You might as well ask for the meaning of life, as to ask anyone to explain the BCS and its' mysterious ways. If they're honest, the BCS types will start by saying if you're Texas, you'll get shafted...
After the 09 Tech game: Leach: "Mack why did you score 77 points on us today" Mack: "Because the BCS told me to"
Be a ******** and run up the score on a hapless opponent. Hey, it sure worked for Hitler of the land thieves.
GET RID OF THE COMPUTERS!!! THEY MAKE NO SENSE!!!! ANYONE WHO DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THIS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS IS DELUSIONAL!!!
Let's not forget that is was computers that put us in the 2005 Rose Bowl against Michigan instead of Cal, who was ahead in both human polls.
If you are gonna compete an a beauty contest, there's nothing wrong with getting a better understanding of the judge's scoring system. And, sorry, but I just don't buy the 'just win all the games' nonsense. That's just a cop-out. Sure, it'd be great to win all the games, but most times you don't. So, it would be good to know as well as we can, what we need to do to overcome a loss. And, if that means scheduling tougher OOC schedule, then better for that to be said - so we have more reason to do it.
This is a great move on Mack Brown's part. The BCS ranking system needs to be transparent. All criteria used in the human and computers polls need to be common knowledge, and understood by coaches, media and the public. For instance, the human voters should be identified and their votes made public, not just the last vote of the year. The computer programming criteria and how it weighs the different data should be known to all.
I think it is just politics. He is making his point and hoping that others are listening and will be more sympathetic to Texas in the future if a similar situation occurred. B/c it would have to be a similar situation that he is concerned about if these are the questions he is askng the guru's. Sure they can go out and schedule better teams. But those schedules are often made years ahead of time and you never know how a team will ultimately look once that happens. Arkansas ended up being a pretty bad team to schedule last year. On paper when it was scheduled I thought it was a decent game to put on the OOC resume. OU got hte benefit of TCU and Cinn having really good seasons. TCU you might have thought would be decent b/c they usually are, but Cinn was just a fluke that went OU's way. Texas defense was better overall than that of OU. They ranked higher and gave up less points than OU. OU forced more turnovers than UT and many voters see this and it makes more of an impression on them. Just as scoring a shitload of points does to them. Many people forget that OU was ahead of Texas in both the Harris and Coaches poll going into the final regular season poll. Why the hell was that the case? What happened was that in the final regular season poll the politics came out and enough people switched their votes to move Texas up. Texas went from 4th in both of those polls to 3rd in both of those polls and got just a few more votes overall to move them ahead of OU in the overall human poll portion of the BCS. Sure OU then also got a big bump in the computers but why the heck did OU stay above UT in the computers for so long until that point? You can take the computers out but I am not 100% confident that the votes don't get swayed enough, like they did in that last regular season poll, and still put Texas behind OU. You gotta put some blame on the voters for making it so close too.
The fact that this philosophy has already failed Auburn makes a crappy OOC SOS a genuine issue of concern. Furthermore, the entertainment value of A cupcake schedule will affect the demand for season tickets, upon which Bellmont has relied in the expansion of DKR and the rise in ticket prices. This is particularly important to consider as, in this economy, people are indisputably curtailing the amounts appropriated for discretionary spending in their budgets. It will affect ticket sales, and milque toast games reduce the incentive of prospective ticket buyers to rationalize those purchases. Taps has made a myopic argument in the past that these tickets should be purchased out of loyalty to the program alone. That loyalty will only work for those that can afford the tickets. The entertainment value, as it were, is an inextricable factor in the affordability assessment of what is, by definition, an entertainment expense. The product needs to justify the expense, and the product of Texas football does not begin and end with a fancy stadium, a talented team, and good coaches. Mowing down the weak sisters of the poor is not good entertainment, and is not a business model that will sustain the ticket sales needed to subsidize the massive institution Texas Football has become. At a certain point, you need to trust your rich coaches and talented recruits (which undoubtedly are lured in by our state of the art facilities, the costs of which are justified by projected future ticket demand) to kick the respective asses of quality opponents on the other side of the ball. What the SEC has done for years, and the Big 12 as well (to a lesser extent), is hide behind a mythical conference superiority to justify bowl "seeding.". This has created an insular, anti-competitive, elitist system which does Nothing to prove who actually has produced the best team in the country. The BCS proponents have done so to preserve their disproportionately large piece of the pie. What they have failed to realize is that they could stave off the playoff pushers by playing teams perceived as being of higher quality in the OOC schedule. Sorry for the rant
Mack Brown should push the strings of the BCS on the computer issue. Exactly how can you expect a damn computer to pick the better team? Yeah, a tougher schedule would help but like it was posted before many times these are set years in advance. If the top 5 teams had all played tougher schedules in 2008 you might have had some really great in season games but then we would all have sat back and watched Utah vs. Boise State play for a National Title. The BCS is BULLSH*T and as much controversy as possible should be brought to their doorstep and deposited on the front porch. These coaches should all push for a playoff!!
