I am staunchly anti-rematch. Back in 1996, I understood Florida getting a rematch against Florida St. because it was before the BCS system and before the Pac-10 and Big Ten were allowed into the championship game. In some years in that era, it was unavoidable. The Big Ten and Pac-10 champions were ranked too high for any other outcome to be possible. That said, I still didn't like the rematch and would have favored Nebraska to get the spot over Florida had they not lost to Texas in the Big 12 Championship game.
I bring this up because we, unless you have been living under a rock (which is certainly possible for some of you), are staring down the barrel of an LSU-Alabama rematch. And I don't like it at all. Here are my reasons:
There is not enough non-conference play to determine with sort of true merit that two teams that played each other are definitively better than everyone else in college football, even if it appears to be so.
In the context of this season, I bring to you the Big 12. Yes, Iowa St. is a middling Big 12 team. So is Texas Tech. Those two teams beat the elite of the conference: Oklahoma and Oklahoma St. But if you look closer, neither team lost a non-conference game. They only played three each and both teams won all of them. How can we say, with any certainty that these teams are weaker or stronger than middling SEC teams like Auburn and Florida (who, by the way, are higher on the SEC foodchain this season than Iowa St. and Texas Tech are on the Big 12 foodchain)? We can't, because we haven't seen enough evidence. We can speculate and guess (if I had to, I would guess Auburn would beat both Big 12 schools and Florida would beat Texas Tech but not Iowa St.), but there is no empirical evidence that one set of teams is better than the other. This applies to the conference as a whole, an increasing problem when conferences are often judged as a whole.
So if the loser beats the winner, which should be ranked higher
Obivously, the one that should be ranked higher is the one with the better body of work. Except in the BCS, if we have a rematch and Alabama wins, they will be the champion with an inferior body of work. I'm ok with this normally with a head to head win, but not when the loser would also have a head to head win. Honestly, if I were voting and we have a rematch, an Alabama win doesn't affect my vote at all. LSU is the number 1 team in a rematch scenario, period.
Shouldn't the National Champion also have to win its conference
Obviously, this is not the case in some other sports (college basketball in particular where every so often you get a champion that won neither its regular season or conference tournament championships), but those sports have playoffs that are designed to reward more teams with a postseason trip and a shot at the title. This sport also rewards teams, but with a bowl game. Not a championship shot. And as long as that is the case and only two out of 120 get a shot at it, the National Champion should be a conference champion unless they aren't in a conference. Go back to 2001 and 2003. How loud was the screaming that non-conference champions got into the National Championship Game. How loud would it have been had Michigan gotten a rematch against Ohio St. without even a share of the conference championship (particularly from the same SEC country that is now arguing in favor of an Alabama-LSU rematch)? With all of that and the whole we won the conference over the National Champions thing to stain the title and it's just not worth it.
Every game counts right
The crux of the argument. In the BCS, every game is supposed to count. And, despite all the controversy in past years, every game has counted (expect one). Even in 2001 when Nebraska didn't win its division and got to the title game, there were many things that could have prevented (chief among them being the playing of the Washington St.-Colorado game canceled because of 9/11 that would have lifted either 2-loss Colorado or Pac-10 Champ Oregon into the championship game) the Cornhuskers from reaching the game. The one time a game didn't count, we got the single most unsatisfying result of the BCS era, and that's saying something considering the existence of so many unfulfilled seasons and controversies. That year was the year of the split national title because the Oklahoma-Kansas St. game didn't count in the eyes of the BCS. Now, we have reached the same point. The LSU-Alabama would not have counted in the eyes of the BCS if we get a rematch and we are setting ourselves up for a fate that is quite awful and terrible if we allow it... of course the fact that it is so awful and terrible for the BCS, is one of the many reasons people are in favor of a rematch.
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