Rade said:
At best, Ohio State should be one rank behind Hawaii.
This is a joke! Hawai'i hasn't played a single ranked team. The Buckeyes have played 2 (Zz: Michigan is not presently ranked). And this is counting only teams that are ranked today.
Ohio State should decline invitation to play for national title, they should go play USC in Rose Bowl and for first time this year try to beat a ranked team.
Ummm...been out of the country, have you? Ohio State
has beaten a ranked team.
Also, there is a reason the computers count only games
played against ranked teams, rather than wins against ranked teams: while it is bad if you can't beat a ranked team, it is just as bad to lose to an unranked team. And Ohio State did beat Wisconsin quite handily, but lost narrowly against Illinois.
The following is the number of games against presently ranked (top 25 BCS) teams played by each of the top teams:
Ohio State - 2
Mizzou - 4
WVU - 2
UGa - 3
Kansas - 1
VaTech - 4
LSU - 4
USC - 2
Oklahoma - 3
Florida - 4
BC - 2
Hawaii - 0
If I recompile this list tomorrow (after this weekend's games have been included) and count only the top 20 ranked teams, then it'll look like this:
Ohio State - 2
Mizzou - 4
WVU - 1
UGa - 2
Kansas - 1
VaTech - 3
LSU - 3
USC - 1
Oklahoma - 3
Florida - 3
BC - 2
Hawaii - 0Sort of squashes your argument that Ohio State has played a lower quality of opponent than Hawaii, doesn't it?
LSU should play Sooners for national title.
And while Ohio State hasn't lost a single game to an unranked team, both LSU and Oklahoma lost twice to unranked teams!
However, in Oklahoma's case, the highlight of their ineptitude was actually one of their wins. If the most pathetic performance this season was Michigan against Appalachia State, then number 2 arguably belongs to the Sooners, in their
shameful performance against then 1-7 (now 3-9) Iowa State. It took till the last minutes of the 4th quarter, and it was a fortunate deflection off a tipped pass that finally sealed the victory for OU. And this is the same Iowa State that was trounced 45-7 by Kansas, and 56-3 by Texas.
And to close out, take a look at http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/ncaa/stats/2007/divia/team/index.html before you say that Ohio State does not have a legitimate claim at the Championship game.
PS: Here's the most recently updated SoS (by win/loss ratio):
http://www.warrennolan.com/football/2007/sos. Oklahoma is ranked 39, Ohio State is 42, USC is 73 and Hawaii is 118. USC has played only 2 teams with winning records.