As Wisconsin basketball heads out of the exhibition season and into Sunday's regular season opener, one question comes to mind: While these exhibition games may in fact be wiped from the record, are they wiped from memory?
If I was a Tennessee fan right now, I would find it difficult to accept this. That said, one need sonly to look back one season to find proof that the pre-season is indeed kept separate. Just as Tennessee's loss to the University of Indianapolis is this year's exhibition shocker, so was Le Moyne's upset of Syracuse just one year ago. Yes, the same Syracuse that went on to gain a top seed in the tournament, four months being plenty of time to forget a team's early season struggles.
So for college basketball, exhibition games do indeed live up to their name.
But could an exhibition schedule work in football?
No. Never. Don't even start.
First of all, the reliance on subjectivity in football makes any game a regular season contest. Heck, voters have started paying attention to spring games in researching their pre-season votes. How could we reasonably expect them to ignore pre-season games against other teams when they can't even ignore an inter-squad game in April?
Basketball may use polling to arrange the tournament brackets, but football takes it the whole nine yards, skipping the whole concept of a tournament and using those polls as the sole means of determining who gets the opportunity to compete for a national title.
In addition, college football has a much shorter season. While a team like Syracuse has thirty plus games to shed away the stigma of an upset loss, football gives programs just twelve games to prove their critics wrong.
Just look at the impact of Michigan's loss to Appalachian State and it seems pretty clear that an exhibition loss would lead to BCS doom.
The addition of exhibition games would be dangerous for college football. Unlike the polls in college basketball, the BCS is heavily influenced by pre-season rankings. That said, it would be impossible to conceive a team that loses an exhibition game would not see that loss impact their ability to compete for a national title.
Non-conference scheduling already gives major programs the opportunity to schedule what are in essence exhibitions. The SEC is famous for their weak non-conference scheduling, a practice that these teams employ to give themselves an opportunity to fine tune amidst a conference schedule that they claim wares on a program more than any other.
Auburn's game last Saturday against Chattanooga was, for all intents and purposes, an exhibition. Auburn wasn't going to lose that game. But if they had, exhibition or not, there is no way the strictest of voting guidelines could prevent voters from taking that performance into account.
Adding an exhibition game, even one, would in essence serve to simply lengthen the college football schedule as no one in their right mind could argue that an exhibition game wouldn't have an impact on a team's ""perception,"" so vital to positioning in the rankings.
Exhibition games are a crucial part of the preparation for an NCAA basketball season. Even so, they should never be a part of the college football landscape. In the BCS era, there can never truly be a concrete line between exhibition and reality.
Think football exhibitions are a good idea? E-mail Max at max.sternberg@yahoo.com.
