[2008 National Champ]

The score of a single game is the silliest argument for “deserve to be there” and that it still exists after ~ 30 years of BCS and CFP means that people still don’t understand the difference between Best Team and National/Tournament Champion.

Blowouts happen in every sport, in every competition and are 10 times more common than exciting finishes. But top level College Football fan has been taught for over 100 years that their bias is more important than what actually happened and they will glom on to any and every innocuous factoid to prove their point. It doesn’t matter how many wild card NFL teams win the Super Bowl, there will still be people who know without a shadow of a doubt that if a wild card team gets blown out in the first round that they didn’t deserve to be there. It didn’t matter how many 4 seeds won the CFP, as soon as one got blown out it proved that 4 was too many and the playoff shouldn’t expand.

In a world where the more talented team at home wins ~ 75% of the time, the only thing more predictable is people with an axe to grind using the results as proof of something unproveable.

[2008 National Champ]

Matthews’s stats for Cal might not be better than Utah 2023, but I fail to see how he would have gotten 30 catches in the 2024 iteration of the Utah offense.

[2008 National Champ]

The rumors also say Troy Taylor said what most of us do, by year game 3 you’ll be running Whitt’s offense, not yours.

FIFY

[2008 National Champ]

It’s only proof that in those specific circumstances, one team scored more than the other. It’s a single data point and the outcome is no more predictive than if I flipped a quarter, it came up heads, and I proclaimed to the world that it was proof that every time a quarter was flipped heads would be the result.

Did the “better” teams win? Or did the teams who were given an inherent advantage by the committee win?

The ESPN invitational will determine a National Champion. But it won’t determine the “best” team of 2024. Because that can’t be determined unless all teams are subjected to the same variables. In skiing, everyone who has met the same basic qualifications during the regular season gets together and they all race down the same hill, in the same weather conditions and whoever has the best time is crowned. In every professional team sport besides football, the teams play multiple games trading off home/away because it is understood that one game at one venue is not sufficient to determine superiority.

At least March Madness does it’s best to provide a neutral surface for it’s one and done sweepstakes. And it includes more teams than are capable of winning the tournament because every school has the same path to the tournament. All the first round of the ESPN Invitational proved was that if you give talented teams an advantage, it is hard for the other team to overcome. And the margins of victory are irrelevant unless you are of the belief that it is proof that if the circumstances were reversed, you would get the exact same result. i.e. proof of the unproveable

[2008 National Champ]

If we just limit the evaluation of the portal ins/outs to recruiting rankings, Utah is down across the board from the “deepest and most talented” roster Whitt has ever put together and it’s not even close. We won’t get a true indication of whether the staff and the ranking services are better at identifying talent the 2nd time around until August 30 at the Rose Bowl.

[2008 National Champ]

Mitchell ran a 10.81

[2008 National Champ]

Until every school has the same available path to the playoff it will always be an Invitational and only slightly more legitimate than any previous version

[2008 National Champ]

Unless the laws are different in Utah, wouldn’t the information your are trying to find be under seal since he would have been a juvenile at the time?

[2008 National Champ]

RG3 never rushed for 1k in a season.

I did find this from the BCS era. Couple more Heisman’s on that list if they’d wanted to expand the range to this century.

[2008 National Champ]

2016 is an odd line to draw for the comparison

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