Experts' Top 25 | CBSSports.com 120 | Bowl Predictions
Nowhere, in any preseason magazine or on any website, have you read a BYU-Missouri national championship breakdown.
Not a shrub has been cut down to print the chances of West Virginia and Tulsa meeting in South Florida. Illinois-Texas Tech? Gotta be kidding.
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| Will LSU's Les Miles rest on his championship laurels vs. Appalachian State on Saturday? No way. (Getty Images) |
Now the ultimate question for all the nerds who have scored with the prom queen: Was that an anomaly or a trend? In other words, could the Season of the Upset in 2007 be the opening act of a long-running show? Let's go to one of the places where they know a lot about opening acts and upsets: Vegas.
"I believe it is a trend," said Tony Sinisi, the odds director at Las Vegas Sports Consultants, one of the city's major point-spread setters. "College football is becoming a lot more like college basketball. It's not who you play, it's when you play them. The gap isn't as large. I think this is the new world."
That new world puts Appalachian State in the same betting category it was in last year at this time. N/A. That's the notation posted by most major sports books, which don't publish spreads on I-A vs. I-AA games. Reason? There already are enough teams to keep track of, according to Sinisi. That might explain what was going through the mind of Michigan last year.
The Wolverines would have to go (Internet) surfing offshore to find out that Michigan was a three-touchdown favorite.
"Since we lost that Appalachian State game I think a lot of people are taking Michigan as a joke," Michigan defensive lineman Tim Jamison, "that we're living off what happened in the past."
If a new frontier was crossed last season, then a lot of major powers are going to start echoing Jamison -- and Barack Obama.
"It gives every team hope," said Southern Miss coach Larry Fedora, who takes over a program with 14 consecutive winning seasons.
The season starts Thursday with as many teams trying to avoid becoming the new Michigan as there are trying to be the new App State.
"I'm getting a text right now," LSU's Tyson Jackson said last month during SEC media days. "Somebody's texting me about Appalachian State. We're not overlooking them. ... Knowing what those guys present and what happened to Michigan last year, no one will be overlooking them this year."
Except that Appalachian State isn't being compliant. It expected this. It planned for it. LSU is the 37th I-A opponent the Mountaineers have played in the past 30 years.
"This is kind of what most of us want," said Armanti Edwards, App State's slippery quarterback. "We kind of snuck up on Michigan. They didn't practice for us. Now we got a D-I team that is practicing like it's a big game, which it really is."
LSU has been warned, but is it too late? Someone left the barn open, and the field mice are streaming in. Michigan became the first ranked I-A program to be beaten by a I-AA. In the week following, App State became eligible for the AP Top 25. We had to be reminded that Edwards was/is eligible for the Heisman.
One betting service said that from 1980-2006, there were nine upsets in games involving a spread of 30 points or more. There were two in the first five weeks of 2007. Stanford over USC and Syracuse over Louisville stand as the biggest point-spread upsets in history. Eleven of the top 15 upsets last season were pulled off in the favorite's home stadium. The jumbled mess when it was over gave us our first two-loss national champ in 47 years.
"Last year was a year like many years that will come and be there in the future," LSU coach Les Miles said.
What the coach lacks in syntax, he makes up for in insight. Hollywood couldn't have set up his opener any better -- Appalachian State in a clash of defending national champions. The I-A champ (LSU) against the I-AA champ (Appalachian State) in a Dixie redo of the game that brought down The Big House.
That upset set the quirky tone for the season. Two days before, the earth began to shake but hardly anyone noticed. Drake, a I-AA program with no scholarships, beat Illinois State, a I-AA program with 62. Four different teams were No. 1 in the AP poll (USC, LSU, Ohio State, Missouri). There were six changes at the top spot. Nine different teams occupied No. 2, where there was a total of 10 changes through the season.
Try getting a fix on a national champion that gave up 50 points in losing its final regular-season game. It was almost impossible. The team with the SEC's worst record -- 3-9 Ole Miss -- gave up 177 points in its last six conference games. LSU gave up 185.
