4B
SPORTS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 6. 2006
Gators deserve BCS championship game
The Florida Gators are headed to Arizona for the National Championship, where they will take on undefeated Ohio State. Bryan Jones wrote in Monday's Independent Florida Alligator that while the Gators may not deserve to be there, they will be competitive.
Is it destiny?
It's year two for UF coach Urban Meyer, who has had unprecedented
It's the fourth year for senior quarterback Chris Leak, who came to UF in 2003 vowing to win a national title.
success in his second year at all of his head coaching stops.
It's the final year for 21 seniors who have experienced the fall of the Gators' SEC dynasty and more emotional turmoil than they bargained for.
And come Jan. 8. they'll all be playing for college football's biggest prize — a national championship. And how can anyone truly be surprised?
This is a team that has caught, and taken advantage of, seemingly every break it needed on a difficult run through the nation's toughest
schedule.
There was the roughing-the-passer penalty on Tennessee's J.T. Mapu that negated a touchdown off Leak's interception, allowing the Gators to squeak by Tennessee 21-20 in Knoxville.
There was the controversial face-mask penalty against Georgia that allowed the Gators to eventually run the clock out and LSU's Jacob Hester being called down just short of the goal line, leading to a JaMarcus Russell fumble and no points for the Tigers.
But it was jarvis Moss' blocked kick in the final seconds against South Carolina that really shows how special this UF team is.
While the Gators are constantly criticized for all the close calls, they
have been as clutch and opportunistic as they have been lucky.
After that victory against South Carolina, larvis Moss said he knew that UF would somehow make it Glendale, Ariz., to play for the national championship.
"There is no doubt about it," Moss said. "Tonight, we just felt it. Everybody on this team just has to believe ... I can feel it. Hopefully you guys can feel it."
A few weeks later, on a day where a Capital One Bowl berth was still a huge possibility, the Gators got another break when they realized at halftime that Southern California was defeated by UCLA. Like countless other times this season, the Gators capitalized, finishing off Arkansas in
the SEC Championship game.
Ironically, UF also needed some unlikely breaks to accomplish its first national championship 10 years ago, when several teams fell in the season's final weeks and Arizona State lost in the Rose Bowl.
Will UF claim its second national title and become the first school to win national championships in basketball and football in the same year? Who knows.
But the Gators certainly deserve to be there. Michigan played a much weaker schedule and didn't win its own conference. And the Wolverines have the Big Ten to blame.
If the conference would just pony up and play a conference championship, perhaps Michigan would have
had a shot to play its way into the BCS title game instead of sitting on the couch watching SpongeBob, to use a Mever reference.
While the Gators will enter the BCS title game as huge underdogs, and some analysts will already be anointing Ohio State the champion before the two teams take the field, just relax and enjoy the season this team has treated you to.
Something tells me this battle tested UF team, this team that is filled with players who have gone through ups and downs throughout this season and their entire careers, will find a way to take advantage of whatever situation comes its way.
Is it destiny?
Learn to love the BCS system
The BCS system is coming under fire again, but Daily Texan columnist Alex Blair wrote Tuesday that people need to relax and enjoy the games.
"Tis the season. It is early December: Christmas decorations are beginning to appear, Thanksgiving leftovers are almost gone and all the kids are huddled around the television to hear ESPN commentators rant and rave about
It seems we go through this every year. The BCS always leaves at least one team and its fans dissatisfied. One coach always has to look his players in the eye and tell them that they won't get to play in the big game, because they lacked "style points."
But you know what? This system is the best we are going to get. This is how I stopped worrying and loved the BCS.
the results of the annual "BCS Selection Show"
Critics love to bash the BCS, but they operate under the assumption that a better system is possible. It isn't.
have spent huge amounts of money to court the NCAA into having a postseason college football game in their city. That's 30 communities who rely on the influx of money that traveling fan bases infuse into local economies.
The only reason the other divisions don't have bowl games is because communities such as El Paso, Texas, or Boise, Idaho, can't depend on the fans of Montana State or Colorado State to pack the house in order to watch those two teams slug it out. But in Division I-A, you have programs that can afford to toss around $8 million when they want a new scoreboard. Even on a down year, fans of bigtime programs like Georgia or Miami will be widespread.
Besides, did you ever wonder how it would be determined which teams would participate in a hypothetical playoff? It would still come down to humans deciding which team would be more worthy, just like the pollsters decided that Florida deserved to play for the national championship over Michigan. There would still be teams on the outside looking in.
In a realm swirling with money, bias and vested interests like major college football, there has to be a method to the madness. Even such an inane method as the BCS. After all, as Darrell Royal once said, "O'ugly is better than of' nothing."
The favorite alternative would be a playoff system. In fact, there already is a college football playoff system. Student-athletes who play Division I-AA, Division II and Division III football have a playoff to determine their NCAA champion. And yet the NCAA claims that it would be unfair to make the same demands on their Division I-A counterparts. Please. What keeps Division I-A from having a playoff is the same thing that keeps the other divisions from having a bowl system — money.
1016 Massachusetts
The bowls have been around almost as long as college football. The Rose, the Cotton, the Orange and the Sugar are institutions. This season, there will be over 30 bowl games. That's 30 institutions that