vaultmd wrote:KYLE ELLIS wrote:why would any of you think that usc deserves the title more than LSU or OU? face it the were in the rose bowl opposed to the sugar bowl because they played a soft shedule! they beat michigan who is as consistent as K-State, this is so stupid you guys will share a title because "you" guys vote yourself AP national champs
good job on avoiding any good teams and catching a Michigan team off their game. no doubt you guys should be champs head down.
The reality is that Oklahoma played the softest schedule of the three teams and when one takes into account LSU's sickening nonconference schedule, that's saying a lot. OU played a soft nonconference schedule and then they played in a weak conference. The whole Big 12 has one win ALL SEASON over out of conference top 25 teams, and it was over #22 Utah. To put things in perspective, Notre Dame, in a disasterous year, all by itself has more wins over top 25 nonconference teams than they WHOLE BIG 12!! Now I know that every game Notre Dame plays is a nonconference game, but I'm sure everyone gets the point.
Now that Big 12 Conference teams have to play good out of conference teams, we get to see how the conference stacks up with the rest of the country, and it isn't pretty. The Big 12 is 2-5 in bowl play. OU's opponents are also 2-5 in bowl play. The two wins were against UCLA and Navy (no disrespect intended for Navy). So one can no longer use the circular argument that: 1) The teams in the Big 12 are better because they play in a better conference; and 2) the Big 12 Conference is a better conference because they have better teams. The Big 12 bowl teams as a group have proven that they are NOT better teams and that the Big 12 is NOT a strong conference this year. In contrast, USC's opponents are 5-1 in bowl games. The one loser, UCLA, also counts as a loss for OU's opponents in bowl games.
I'm not saying that that's always true about the Big 12 - two or three years ago, it was the Pac 10 that got its head handed to it during bowl season by losing something like 5 of 7 games.
And for your information it's not "us" guys voting. It's the majority of AP sports writers and the majority of D-I coaches who agree that USC has had the best season, because the majority of them have actually seen the games. They saw how OU got manhandled by KSU and gave up. And they all knew that the score would have been 42-7 had KSU had not run the clock out when the ball was on OU's 5 yard line. That just does not happen with championship teams. If they kept fighting, like Michigan does, maybe the pollsters would have felt differently.
Pete Carroll does not participate in the coaches' poll anyway.
The worst thing that has happened in all this didn't happen to USC - it happened to LSU. They must be feeling that they have to beat OU by 28 just to be considered to be even as good as Kansas State, which lost it's bowl game; and that wouldn't have happened if the computers had accounted for all the Big 12 teams padding their schedules with weak out of conference opponents at home.