If you apply the old comparative scores method, Michigan ended up losing to a team that lost to Wofford. Stanford last season was good enough to beat Ohio State. (The Cardinal beat USC, which beat Illinois, which beat Ohio State). The Buckeyes themselves got to the championship game by essentially beating no one, not a single AP top 20 team.
The lines have been more than blurred headed in 2008. So much so that if CBSSports.com preseason No. 1 Ohio State beat USC on Sept. 13, it would be considered an upset. The opening weekend seems to be an indicator of how those upsets have changed the landscape. No one wants to take a chance. There are only two games involving teams each ranked in the AP Top 25 -- Missouri vs. Illinois and Clemson vs. Alabama.
That might just mean more opportunities for the upset bug to suck the blood out of an unsuspecting giant.
"Sometimes the fear of getting your tail beat is an unbelievable motivator," East Carolina's Skip Holtz said.
Holtz's rapidly improving Pirates kick off the season with consecutive games against Virginia Tech and West Virginia. May we offer a fair warning to the Hokies and Mountaineers?
"That's why you play the game (for an upset)," said Fedora, who has coordinated offenses at Florida and Oklahoma State. "Coaches have been preaching it for years. I don't think people have really bought into it. You try to get your players to buy into it. You don't have to be the best football team in the country on Saturday. You just have to be better than your opponent."
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| Utah coach Kyle Whittingham has his eyes on Michigan in Week 1. (US Presswire) |
• The spread option is the great equalizer against any defense.
• Recruiting is becoming more like basketball. Get yourself a few guys -- in this case a quarterback and a couple of receivers -- and you're competitive.
• Speed has replaced brawn as the game's key feature.
None of it would have been possible without the BCS. Do you remember we were a heartbeat away from West Virginia-Missouri in the national championship game last season? The BCS -- yes, the BCS -- has made it that way. Some call it parity. We call it the chaos theory. Without the unification of all the major conferences in 1998, college football wouldn't be this fun.
If that makes you cringe, consider that the BCS married to college football is better than these odd combinations:
Anyone from NASCAR in a tux. C'mon, who are you fooling here, Bubba? Know why they never show the drivers below their waists at those award shows? They're shoeless.
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss He's a still-cool iconic rocker. She's a new-age violinist who is trying to gravy train a still-cool iconic rocker.
Little League and television: I have flash drives older than these kids (I think, I haven't checked the birth certificates of either). They have batting gloves, wrist bands and are stylin' more than Milan during fashion week. Where do these punks learn this stuff? Television? Now they are television.
In the old bowl system, Ohio State would have been shuttled off to play USC in the Rose Bowl. LSU would have played, maybe, Kansas? in the Sugar Bowl. Undefeated Hawaii would have been playing at home in the Hawaii Bowl instead of New Orleans.
Tulsa's Todd Graham intends to take full advantage of the system that has elevated his non-BCS brethren. It happened in stages. First, with Utah winning the Fiesta Bowl in 2004. Boise State beat Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl two years later. Even then, parity was sneaking up on us. Who remembers that Boise was ranked two spots ahead of the Sooners in the BCS before that game?
The Golden Hurricane, 10-4 in 2007, are thinking big, mostly because they can. Back during their last 10-win season (1991) there was no BCS to frame it around. The Freedom Bowl was their reward. If Graham's powerful offense can score enough and the program can negotiate a schedule that includes a trip to Arkansas, Tulsa could plant its flag in that new world -- Dolphin Stadium in the Orange Bowl.
"We want to be the No. 1 non-BCS school in the country," Graham said. "We want to do what Boise and Hawaii did, go play in a BCS bowl."
Outlandish? Not in this age. Tulsa beat the team that beat Alabama (Louisiana-Monroe) amid last year's craziness.
Utah coach Kyle Whittingham prefers not to talk about the subject much this week. He is taking Utah to Michigan almost a year to the day after App State ventured there. Never mind the Utes are considered just a hair behind BYU as this season's non-BCS favorite to get to a BCS bowl.
"The element of surprise is gone," Whittingham said. "I don't think anybody is going to catch anybody off guard this year."
Wanna bet? Tony Sinisi will be more than happy to take your action. Your Utes, Kyle, are 3½-point underdogs.
