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closeThe season’s first Bowl Championship Series standings came out earlier this week, revealing, in case you didn’t know already, that life is good if you’re a Florida Gator, a Texas Longhorn, or part of the crest of the Alabama Crimson Tide.
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Those three teams, as many predicted before the season started, have the clearest paths to the BCS national championship game, partly because the rougher stretches of their respective schedules are already behind them and partly because the teams behind them in the rankings aren’t likely to make runs toward the top.
The Big Ten’s best team, Iowa, needed to block two extra points to beat Northern Iowa and had a too-close- for-comfort win over Arkansas State.
The kings of the Pac-10, the USC Trojans, were defeated by a Washington team that did not win a game last year and is 3-4 this season.
Cincinnati and Boise State, fine teams who would handle themselves well in any conference this season, are handcuffed by the lack of collective juice in the Big East and the WAC.
Just about everyone else would need a win over one of these teams to boost their own resumes, and schedules that include hapless foes from Division I-A as well as I-AA, in the majority of cases, don’t allow for that.
A more interesting question, though, is are the Gators, Longhorns and Tide on top of the mountain because they’re truly complete, dominant teams, or are they there by default?
Put another way, are college football’s teams, by and large, getting better or worse?
After all, as Penn State coach Joe Paterno likes to tell us, you don’t stay the same. You get better or you get worse. And although there are arguably more talented athletes playing the game today than ever before and the coaching is as innovative and thorough as it’s ever been, the last few years — 2009 in particular — have produced few, if any, truly great teams.
A few reasons why:
1. Haves and have-nots. Some argue that parity has ruined the game. I’ll argue that it’s a lack of parity that has done it. Actually, two separate disparities — a disproportionate collection of talent in the southern and western parts of the United States and the way that talent seems to flock to certain schools — USC, Texas, Florida — and not find its way north or east. When four- and five-star recruits are sitting on the bench for two seasons behind other four- and five-star recruits, it weakens the level of competition. It also leads to the second reason ...
2. Stud freshmen are taking over the game. This should be a good thing, right? Today’s 18-year-old blue-chipper is physically ready to play and fundamentally sound after years of training, all-star camps and private workouts. In many cases at many programs, he’s good enough to unseat a less talented upperclassman. But although that stud freshman might catch six passes for 160 yards and two touchdowns against Western Alaska Tech, he is often more prone to a big mistake — a wrong route, a dropped pass — in a tight game against a conference rival than the veteran he replaced.
3. Early exits. Three years later, that stud rookie knows what to do in those spots. Except he’s not a college senior — he’s a second-year NFL player, making new mistakes on a new team. Juniors have been turning pro early for years, but an increasing number of third-year sophomores — former Penn State defensive end Aaron Maybin is a great example — are leaving, too. And every injury to a high-profile player who could have jumped and didn’t (Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford) will send even more young players to the pros.
4. Shifting coaching landscape. Five years ago, the average tenure of the Big Ten’s 10 other coaches was six years. Today, it’s 3 1/2. Joe Paterno’s 44 years at one program is an anomaly, but it’s rare to see a coach at one school for more than five years these days. If he’s bad, he’s fired. If he’s good, he’ll leave to go to a better program, as Urban Meyer, Nick Saban and Rich Rodriguez did. Either way, a new coach means starting over in recruiting and starting over in terms of what kind of system the coach wants to run, neither of which is conducive to putting a quality product on the field without at least a couple of years of transition. If they’re even granted.
The addition of a 12th game, and the immediate scheduling of I-AA opponents that followed, hasn’t contributed to the disparity but has, at least incrementally, made it tougher to distinguish the strong teams from average teams who have pounded on defenseless opposition, which can and has become a problem when BCS pairings are drawn up and result in post-New Year bloodbaths.
And it has led teams even further from the original (alleged) purpose of the legislation — scheduling intriguing interconference power games.
The beauty of a college football season is the millions of twists and turns it inevitably takes, including the little turns in games — a punt block here, a goal-line stand there — and the big twists a top-five upset can lead to. Maybe the team or pair of teams standing tall at the end of this season will have proven their mettle against all comers, and maybe more of those comers will give them stiffer challenges than they’ve seen so far.
But this year’s title could come with a sickly, unresolved feeling, a thought that the last team standing didn’t measure up to champions past.
Or worse — that it did, but never had the chance to show it.
Jeff Rice covers Penn State football for the Centre Daily Times. He can be reached at 231-4609 or jrice@centredaily.com.
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