What We Learned Yesterday

As I have said many times before, the problem with the current coverage of college football is that the race for the BCS title game supersedes everything else. There are clearly 6-7 teams that are, at this point in the season, better than the rest. That's fine. But this is not the NFL where we only crown one champion and do not care about the rest. In college, one team will be crowned the BCS national champ. But one team is going to be ecstatic that they won the Big East, one team the ACC, etc. Why the media cannot understand this mystifies me. Wake Forest beating Florida State should have been a huge story. Instead it was covered the same way as the South Carolina beat down of Kentucky.

The other fascination with the media is with individual talent in this a team sport. Actually, let me correct that. Individual talent on the best teams that they happen to notice. Russell Wilson playing well for also-ran North Carolina State? Who cares. Russell Wilson playing well for undefeated Wisconsin? "That guy is incredible." And you do not have to transfer to get a boost. Robert Griffin has been pretty amazing when healthy his entire run at Baylor but needed to throw long passes to wide open receivers in the upset of TCU to get noticed. Part of the problem with the stars of the second tier teams is ignorance. The analysts spend so much time saying the same things about Alabama and Oklahoma that they miss the key players for the other teams. What could they say about Wake's win when they did not know who plays for the Deamon Deacs? Or how about Herbstreit yesterday praising Kansas State's defense for overcoming a lack of talent with grit and determination. While he correctly picked Kansas State to beat Missouri he forgot that the catalyst for KSU's undefeated season has been the superb play of linebacker Arthur Brown...a FIVE STAR RECRUIT who transferred from Miami. Brown has 38 tackles to lead the Wildcats. No one else is within 10 of that total.

So stop worrying about who will be atop the first BCS standings when they come out or who is leading the Heisman race and give us more coverage of Rutgers, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, etc. Why not?