Remember back when we thought Wisconsin was an Orange Bowl contender? Then the Badgers went from having a stake in the Rose Bowl to a bowl named for a steakhouse. Yes, that was just dandy. But on the bright side, at least we don't have to worry about the Bowl Championship Series anymore, nor are we a part of the awful Big East Conference.
In the basketball world, it is a powerhouse, but the football Big East just plain sucks. The best programs, Miami and Virginia Tech, left for the Atlantic Coast Conference this year, and the next best, Boston College, will join the ACC next year. Problem is, even though all the good teams are gone, the Big East champion still gets an automatic berth in one of the BCS bowls, no matter how terrible its record.
Terrible is almost an understatement, however. Four teams tied for first place at 4-2. So we will go through a couple of tiebreakers and find out only Pittsburgh and Syracuse are still eligible to win the BCS spot. Pitt still has a non-conference game at South Florida Saturday that was postponed way back when hurricanes were going Ron Artest on the Sunshine State.
If Pittsburgh wins, the Panthers pretty much wrap up the BCS berth with an 8-3 overall record. If they lose, the Panthers can still get into a BCS game, even though they lost to Syracuse. Pitt just has to finish higher than the Orange in the rankings. Of course, neither school is really good enough to crack the top 25, so it could come down to the \also receiving votes category."" If Syracuse has some friends with a sense of humor and gets more votes, a 6-5 team that wasn't even bowl-eligible until last Saturday could be playing in a $14 million bowl. Syracuse, by the way, lost to Temple, a school the Big East is kicking out of the conference for being chronically bad at football. Oh, the irony.
Actually I'm hoping for even greater irony. I want Tennessee and Colorado to steal a couple of more BCS spots by knocking off Auburn and Oklahoma this weekend, thus leaving the BCS to select a single one-loss team from Oklahoma, Auburn, California and Texas. And then I want to see the agitated commissioners from the BCS conferences try to defend this ridiculously inept system while their best teams are shut out.
Frankly, I think the higher-ups in college football place too much importance on having a ""national champion."" We don't really need the BCS; it's all about money anyway. Everyone should relax and take a cue from Wisconsin football. You won't find us worrying about such trivialities as national titles.
Michael Worringer can be reached at mtworringer@wisc.edu.
