By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — This is a conversation that isn’t really supposed to take place.
College football, we were told, had taken care of it. See, they set up a system to decide a national championship, a thing called the BCS, which stands for Bowl Championship Series.
Six conferences were made members of it, their champions being automatically qualified to play in BCS bowl games. One game would be designated for the national championship and, as “equals,” it stood to reason that BCS teams would have the same chance to get into the game, which was determined by standings that were more intricate than anything NASA ever undertook.
Non-BCS teams, quite naturally, have taken affront to such a plan and have done all they can to get into the BCS, but the fact of the matter that there is an elite in college football and it turns out it was easier to overturn Jim Crow laws in the South than to get the Boise States and Utahs of the world on equal footing with the BCS schools.
Fine.
But now, it appears, there is something of a class system within the BCS schools themselves, and guess which conference seems to be sitting on the bottom rung of the ladder.
We will give you only one guess, but if you guess the Big East that is all you need.
See, six or seven weeks into the college football season there are rumblings already that the University of Cincinnati should not be able to play in the BCS championship game.
True, the Bearcats are undefeated. True they now are ranked No. 5 in the country and will be favored from here on out.
True, they are a member of the Big East, which is a member of the BCS, which should mean that they could easily qualify if they go unbeaten.
But there are underground rumblings already and, to be quite honest, the folks in the Big East don’t like them at all.
Take Dave Wannstedt of Pitt. His team already has a loss, so it probably won’t qualify for the BCS championship game even if it wins out and beats Cincinnati and West Virginia along the way. He has trouble understanding why such talk exists.
“That’s ridiculous,” Wannstedt said when the subject was breeched during the Big East coaches conference call this week. “If Cincinnati goes undefeated they’ll be playing for the national championship … and deservedly so.”
But, it seems, Cincinnati isn’t from the Big 12 or the SEC, which some seem to think have a claim upon a spot in the game. Think Texas, think Oklahoma, think Alabama, Tennessee and, yes, think Florida.
An SEC or Big 12 team has been in the game the last six years.
Rutgers coach Greg Schiano surely doesn’t think much of such talk.
“That seems ignorant to make a statement like that,” he said. “You’re talking about BCS Division I football. If a team is undefeated it should have a chance.”
And, you probably can guess when Brian Kelly, the Cincinnati coach, stands on the issue.
“It’s almost silly,” he said. “Let the teams play. We’re six games into this thing, and we’re already picking a national champion. Let’s just play it out.
“We’re so ingrained to think about the traditional powers and, quite frankly, we’re not one of them. If our name was West Virginia, Syracuse or Pittsburgh, we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
That raises an interesting point.
Is this talk about the Big East, or is it about Cincinnati?
Kelly does realize and appreciate that his program is as much an outsider as Boise State or Utah, just a few years removed from non-BCS status as a member of Conference USA.
All of sudden it’s up there challenging the big guns in college football and, to be quite frank, schools like Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Alabama and Georgia don’t like it. He may be right that if it were West Virginia, Syracuse or Pitt – Big East teams but all with long histories of football success that included winning or playing for national championships – no one would be complaining.
But Cincinnati? That’s supposed to be a basketball school. If they reach the Final Four there with a history that includes national championships and Oscar Robertson, there wouldn’t be a peep out of anyone.
That being the case, why would anyone object to them rising to the top in football?
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
