Oh Dell Whatever Nevermind

2500 freaking dollars for their newly released XT Tablet.  Engadget’s hands on with the device makes the new  capacitive touch/active digitizer screen experience sound like it’s butter, but the premium for that butter is much more than anyone even thought about guessing.   Am I feeling stupid and contagious though? I think you know the answer…….

Perfect Storm Makes Landfall

What now Mr. BCS Conference College Presidents?  Ohio St. is the “clear” number one team now by default, not because they are clearly the best team in the country.  And then determining who comes next is a less difficult problem to solve than I wish it was, but it’s still a conundrum.  LSU did win the toughest conference, was twice ranked number one during the season, and had the least convincing LOSSES (both in triple OT to good Bowl bound SEC teams) among all the 2 loss conference champions.  They also beat one of the other 2 loss BCS conference champions (Virginia Tech) very convincingly early in the season.

But, is LSU definitely better than Georgia?  I expect the the computer polls to disagree with the human pollsters on this, as coming out of last weekend they had the Dawgs 3 spots ahead of the Tigers.   They played several common opponents in the SEC and LSU had the better record against them.  But, if they had played in the SEC championship, Georgia very likely would have been favored, and very likely would have won, being widely recognized as one of the two hottest teams in the country at the close of the regular season.

The other hot team is USC, a team that started the season as the consensus number one, and stayed there until LSU passed them with their impressive win over VT.  Then the Trojans lost shockingly to lowly Stanford and later to Oregon.  The loss to Oregon was on par with the losses LSU suffered, but Stanford was uh, not?  However, if LSU and USC were matched up in the Rose bowl, who would bet against the Trojans now?

Speaking again of Virginia Tech, they avenged one of their losses with a convincing win over Boston College today in the ACC championship game, but again no one has forgotten how outclassed they were against LSU (or have they, as VT is actually currently AHEAD of LSU in the BCS rankings folks!).  They will likely play a spiritually wounded West Virginia team in the Orange Bowl, that with a win over Pitt tonight (at home), would have rendered this entire diatribe unnecessary.  Instead, they lost crushingly, just as nearly every other team ranked 2nd in the polls has seemingly done all season.  It seems so fitting then that we will now argue for the next month over who number two is, because literally no team has earned it, and therefore none of them really deserves it.

And that brings me to the Rainbow Warriors from the 50th state.  They are the only Div I team without a loss, and they last week beat the BCS Cinderella of 2006: Boise St.  You might remember that thrilling OT win Boise St. had over Oklahoma in last year’s Fiesta Bowl?  The only way a team like Hawaii will ever even have a shot at a national championship though is with at least an 8 team playoff.  And if we had that playoff how would Hawaii do?  They would likely lose in the first round (probably in the Rose Bowl against the number one seeded/ranked Ohio St. Buckeyes), but the way this season has gone would certainly make people watch it to make sure they didn’t miss yet another historic upset (Alas, Hawaii just went down by 3 touchdowns to Washington as I type, so nix that part of the fantasy).

Taking this hypothetical playoff even further who would Ohio St. play in the second round?  Maybe an Oklahoma team coming off a victory over either USC or Georgia in the Fiesta Bowl.  After watching Oklahoma dominate the number one Missouri Tigers tonight, I’m not sure Ohio St. could make it past the Sooners.  In fact, it’s not hard to imagine the Sooners beating LSU in the Championship game.  For that matter, why aren’t the Sooners being given more serious consideration as the number two team?  Their two losses were sqeakers against BCS conference bowl eligible teams, just like LSU’s were.  I’ll grant you the LSU’s were less worse, but so was their win over Tennessee today less convincing than OK’s was (over the number one team by the way).

So is it Georgia, LSU, USC, or Oklahoma who should be playing the Ohio State University in New Orleans on the night of January 7th?  The only way we can really answer that question is for them to all play each other between now and then, but, of course that isn’t going to happen, this year, or next year when the same thing happens all over again (and probably with the exact same teams).  But, two years from now, the current BCS contract with ABC expires, and 3 years from now, we may finally get our wish: an 8 team playoff or what we can then finally, and mercifully refer to as the real Bowl Championship Series.