If the powers-that-be at BCS are honest with Mack, they'll tell him something he doesn't want to hear. They will tell him that there are a handful of schools (USC, blow-u, maybe LSU, maybe tOSU) that will get the benefit of the doubt come championship game time over UT. Everything else being equal, UT will generally have to do more to impress than those schools to get into the championship game. It may not always be so, and the cast of favored schools may change from time to time a bit, but UT probably needs one or two more championships to make it to the "favored" list. This is NOT saying UT's not as good as those schools. Quite the opposite...the Horns can hang with any of 'em most years. It IS saying there's a voters bias UT is gonna have to overcome. Maybe it starts with scheduling tougher non-conference games, maybe not. Mack's doing the right thing by at least getting some explanations, and if he's setting the table to get a more favorable outcome this next season, great. This is just my two cents worth, but I'm not gonna get my hopes up that the coaching staff is gonna hear anything insightful enough from the BCS people to dramatically change how UT goes about playing this next season. It's not in Mack, I think, to run up the score on beaten opponents the way Stoops and his alter-ego Leach do. That's a big reason I like Mack so much as our coach, whether or not we ever get back to the BCS championship game.
I love the fact Mack is doing this and hopefully it will help. However, I don't see why everyone is so down on the computers. I do agree with everyone stating the whole thing should be thrown out in favor of a playoff. However, the computers didn't have near as much to do with us not making the MNC as the human voters did. We finished #2 in the computer polls and #3 in both human polls. The 2 #3's is what did us in!! If you really want to fix this thing without a playoff get rid of all polls (human opinion and bias) and only use the computers. The computers provide an unbiased look at the team's season. They aren't influenced by the cOcksUckers running up the score or espin thinking Tebow is better than Jesus. They look at the numbers and that's it. Once again the bias in the voters is what kept us from the championship game. Here is a link to the finally BCS rankings which yielded the bcs rankings that determined the MNC. The Link As far as what we could have done differently, there are really only 2 things. We could have had a tougher nonconference schedule, although this isn't as easy to predict as many think. Is there any doubt that if we had beaten an Arkansas team that had Felix Jones and/or Darren McFadden and Nutt (instead of a first year coach and new system) our schedule would have been looked at completely different? Or is there any doubt that had Cincinnati sucked like they traditionally do, the **********’s ooc would have been viewed completely different? This throws out the fact that the schedules are made years ahead of time, so it's really a crapshoot. The second thing we could have done is not pulled starters and ran up the score like other teams did. The human voters would have been more impressed and we may have been ranked higher. It probably would have made a difference had we beaten aggy 63-9 instead of 49-9. Especially when we are being compared to the cOcksUckers. Other than that, we did everything we could.
The Horns got chipped in large part because they lost later than the other contestants and didn't have any marquee matchups down a stretch wherein OU did. Add to this a weak OOC sched and a conference three-way tie breaker that does not account for head to head if the whole BCS mess doesn't and you have another non-conference champ in Austin and no inclusion in the MNC game. The real prob is that the human pollsters never really bought into Texas as being better than OU. They only dropped OU four slots after the RRS. They were bound to battle Texas for the higher BCS slot and Texas lost late, anointing Texas Tech #2, and then OU followed up and drank down style and SOS points by destroying those teams. There was alot of shaky support for the Horns as a team ranked ahead of the Sooners, and that support faltered. Even if Mack has purposefully run up the score on the last couple of UT opponents, it would have looked desperate and weak in comparison to the Sooners waxing highly ranked opponents.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Texas have gone to the BCS Championship if it weren't for the ridiculous big 12 3-way tiebreaker rule? I'm not sure if that would have given us the required number of points in the computers however, so I'm glad Mack is doing this.
USC was reamed as badly as anyone last year. They were a damn good football team and they only got to annihilate Penn State.
