January 12, 2008 12:32 am
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So it’s a few days late and therefore totally irrelevant, but here’s the championship game, that was simmed out on ‘Monday,’ for the Blog Championship Series tournament.
On an aside: Have we learned our lesson about Ohio State and the Big Ten in general when it comes to this wonderful farce that we call the BCS Championship? Two years in a row the Buckeyes were the best team that the computers and pollsters could come up with, and two years in a row the season ended with Ohio State getting trounced by an SEC team. I understand that both Ohio State and LSU backed into the game this year thanks to eggs laid by then-No. 1 Missouri and No. 2 West Virginia on Dec. 2, but who’s to say that you’re the best team in the country simply because your loss came less recently than another team’s did?
Had West Virginia not torched Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl two days after Missouri did the same to Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl, my argument holds about as much water as Roger Clemens’ B12 and lidocaine defense.
From what I saw Monday night, it was pretty clear that almost every team involved in a BCS bowl game this year could have done the same to the Buckeyes on a neutral field (and Kansas did it at Ohio Stadium in this very crude simulation of actual football).
The realist in me knows that a tournament will never happen in college football simply because there’s too much money that would allegedly be lost from bowl tie-ins. The fan in me is naive enough to hope that one day someone that has enough power within collegiate athletics will try to create something that will give us a truer national champion than the current method of popularity contests and random math while the kid in me loves the sweet, sweet frosting.
Either way, the BCS, which has produced two good title games and enough dogs to fill a shelter since its inception, is flawed and/or the Big Ten is overrated.
But I’m just a lowly blogger with an obsession for video games, I could be wrong.
And now, on with the show ...
Championship: Oklahoma vs. LSU, at New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS – Not even four first-half interceptions by Matt Flynn could derail BCS No. 2 Louisiana State from its rightful coronation as the Tigers rattled off 31 unanswered points to dispatch BCS No. 4 Oklahoma Monday at the Louisiana Superdome in the Blog Championship Series championship.
The Tigers’ 31-14 win was the second championship win over Oklahoma in the Superdome, with the first coming in 2003’s BCS title game when the Sugar Bowl was the designated host.
Flynn’s lone touchdown pass – a 75-yard strike to Terrance Tolliver late in the second quarter – gave the SEC champions a 21-14 lead heading into the half. Keiland Williams’ 58-yard run and a 64-yard punt return by Trindon Holliday (on a reverse by Jai Eugene) allowed LSU to knot the score midway through the second. Flynn finished 9 of 21 for 175 yards with the four picks.
Eugene helped the Tigers wrap the game up late in the third on his 13-yard interception return after a muffed punt Marcus Walker pinned the Sooners at their 1-yard line. Colt David’s 35-yard field goal midway through the fourth capped the scoring.
Two of Flynn’s three first-quarter picks led to 14 Sooners points with an 18-yard run by Allen Patrick opening the scoring and a 15-yard interception return by Lendy Holmes padding the lead just 14 seconds later.
Interceptions No 3 and No. 4 – both made by Oklahoma’s Lewis Baker – were quickly erased by a stifling Tigers defense that held Oklahoma to 84 total yards of offense.
Blogger’s note: OK, so the tournament produced the same national champion that the real BCS did, but I almost feel better about the outcome because it was decided by a tournament. If the Super Bowl match-up was simply determined by a silly formula like this every year, would the NFL be as big as it is now? How many people would care about college basketball if the RPI was used to pick two finalists and the heck with the other 63 schools that make it in every year in a tournament that captivates rabid and casual basketball fans across the nation.
As popular as college football is at the FBS level is, a way of finding out a true national champion is lacking in the sport that is second only to baseball in my heart. If this simple mistake were to be fixed, I’d feel a whole lot better with the results, even if a two-loss team from the SEC that played a title game in its home state won the big crystal football.
Again, I am but a lowly blogger.
Shawn Curtis is a sports writer for The Tribune-Democrat. Now that this burden of a tournament is over, he can get back to what this blog was mae for: Knee-jerk reactions to pointless happenings in the world of sports.
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