I recently read Travis Marmon’s article about Boise State University and how they should never be ranked higher than third; and I disagree. From what I have gathered Travis’ main points are as follows; first, they don’t play enough non-conference games against quality opponents. Second, it is their fault they are in the Western Athletic Conference and are penalized because of it.
In Travis’ first point he totally ignored the conversations that have to be worked out for non-conference games to be scheduled. They are often scheduled five to 10 years in advance. For example, The Ohio State University has a game scheduled against the University of Tennessee in 2019 already. Highly-ranked teams routinely schedule these suspected highly-ranked opponents years in advance and leave the three to four-year window to schedule teams like UT-Chattanooga and Utah State for the University of Alabama and Oklahoma University
Six years ago no one could have predicted that Boise would be a perennial power for the last two years so they did not schedule them as such. Now that they are regarded as one, those agreements are starting to be worked out.
The second piece of evidence is that they are not trying to fix this problem either. Let’s look at this year. The Virginia Tech University game was originally scheduled to be played in Boise, Idaho. Boise then agreed to move it thousands of miles away to Washington, D.C. So in essence they were playing a home game 2050 miles away. This takes away the excuse that the national media uses that Boise can beat people on the blue turf but nowhere else (i.e. Oregon). However they went to D.C. and beat Virginia Tech
Travis’ final piece of evidence is that they wouldn’t go play Nebraska unless they were to receive $1 million. If you look at similar agreements in college football you will see that this isn’t even an egregious amount, in fact it is quite low.
For example, lets look at the agreement Ohio State and the University of Colorado accepted earlier this year. Colorado will go to Columbus to play Ohio State for 1.4 million. And this is Colorado, a top flight Big 12 soon to be Pac-12 University. I’ll admit I agree with you in terms that if Oregon University and Auburn University win out they should go to the national title. I do support the fact that Boise did beat Oregon last year but they have looked very impressive and I would be okay with them going over Boise even though Boise started the year ranked higher than both and haven’t lost.
So if you ended your argument there I could have agreed mostly with you but then you go and say that Texas Christian University or the University of Utah are better teams and justify leapfrogging Boise, and that’s where I vehemently oppose you. To say that the Mountain West Conference is that much better than the WAC shows that you have not watched a game in either conference besides that of Boise, TCU or Utah. You make the point that San Diego State University, Air Force and Brigham Young University are all good teams in the top half of the MWC. We’ll take them one at a time. SDSU is two years removed from a 2-10 season.
The only impressive thing you can say about them is that they kept the University of Missouri close on the road, which I am sure is your rationale for your previous point. If we go by that then they beat Utah State big, who almost beat Oklahoma on the road. Are you saying that San Diego State could beat Oklahoma big? Yeah right, they would get demolished.
Air Force are basically Georgia Tech but not as good as they don’t have as good of defense and have much less overall speed than that of Georgia Tech. Both run variants of the Triple Option. And look at that Georgia Tech, they were just beat last Thursday by Virginia Tech, who lost to Boise, but obviously you wrote this article before knowing the outcome of the game.
BYU is 3-5 and 2-2 in the MWC alone. So you have Utah and TCU at the top. Utah hasn’t played anyone except for the University of Pittsburgh at home. But because they have beaten seven bad teams and one average team they are ranked five so when TCU beats them it will look great in the Computers, yet only because Urban Meyer brought Utah to collegiate prominence.
If the University of Nevada or University of Hawaii were still undefeated they would be ranked in the high teens still and wouldn’t help Boise much. So saying that the WAC is considerably worse than the MWC is wrong in my opinion.
Again, I agree with your statement that Boise should not jump Auburn or Oregon in the standings but I do not agree that BCS system should make it so that it is legitimately impossible for Boise to make the national title game.