College football week 8 thread - Austin Powers: The Horn Who Hooked Me

it’s three losses in four years (all to bama) — he’s 48-3 since 2021

 

You have cut me to the quick and I shall never recover.

 

Damn. Forgot that the Tide has 2.
I wish to revise my remarks. The Ga win over Texas increases the chances that a multitude of SEC teams will have 2 or fewer losses on selection day.

 

No you were right the first time. A two-loss team could still win the national title. But it ain’t gonna be this one!

 

From your vantage point, I'd say you have much to be petty and bitter about in this matter but I don't think Cal and Stanford could have done what you suggest. Their Olympic sports would have withered on the vine with just meets against Boise and SDSU, not to mention the whole academic profile that folks like Michigan like to bang on about. Honestly, they still might. At least now they have the likes of Duke, UNC and Notre Dame to chum around with in this regard. I think Stanford would have considered independence but the broke-ness of Cal's athletic department has been well known for some time. I doubt they're doing any better than they were but they needed someone's TV money.

Don't get me wrong, all of this is an abomination, but there are people who jumped on yachts and people who jumped in lifeboats.

 

Oregon State and Wazzu absolutely have a right to feel hard done. And they are of course right that it is insane for west coast colleges to constantly shuttle teams back east.

But if the Big 12 offered to bring them in along with the four corners schools, they happily would have booked trips to Ames and Morgantown instead of hanging back to make friendship bracelets with the Bay Area schools.

 

The phrase "13th-place team," especially when used to differentiate the squad from lower-standing clubs, is truly a sign o' the times.

 

I had to double take because my mind was thinking “wait, Auburn is winless too …” and then I remembered this conference could now fill out a March Madness region all by itself. Still not up to the level of the old SIAA, which once had at least 22 members at one point, combining most of the current SEC with a handful of ACC schools and some wacky outliers like Cumberland, Johns Hopkins and what eventually became Rhodes College.

 

That's wild. I'm gonna guess Hopkins never made the trip to Memphis to play Rhodes. Just as several Southern Conference schools played two or fewer times in ≥ 25 years of common membership in the (very) old Southern Conference.

 

Fittingly enough for this corner of the country, it was a very loose confederation of schools, almost more of a parallel NCAA before that organization gained any real cachet. Virtually all of the current power school teams were out after 1921 (Louisville, Miami and Vanderbilt the exceptions) but some of the early permutations are fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Intercollegiate_Athletic_Association