All season, West Virginia was making headlines as the Big East team that would probably finish undefeated. Now the focus of that talk turns to the Louisville Cardinals. Last night’s 44-34 win by Louisville, in a game where defense was basically discouraged, should put Louisville at #3 in the next BCS standings. All night long, Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Fowler (who I hadn’t seen on TV in ages) talked about the importance of not only winning this game, but looking impressive while doing it. Surely, Brian Brohm did his part. But that Louisville defense? The 575 net yards allowed says otherwise.
This controversy definitely isn’t over. While West Virginia is out of the running for the National Championship, Louisville and Rutgers are both still undefeated. As for Louisville, they looked good in their win but I doubt it reflected that well on the pollsters. Watching these two teams drive uncontested down the field was certainly fun, but a 24-13 win probably would have looked better for Louisville. Now they might just be the best offensive team in a conference full of awful defenses and missed tackles.
In the end, I don’t see Louisville making it to the BCS Championship game. There are tons of great 1 loss teams (USC isn’t one of them, they’re closer to a good team) that have played tougher schedules. I’ll applaud Louisville for scheduling Miami and then owning them, but even Duke came close to beating Miami this year. In a normal year, Louisville’s win over Miami would have a lot more weight behind it but this has become a huge down year for Miami so unfortunately, the win isn’t as respected.
There’s four one loss teams in the SEC but who can really separate themselves from the pack? It’s simply too clustered. Florida beat Tennessee but lost to Auburn, while Auburn lost to Arkansas, a team that still has to play Tennessee and LSU. I think Florida, Auburn, and Tennessee would all beat Louisville. But in the end, it might be Texas in the National Championship game. By doing this, the BCS avoids an SEC controversy by simply not picking one SEC team over the other. Also, the Longhorns are a very different team than the team that lost to Ohio State early in the season.
You know what would be perfect this season? If the top 12 teams in the country could play in some kind of tournament and the last team standing would be the consensus #1 team. Oh, that’s a playoff system. I forgot this is college football.
