The Second Act

After coming to the realization the entire sports universe is going the way of the blog - even ESPN.com - and getting tired of posting the longest responses on message boards, I'm giving this blog thing another shot.

Last season is long gone. The pre-season mags have been out since June and the pre-season rankings are the hot topic - that and the number of players missing the opener for Georgia. Speaking of Georgia, no surprise as the pre-season No. 1 but I don't think they will stay there and that was before the injury to their starting LT. Georgia is talented but every day they look more and more like the team that might disappoint the most.

First and foremost, its tougher for teams to shoulder the burden of being No. 1 or 2. Go back to the number of teams last year that moved up with solid play only to look average at best in the spotlight and fall quickly and many times to an unranked team that had no business pulling off an upset. Will the upsets continue this year? The overall trend line of upsets vs. history will continue to increase but the sheer number won't reach last year. I think college football's traditional powers will continue to occupy the top 'floors' of rankings but upsets will reshuffle the occupants more frequently.

I don't think we will see the two loss thing for a while but the debate over the one-loss teams will be almost an annual thing - which leads us to strength of schedule talk. Once upon a time it was in the BCS but taken out. Many schools, like Texas, have elected to stay away from high profile series in the future like the one they recently had with Ohio State. Oklahoma is going the opposite direction which is why their highly respected AD Joe Castiglione has been advocating SOS be put back into the equation.

The way the system is setup, it would appear Texas is making the right move by taking the path of least resistance. Their thought is don't take a lot of risk in the non-conference because if they can go undefeated in the Big 12, chances are they get in. However, it actually may work against teams with that approach. A couple of years ago some argued it was harder to win a title in the more competitive SEC because of the difficulty in staying unbeaten vs. say USC in the Pac-10 or Ohio State in the Big Ten. It's a foregone conclusion that an undefeated BCS team would likely get into the national title game over a one-loss BCS team no matter the circumstances or particular BCS conference. However, parity is resulting in fewer BCS undefeateds and the trend is likely to continue. Therefore, in a comparison of one-loss teams, conference reputation and the non-conference schedule may be the deciding factor after all. It certainly worked for the SEC the last two years.