS) don't understand is that all of those preconceived biases begin to work themselves out in the rankings (and accordingly in the computers), which in turn gets the BCS to nearly be 100% accurate by the time this gets into January. What I mean by that is that like you and I said, the voters and coaches and media folks all have an initial bias after the non-conference and first couple weeks that lead them to think teams like Arkansas, Alabama, LSU, Florida, Auburn, South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi State are all top caliber teams. So as teams like LSU or Auburn go down and start beating their own highly ranked SEC brothers, it pumps up their records (not to mention beating a Kentucky team looks good because Kentucky has a high SOS from losing to a bunch of ranked SEC teams). So these handful of SEC teams have high and skewed computer rankings. But the GOOD NEWS is that as half of these teams start losing games by losing to each other, teams like Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, etc. will start falling out of the top-25 because you simply CAN'T be a top-25 team if you have 4-5 losses, it's impossible for a team to make someone a top team that keep losing games while other conferences have teams with only 1-2 losses. So the BCS starts to adjust Auburn's computer rankings as their strength of schedule continually goes down as those previous opponents all fall out of the top-25. So that is the good news for fans of Oregon.
