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I'm guessing Gary Patterson won't be sending the Mountain West Conferences any thank you notes for TCU's end-of-the-season schedule.
After winning a Saturday night (7pm CT) game two time zones away (at UNLV), the Frogs returned to Texas, only to have to head back out on the road for Thursday night's game at Utah. Championship teams overcome all kinds of adversity, but I think mental factors (short week, travel, altitude, cold weather, TCU's recent Thursday night road woes) play heavily in Utah's favor this week.
Schedules do have away of evening out over the course of a season, but a short week followed by 16 days between games (before the season finale home to Air Force) is probably not how Patterson and the Frogs would have drawn it up.
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The two FBS teams from the state of Washington are historically bad, at the same time. The Washington Huskies and Washington State Cougars both lost on the weekend, and both got shut out--the Huskies lost 56-nothing to USC, while Wazzu lost 58-nothing to Stanford.
Parenthetically, how would you like to be USC? You beat a league opponent 56-zip and drop two spots in the BCS Standings. Hey, BYU knows what it's like to have the Huskies hurt your schedule strength.
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As I've mentioned before, Utah's last-minute comeback win over Oregon State has paid season-long dividends for the Utes. Since opening 0-2, the Beavers have won 5 of last 6 games--the only setback was the late-game meltdown in Salt Lake City.
So, while the Utes' win over Michigan has long since lost its luster, the Oregon State win continues to be the "hole card" on the hill.
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I've long been a fan of English soccer, and have watched with fascination as the worst teams in the 20-team Premier League fight the "relegation battle" every season. As I'm sure many of you are aware, the bottom three teams in the Premier League drop down a division at the end of the season, while the top three teams in the next-highest division move into the Premier League the following season. The same pattern follows through the top leagues, with either two, three or four teams moving up or down depending on the league in question.
Of course, the BCS is not based exclusively on merit, and as such does not lend itself to a "relegation" system, but as this season has proven, the Big East and ACC would be fighting to avoid having their champion "dropped" this year.
Imagine if the BCS automatically qualified, say, the top six league champions, based on BCS Standings for the season in question, but regardless of league affiliation. In such a scenario (based on today's standings), the MWC and WAC champs would join the top teams from the SEC, Big 12, Big 10 and Pac 10, while the ACC and Big East would not automatically qualify a team.
This won't happen of course, but it would be nice if yearly on-field performance became the primary qualification criterion, rather than membership in a league that belongs to a monopolistic college football cartel.
To be fair, the BCS does have a provision by which automatic qualification standards can be re-drawn every few years, based on a conference's performance over the preceding seasons--so the MWC is making inroads with its top teams' results so far this season. I think welcoming Boise State to the league would go a long way to improving the MWC's chances of securing an automatic bid the next time the standards are revised.
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