ESPN's Schlabach ranks the BCS National Champions

2000 ou, with josh heupel - the guy that nobody ever heard about before, or since - would be competitive in most any comference, no doubt.
 
Another quick stat on the 01 Miami v 05 Texas. Texas scored 40 or more points in every game that year except tOSU in the Shoe, making them 12 games of 40 or more. Miami scored 40 or more 6 times in 01. They played 5 ranked teams, we played four. We played three Top 10 teams & they played 2.

They beat a team in NU that most believed should not be there. We played a team in USC that most believed was the best ever.
 
4 pages of posts and no one has convinced me yet...keep going!

smokin.gif
 
That stands a solid chance at being one of the worst things ever written. Holy **** was that an underresearched, overwritten piece of penguin ****.
 
Thanks for that. That is the revision right there. Lose to Texas in the Rose Bowl, and all of a sudden '04 USC is elevated above '05 USC. How convenient.
 
SARS smack? That's great. Not as great as beatiing three Top 10 teams in a month, but great just the same.

I'm looking forward to those Bird Flu allusions in 2012.
 
The worst part about the ESPN images jcdenton just posted is that Herbstreit had 1995 Nebraska as #4 in the last 50 years.

Well, that and the fact that the clown didn't have a single team from before 1994.

1971 Nebraska nowhere to be seen? Absurd.

Last 50 years -

1. 1971 Nebraska
2. 1995 Nebraska
3. 1971 Oklahoma
4. 1991 Washington
5. 2005 Texas
6. 1987 Miami (FL)
7. 1972 Southern Cal
8. 1973 Ohio St.
9. 1974 Oklahoma
10. 2001 Miami (FL)
 
Why are you ranking that 1971 Oklahoma team so high? Victories over 20, 18 3 12 and a loss to #1 isn't as impressive as the 2000 team with victories over 12, 9, 9, 8, 5. MOV favors the 71 team but not by much.
 
I should have clarified that the list is simply the direct output of my computer ratings.

I would move 1971 Oklahoma down, too, but not by much. Losing 35-31 to perhaps the greatest team ever isn't exactly a serious blemish. I would still rank them ahead of 2000 Oklahoma.

The 2000 version came out of the gate like gangbusters. But their last five games were 35-31 over a 7-5 Texas A&M squad, 27-13 over 7-6 Texas Tech, 12-7 over 3-8 Oklahoma State, 27-24 over 11-3 Kansas State, and 13-2 over 11-2 Florida State. While certainly impressive and definitely a great team, it doesn't rank with the season-long performance of their 1971 team or any of the other teams with claims to the all-time top ten.

The 2000 squad had five games that they won by 11 points or fewer. The 1971 squad had only one game like that, the 4-point loss to Nebraska.
 
the 2006 Gators was the best UF team ever, especially on D.
I believe the 2004 USC team would have beaten UT because of the tremendous D Line and # 1 rush defense. Can you get to VY in the backfield ? If yes, you beat Texas.

UT 2005 Defense was good but not great completely supported by 5 DBs that played like 6 DBs and 3 LBs since the LBs were nonexistant. As a group, the DBs deserve just as much respect for winning the title as does Vince. The greatest DB group in UT history and that says a lot considering who UT has had in the last 40 years.

UT 2005 had arguably the best offense of all time, even though only 1 NFL WR , given the fact that VY sat out so much time and Mack called off the dogs.
 
Well, 1971 and 1995 NU are good company. Think of how difficult it is to meet that criteria. First, you have to go undefeated. Probably about half of the BCS champs finished undefeated, meaning you only get one undefeated team from a BCS conference every other year.

Second, you have to beat two Top 5 teams. Obviously, there are only five slots in the Top 5, and our champion is taking one of them. The current BCS format ensures they will play another very highly rated team ( a team rated so high that even after losing the last game of the season, like FSU against OU in 2000, they stay in the Top 5).

That means a team has to play another elite team during the regular season and beat them. In 2005 UT's case, that team was tOSU. How good were the Buckeyes? From 2005 - 2007, they lost five games. Three of those losses were to teams that would win the BCS championship. The other two losses (2005 PSU and 2007 Illinois) were to teams that would play in BCS bowls.
 
the Big 8 in 1971 had to be quite weak don't you think? I don't really buy this theory of having the top 3 ranked teams from 1 conference.

I look at a potential USC 2004 vs. UT 2005 matchup like this:

Can USC2004 score 30 on that UT2005 defense? Yes
Can USC 2004 defense holde UT 2005 to less than 30? Yes, Ohio State did and I'd say USC's 2004 defense was just as good if not better. Also, USC2004 Defense would cause some TO's, force punts and give much better field position.

Defense wins championships.
 
beencounting, were you around in 1971? What is your basis for viewing 3 Big 8 teams in the Top 5, and coming to the conclusion that the Big 8 must have been "quite weak"?

As for your 2004/2005 USC analysis, I think Huck already addressed it, but to recap- You are making an assumption. You're assumption is that the 2004 USC offense (which by every objective metric was a good, but not a great offense), was nearly as effective as the (great) 2005 USC offense. As I understand it, that assumption is based on the idea that the two offenses shared a lot of personnel, one year apart. The fallacy there is that we have a lot of examples in D-1A where one year, with the same personnel, makes a world of difference. Compare UT's (5-6) 1989 offense to the (10-2) 1990 offense. Compare UT's 2004 offense (shut out by OU, and VY with less than 100 yards offense against Mizzou the next week at home) witht he 2005 offense. Your opinion is based on no evidence, just your personal impressions.

