BCS Bowl Championship Series
Ohio St., LSU to meet for BCS title
FOXSports.com
15 days ago
Just a few weeks ago, it appeared as if Ohio State and LSU had both blown their shot at playing in the BCS title game with losses to unranked opponents.
But in this strangest of college football seasons, both have played their way back into the championship, albeit with plenty of help from any number of teams who were unable to take advantage of opportunities.
On Saturday, it was Missouri and West Virginia which stumbled — the first time in the history of the BCS that both the Nos. 1 and 2 teams in the standings lost on the same day — opening the door for idle Ohio State to ascend to the top spot.
It marked the end of a long journey back for the Buckeyes, who were in seventh place in the standings after their stunning home loss to Illinois and still mired in fifth place after finishing the regular season with a win at Michigan on Nov. 17.
LSU, meanwhile, used a victory over Tennessee in the SEC title game to vault all the way from seventh to second in the standings. In addition to passing Saturday’s big losers (i.e., Missouri and West Virginia), the Tigers also leapfrogged ACC champion Virginia Tech and a pair of idle teams in Georgia and Kansas.
Virginia Tech was the top-ranked team in the country, according to the computers. But the two human elements of the formula — the coaches and the Harris poll voters — considered LSU the No. 2 team, behind only Ohio State. And it’s a fairly safe assumption that LSU’s 48-7 dismantling of Virginia Tech earlier in the season was at least one of the factors those voters considered in elevating the Tigers to the No. 2 spot ahead of the Hokies.
It’s also safe to say that voters strongly felt that a team needed to win its conference championship game in order to merit a spot in the national title game. How else to explain Georgia dropping a spot from fourth to fifth after a week in which they didn’t play, and which saw two of the three teams ranked ahead of them lose?
Kansas got similar treatment, falling from fifth to eighth even though the Jayhawks finished Saturday with the same 11-1 record with which they began it. Even though they had one fewer loss than conference rivals Oklahoma and Missouri, the Jayhawks finished behind both the Sooners (fourth) and the Tigers (sixth) in the final standings.
Many observers felt as if USC — along with LSU, one of the early favorites to play in the title game — might merit consideration in the title debate after finishing the season on a four-game winning streak and claiming its sixth straight Pac-10 crown. But a 24-7 win over crosstown rival UCLA was only impressive enough to move the Trojans up one notch (from eighth to seventh) and the preseason No. 1 team will have to settle for a Rose Bowl appearance.
The other big BCS winner — other than the Buckeyes and Tigers, that is — was Hawaii. After rallying to defeat Washington and preserve their perfect regular season, the Warriors assured themselves of a BCS bowl berth with their 10th-place showing in the final standings.
But even though Hawaii finished the season as the Bowl Subdivision’s only undefeated team, the Warriors were never seriously considered as a title game participant by either the human voters or the computers thanks to their comparatively easy schedule.
And so the Buckeyes will have an opportunity to atone for their performance in last year’s title game, in which they were handed a crushing 41-14 defeat at the hands of Florida. To do it, they’ll have to beat another champion from the mighty SEC.
This season, far stranger things have happened.
