Flip-flop
Stewart Mandel
SI.com
A couple of hours before the start of Saturday night's SEC championship game -- before USC and UCLA had even kicked off -- a BCS official stood chatting with reporters in the back of the Georgia Dome press box and joked: "You know what we say in the BCS?" he said. "Never say, 'That won't happen.'"
A lot of people said that very thing about the Bruins' chances of knocking the Trojans out of the national championship picture on Saturday. And now that Florida has advanced to the title game under somewhat dubious circumstances, a lot of those same people -- particularly in Ann Arbor, Mich. -- are saying the same thing about the possibility of a Gators upset of No. 1 Ohio State.
That's what we do in college football: We make assumptions. We assume Miami will crush Ohio State in the 2002 national title game. We assume '03 Oklahoma is one of the greatest teams of all time right up until the moment it loses 35-7 to Kansas State. We assume '05 USC will cruise to a third straight national title. We assume Wake Forest will never in a million years play in a BCS bowl.
I've always wondered whether the day would ever come when people stopped making such blanket assumptions.
I think that day arrived Sunday.
For the better part of two months, the college football media and public operated under the assumption that Ohio State and Michigan were the two best teams in the country. Even after the Buckeyes knocked off the Wolverines on Nov. 18, we held true to that assumption, setting up the possibility of a rematch for the national championship.
But a strange and unprecedented thing transpired over the two weeks: The people who vote in the polls actually questioned their own assumptions.
Which is how it came to be that on Sunday, a surprisingly large amount of coaches and Harris voters suddenly -- and, if you were to ask any Michigan fan, inexplicably -- moved the Gators over the Wolverines onto No. 2 on their ballots. Did 63 coaches and 113 Harris voters watch Florida's SEC title win over Arkansas on Saturday night and suddenly decide, "I've changed my mind -- Florida is the second-best team in the country, not Michigan."
I highly doubt it.
I think it was the voters' way of saying, "You know what? Maybe it's not as sure as I thought." After all, it's not a question they'd have to give much thought to before because almost no one saw the second title-game spot coming down to a choice between the Wolverines and Gators.
So after USC lost and Florida beat Arkansas the voters did something previously unheard of in the annals of polling: They reevaluated their ballots.
This, of course, will touch off the latest subject of controversy in the illustrious history of the BCS. Three years ago, after the No. 1 team in the polls, USC, inexplicably finished No. 3 in the standings, the BCS folks opted to place less weight on the computers and give more voice to the humans. Now, after this year's bizarre 11th-hour shuffle, a new argument will undoubtedly arise to eliminate the human component altogether.
"I hope that, in the future, we can have a system where all of the answers are decided on the field," an understandably peeved Lloyd Carr said Sunday night. "We need to get away from anything that's not decided by the players themselves."
News flash, people: Even if academia's powers-that-be had a sudden change of heart tomorrow and instituted a playoff, there would still be someone, somewhere determining who plays in it. What the pollsters did Sunday was actually fairly reasoned by college football standards.
The fact is, we have no idea whether Florida is better than Michigan. They play in different conferences against different opponents. One runs a traditional offense where the quarterback hands off to a tailback and throws to a receiver; the other uses its backup QB and a freshman receiver as running backs.
The only thing we know for sure is that on Nov. 18 in Columbus, Ohio State was three points better than the Wolverines. As of now, we have no idea whether the Gators will fare better Jan. 8 in Arizona. Anyone who says they do is making -- say it with me now -- an assumption.
Carr was 100 percent correct when he pointed out Sunday night: "[Florida] would not have moved ahead of us had USC won its game" It's true. No one would have bothered re-ordering No. 3 and No. 4.
But the pollsters don't operate in a vacuum. They knew exactly what the stakes were when they turned in their ballots, and quite frankly, I don't think they felt comfortable playing God. They didn't feel comfortable relegating a 12-1 SEC champion to the Sugar Bowl based solely on their subjective belief -- check that, their assumption -- that the Gators wouldn't give Ohio State a better game than Michigan did.
Many will contend in the coming hours and days that voters shouldn't be thinking about the championship matchup when casting their ballots. I say, how could they not? You can't ask people to vote in a poll that helps determine the title game and then expect them to somehow block out the impact their vote will have. There's also nothing against it in the criteria for either poll.
"The voters had the freedom to vote for any reason that they deem appropriate," said BCS coordinator Mike Slive, who is also the SEC commissioner . "Some of the [reasons] we may like and some of them we may not like. Some of them we agree with and some we may not. But that's the system that's in place."
Finally, I've got to imagine the voters were affected at least somewhat by recent history.
There was no shortage of sentiment in '04 that undefeated SEC champion Auburn deserved an Orange Bowl berth over undefeated Big 12 champ Oklahoma. But the pollsters weren't about to drop the Sooners to No. 3 for no good reason. As it turned out, they probably should have; USC throttled Oklahoma 55-19, leaving a whole lot of voters feeling like they made the wrong choice.
All the accompanying bellyaching from Tommy Tuberville and other SEC coaches may not have garnered Auburn anything more than a Golf Digest trophy, but it set into a motion a seismic ripple effect. For the past two years, we've had a recurring message beaten into our brains (including in a Sports Illustrated cover story earlier this season): The SEC is the best. The SEC is the toughest. The SEC should have a permanent seat in the national championship game.
That sentiment undoubtedly played a huge role in lifting the Gators into the title game. The respect the SEC has achieved is reflected in how many of their teams appear in the national rankings -- and it's because of those rankings that Florida's resume looked better than Michigan's on paper.
Of course, the SEC's reputation as the best conference this season is yet another one of those pesky assumptions. Fortunately, we now have the perfect litmus test -- the national championship game.
In one corner we have Ohio State, a team no one in the Big Ten was able to touch all season. In the other corner we have Florida, the cream of the SEC crop this season, going 12-1 against the likes of LSU, Auburn, Tennessee and Arkansas.
You say you're the best, SEC? Then let's see your champion go out to Arizona and knock off an Ohio State team that no one in the Big Ten -- or defending national champion Texas -- could remotely touch all season. At the very least, they better put a bigger scare into Troy Smith & Co. than Michigan did.
If they don't, there are going to be a whole lot of pollsters who wish they'd stuck with their original assumption.
This article appeared on the Yahoo Sports website on Monday, December 4, 2006.