I also don't get what you're saying about the 2004 USC defense. You say they are about as good as the Buckeye defense, but would cause more turnovers and punts? Did you notice that the 2005 Buckeyes caused Texas to turn the ball over and punt? Are you saying that 2004 USC would pretty much shut down Texas?
 
I am saying that the USC 2004 D would cause Texas a lot more grief than the USC 2005 Defense which had the freakin' undersized pre-med students Ting brothers chasing (attempted) in the backfield. USC also lost 2 highly talented DT's high in the NFL draft and a reserve (Manuel Wright) who had better physical talent than the other 2 but attitude issues and did not realize his potential.

Comparing the OU 2004 defense to Missouri 2004 defense is just silly. Wow, UT improved after the OU week? UT could never handle the blitz from Wilkerson, Jackson, Cody, Poole, etc etc. just too much hard core brutality to deal with.

and yes, the Big 8 was one weak conference.
 
Hmmmm, took me a while to notice this one topic but here is a study that might be germane to the discussion. This is a comparison that I did not long after the 2006 NC run (so it doesn't include the latest BCS champs).

I'll just copy and paste it as it's a little lengthy:

Rating the BCS Champions, Margin of Kickassness

Reading some other boards and have seen the topic of 'rating the BCS champions' crop up a few times. There is a very good (and long) thread on the Florida board that surprisingly kind of sidetracked into a '95 Huskers vs. '01 Canes debate (surprising because it's mostly being argued by Gator's and Buckeye's). But generally the ontopic consensus is pretty favorable to our Horns but some of the reasoning got me thinking of a way to try and quantify the situations (while including the 95 Huskers as they are thought to be probably the most dominant team in anyone's recent or past memories.

So here's my metric; take the point totals from each opponent the champion played but subtract their head-to-head game and then divide that by the total games played (minus one) to get the opponents average score per game, both for and against. Then take that average and compare it to the head to head game played to gauge how much better (or worse) the champion faired compared to their season's opponent's average. In this way a team is not overly rewarded for beating the crap out of a patsy (cause everyone is going to beat the crap out of the patsy so their average will be very high) and conversely the team will be rewarded for scoring (or defending) particularly well against teams that had very good seasons.

So for the 2005 Longhorns for example, against USC they held them -12.00 pts below their average (38 pts versus an average of 50 pts scored per game) and the Horns gained a margin of 19.67 above what USC's defense was used to giving up that year (41 pts compared to 21.33 average). Combine the two and you get 31.67 pt margin of Kickassness. From there it's simply a matter of totalling up all of the games and averaging it out to come up with a Seasonal Margin of KickAssness, a figure to determine and compare how dominant one team was over their opponents during their championship run.

some notes;
1) Div 1AA game didn't count for the Champion (but I did leave in Div 1AA figures from their opponents totals, mostly because I'm lazy and because it didn't happen all that often and I don't think it skews the figures too much anyway).
B) if a team had to play another team twice during the season, both games totals were subtracted to get the opponents average and then each game was compared independently to that figure.
III) I threw in 2005 runner up USC (cause I thought they'd have a pretty high figure themselves) and 2006 runner up Ohio State (mostly to establish that these numbers don't mean ****, that even if you have a dominating season you can still get whooped in the title game).

So minus the spreadsheet ********, here's how it turned out:

Total dominance (combined Offensive and Defensive margins)
[pre]
1995 Nebraska 42.92
2005 Texas 40.46
2001 Miami 37.91
2005 USC (#2) 35.03
2004 USC 30.15
2000 Oklahoma 29.99
1999 Florida State 28.24
2006 Ohio St.(#2) 26.09
2003 LSU 24.72
1998 Tennessee 22.80
2006 Florida 19.99
2002 Ohio State 19.72

Offensive dominance (how much more the Champion scored then their opponent was used to giving up on average)

[pre]1995 Nebraska 29.17
2005 Texas 27.14
2005 USC (#2) 24.13
2001 Miami 20.59
2004 USC 16.03
1999 Florida State 15.80
2000 Oklahoma 13.52
2006 Ohio St. (#2) 13.19
1998 Tennessee 10.58
2003 LSU 9.03
2006 Florida 7.95
2002 Ohio State 2.38[/pre]

Defensive dominance (how much less opponents scored on the Champion than average)

2002 Ohio State -17.34
2001 Miami -17.33
2000 Oklahoma -16.47
2003 LSU -15.69
2004 USC -14.11
1995 Nebraska -13.74
2005 Texas -13.31
2006 Ohio St. (#2) -12.90
1999 Florida State -12.44
1998 Tennessee -12.22
2006 Florida -12.03
2005 USC (#2) -10.90[/pre]

On the whole, I think our 2005 team comes out looking pretty freakin great, not a big surprise maybe but I might have personally thought 01 Miami and 04 USC would have been slightly better than they did because I think even with Vince, we'ed have a very tough time with both in a head to head matchup. And while I knew our offense would kick butt, I'm pleasantly surprised that our Defense holds up very, very well in comparison.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Recent Threads

Back
Top