Tournament of Champions - 2008 Edition

It's that time of year again... time when virtually every sportswriter covering college football puts out a fictional playoff, in and of itself strong evidence that the current BCS is a ridiculous farce. So in the spirit of December in College Football Without A Legitimate Post-Season Playoff Format, here is our Tournament of Champions for 2008.

In our fictional system, champions from all eleven conferences are invited to duke it out on the fictional field. We defer to the conferences themselves to select their representatives, so we don't care whether there is a conference championship game or not. We also don't care about three-way ties in the Big XII South; that's for the Big XII to sort out. We also don't care that the SEC has so many strong teams, or that the Big 10, Pac 10, ACC, and Big East are having relatively down years.

Second-placers from the conferences don't make it - you win and you're in - that's all there is to it. No polls, no computers, no lobbying, no mass-opinion-pushed-like-crazy-by-all-the-ESPN-on-air-talent... you win and you're in.

In lieu of a seeding committee, we'll consult a combination of polls for seeding assistance, and allow any independent that finishes #6 or higher in a relevant poll an invitation.

Conference Champions:

Seeding	Team	Conference
1	Oklahoma	Big XII
2	Florida	SEC
3	USC	PAC 10
4	Utah	Mountain West
5	Penn St.	Big 10
6	Boise St.	WAC
7	Cincinnati	Big East
8	Virginia Tech	ACC
9	East Carolina	Conference USA
10	Buffalo	MAC
11	Troy	Sun Belt

Independents: None qualify.

With the championship held in the Orange Bowl, the other top-tier bowls could look something like this:

Rose: Ohio St. vs. Oregon
Sugar: Alabama vs. Texas Tech
Fiesta: Texas vs. TCU

And the tournament bracket is as follows:



Notable in 2008:

• Mid-Majors Utah (Mountain West) and Boise St. (WAC) seed better than the ACC champion (Virginia Tech). Why does the ACC get an automatic bid to the BCS?
  
• Cincinnati of the Big East seeds a respectable #7... but as this isn't in the top 6, one might ask why the Big East gets an automatic bid to the BCS as well?
  
• USC-Boise St. in the second round would be a surprisingly entertaining game.
  

And the National Champion is...

This is a difficult year to call, with a number of teams legitimately in the hunt. We'd give home teams Virginia Tech, Cincinnati, and Boise St. wins in the first round. And it's hard to see any upsets in round two, with Oklahoma, Florida, and USC advancing. While Utah/Penn St. would be a good matchup, we think the Mountain West, top-to-bottom, was a better conference this year than the Big 10, and give Utah the win to advance and face the Sooners. Oklahoma then takes that game, and we'll give a coin-flip to USC to outlast the Gators in the semi-finals, leaving...

Oklahoma vs. USC in the championship game. Oklahoma made headlines as the only team in NCAA history to score over 60 points a game against five opponents in a row. The only problem with a team with such a strong offense is when they hit against a team with a tremendous defense in a championship. It's often enough for the immovable Defense to slow down the irresistible Offense to take the match.

We'll use the 1983 Nebraska Cornhuskers, the dominant offensive powerhouse vs. Miami in the 1984 Orange Bowl as the model. Through tremendous special teams' and defensive play, the Hurricanes made the Husker offensive machine play from behind the entire game, ultimately securing the win as Nebraska failed on a two-point conversion gamble late in the fourth quarter. We see our fictional championship playing out in a similar fashion. Yes, Offense wins games... but Defense wins championships.

USC 31, Oklahoma 30.