Quote:
Originally Posted by Flames in 07
And the iron bowl would have been a Complete waste of time.
How many times did Vern lundquist and danielson say "for all the marbles"?
The bcs screwed auburn in 04, outside if that it nailed it. It's never easy with 118 teams and 12 weeks. But now we need to start to cater to the lowest common denominator, start with 4, then probably 8 and then we end up with basketball. No massive iron bowl games. Just 3 months of mildly important football but never, ever huge games they was have been used to over the decades.
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Yeah, but it wasn't for all the marbles. If Alabama won, they probably still need to beat Missouri to get to the NC, assuming Florida State and Ohio State win out. Next week's SEC championship has a claim to be for all the marbles too, because the winner has a shot at jumping into the top two, even though we don't know for sure how the BCS is going to score it.
The system has the appearance of making games more important because it keeps the effects of outcomes unknown until after they happen. The iron bowl game seemed more important than it was because people thought that it might be enough to vault Auburn ahead of Ohio State. When you're inside the narrative, a lot of things seem huge. But in retrospect, few games are actually as large as they seemed. The Oregon/Stanford game seemed huge when it happened. Now it's a 'meh' moment of the season. If Auburn fails to reach the NC game, then the importance of this game will shrink significantly. Yeah, it took someone out of the championship picture, but it didn't get anyone into the championship. So it's definitely not an all-the-marbles game.
I'm not saying the new system is better. Actually, it's a lot worse. I hate it. Not because the games count for less, but because we'll have even less idea what the actual repercussions of particular results are, even after they happen. Media will hype up these games just as much, because nobody can tell them with authority that they don't have massive implications. We'll get the same 'all the marbles' lines, and they'll still be false 90% of the time. Fans will get caught up in these narratives and be just as into it, and then be outraged when their signature win didn't sway the selection committee as much as they thought it would.
That said, I do think there will be less controversy overall under the new system. Because ultimately people only care about the winner, and the winner will have legitimacy by surviving a playoff with three other elite teams. The team that finished 12-1 and with an okay schedule but lost out on a playoff berth to another 12-1 okay schedule team will be forgotten by the start of next year.