The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

Yeah, about that streak of SEC teams in the Championship Game: it's pretty easy to put a team there every year when the starting point for the media is that your conference is de facto better than every other conference before a single game has been played.

And in totally unrelated news, when forced to actually win their way into the championship game, suddenly The Streak Has Ended!  What an amazing coincidence!  I, for one, am shocked.

I will save my Nick Saban commentary for another time.

P.S. Food for thought: in the absence of a playoff system, the National Championship game this year would have been Alabama vs. Florida State.  Tell me how I am wrong.

Also just think, IF there was NO playoff this year we would be talking about that Alabama-FSU National Title Game coming up in a few days most likely. That would have most likely been your national title game. The 1 loss SEC school vs the unbeaten defending national champs

The SEC got beat up the past few days. Alabama, Ole Miss, Miss St, LSU, Auburn all lost. Ole Miss and Miss St got flat out beaten up and embarrassed.

Yeah, the SEC's air of superiority definitely had the air let out of it this postseason. As a Pac-12 fan living in SEC country, this provides me with a considerable amount of amusement.

I just straight up hate FSU and Alabama, so this was a pleasing result.

Oh hell yeah. Last night was absolutely perfect.

I don't care for the Buckeye's but I was rooting for them last night when they beat Nick Satan!!!

Ole Miss and Mississippi State are the shining examples of SEC bias.

Mississippi State beat garbage teams out-of-conference, but because they beat SEC teams and SEC Teams Are The Best, they were ranked #1 in the nation.
The best team Ole Miss had on their out-of-conference schedule was an unranked Boise State.  Beating SEC teams propelled them to #3.

Even when SEC teams win, they embarrass.  Turns out a Gator player scored a TD with a dump in his pants

gamedayr.com/sports/college-ncaa/college-football/adam-lane-poop-his-pants-birmingham-bowl-129349/

While a few teams got extra love because of it ... I'm pretty sure sure prior to the bowl games most people recognized the SEC was down this year. As for FSU ... everyone also knew they weren't the same team as last year but unfortunately no one beat them so regardless of what name they wear on their jerseys ... they deserved to be in the final four.

It's funny to me that people think this year means every year would have been the same. How may times have we seen an Ohio State run out of the National Championship?

You say that "most people recognized the SEC was down this year" but they had the #1 ranked team in the nation and 3 teams ranked in the top 10.  How many teams would they have in the top 10 of an "up" year.... 5?  7?

I don't really see the hilarity.  With the info you had, the teams were ranked correctly.  ...FSU included.

You have to go off of the info you have -- Alabama looked great, FSU hadn't lost.  Even if they both had gotten blown out, they deserved to be there.

That's why you have a playoff.

"The info you had" said that SEC teams are de facto better than teams in other conferences.
That info was incorrect, hence the hilarity.

The SEC has benefited from this perception for years, and this was one of the first times where such an assumption has been put to the test.

I think it's true, in general, that the SEC is better than other conferences.  Sure, that may have been inflated this year. 

But you have a pretty limited sample size. 

All you used to be able to go on is what you saw on the field.  SEC, in years past, looked stronger and faster.  It doesn't necessarily mean you're better, but if that's the info you have, you have to use what you've got.  And they did win many championships.

It's a lot easier to win championships when you are allowed to play for them every year.

As I already stated, without the Playoff this year, the BCS title game almost certainly would have been Alabama vs. Florida State, and the SEC would likely be celebrating another year of "domination" over the college football landscape.

Right. I agree.  But they'd be right.  In that system, they were the best regular season teams.

But they were NOT the best teams, as demonstrated last weekend.  Regardless of the system.

Is that fair?

If the Giants played the Patriots 10 times, do they still win?  I mean, BEST means nothing -- it's really BEST WITHIN WHATEVER SYSTEM. 

The way the NFL was set up, the Giants peaked at the right time and beat the Pats.  Good for them.  Had the season ended and we had to pick a winner, it would've undoubtedly been the Patriots.

You work within the guidelines of whatever championship you have.

--

TCU could very well stomp OSU or Oregon and we'll never know.  But in the system that we have, they were put out early, because of a loss to Baylor.  It's just the system you have.

The only way that you arrive at the conclusion that Alabama was "the best regular season team" (when they have the same record as many other teams) is to presume that the teams Alabama played were better than the teams that the other 1-loss teams played.

i.e. the SEC is better than the other conferences

When the system is "team A beat Team B in a game head to head" that's fine.

When the system is "these two teams never played each other but Team A looks better than Team B" then that leaves room for opinion and speculation.

That's always the case, though.  The Giants didn't play every team in the league when they won the Super Bowl.

Look, I'm pro-playoffs, but I don't think that it justifies shit-talking previous champions awarded, considering that the decisions were just, based on the info that they had.

Guys, you're missing the point here...a guy pooped himself on TV.

This is what I believe as well.  You can knock the system but not the teams.

But every team that the Giants did not beat either a) finished with a record so bad that they did not qualify for the playoffs or b) lost in the playoffs before the Giants did.

Imagine a version of the NFL where there are only two divisions per conference, East and West.
Imagine that each team plays two games against each of its 7 division opponents, one interdivisional game and one interconference game and two more games against basically any pro team you can find, including AFL and CFL teams.
Now imagine that instead of having playoffs, the media simply voted on which two teams should play in the Super Bowl (not necessarily one from each conference).

A narrative would quickly develop on which division was the "power" division, and because most games are divisional matches, there is no real way to dispel this narrative.  This is the college football system under which the SEC has excelled.

While I tend to agree with spider, the sample size is too small.   If over the next few years this result repeats with sec getting knocked out round 1 the case will be stronger.  If the sec wins it in playoff 3 out of 4 then this was afluke.

I do like playoffs better.  But just because a team wins a game doesn't mean it is the stronger team just that they were better on that day.

the 07 giants ere not a stronger team than nep

and in 85 under a bcs system the super bowl woud have been bears and fish, and that would have a much better game than pats bears

I'm not saying that a single-elimination playoff bracket is perfect.  Far from it.  (and 4 teams is too few IMO)

My issue is with the presumed superiority of a conference.  People talk about the SEC streak of championship game appearances as if it has great significance, but all that it means is that the SEC practically always got the benefit of the doubt under the BCS.  The epitome of this nonsense was the LSU-Alabama title game in 2011, where a team that didn't even win its own conference was playing for the national title Because SEC.