Holy freaking crap… We take one week off to celebrate Thanksgiving
and all hell breaks loose. For the first time since last December, a team that
is not Alabama sits atop the USELESS Poll.
There is an easy road for the rest of this season to play out. There
are still two BCS conference teams that are unbeaten who can make the selection
into the national title game an easy call. But there is always the looming
threat of chaos during conference championship week. It would seem only fitting
if the final season of that wacky ‘ol BCS system that has caused nothing but
trouble for 15 years gave us one more year of anarchy in the final poll of the
season.
Well, here we go. One more crack at the top 25 before the bowl
matchups shake out.
- Florida State
(defeated Florida
37-7) – Normally, it’s slow and steady that wins the race. Instead of that
time-tested method, the Seminoles have opted for constant ass kickings and
have saved some of their most impressive performances for their biggest
games. Florida
State has beaten all
12 of its opponents by 14 or more points and has allowed more than 14 just
twice all season. While the ACC is far from a juggernaut of a conference,
it’s still no small feat to be that consistently dominant. Selfishly,
we’re hoping that this whole Winston kerfuffle is somehow blown out of
proportion. In no way would we want football to stand in the way of
justice, but it also sucks that one of the most dominant runs in recent
memory is being tainted.
- Ohio
State (defeated Michigan 42-41) – If Michigan would have pulled off that
two-point conversion, it may have gone down as the biggest rivalry game
upset in history. Sure, there are plenty of other games where there has
been a greater disparity in wins for each team, but rarely could an upset
have cost the favorite more. For those who delight in the time-honored
practice of schadenfreude, there could be no better win on the calendar
than to cost your sworn rival an unbeaten season and a chance to play for
a national title. In fact, in the instance that your team is unable to
finish above its biggest rival in the standings, we suggest that you
actively root for said rival to continue winning so as to worsen the blow
when your school takes down those cocky bastards from
state/tech/A&M/etc. at the end of the season. Good try, Michigan. You
almost played that one perfectly.
- Auburn (defeated No. 1 Alabama 34-28) – Auburn fans: please don’t take this the wrong way.
You absolutely deserve this spot in the poll, regardless of some
less-than-incredible things you’re about to read concerning your team. Remember
all that talk of dominance given to the Seminoles a couple of spots above
you? Yeah. It’s weird, but the Tigers have managed to be just as deserving
for consideration in the national championship game despite having more
than a few fatal flaws just waiting to put an end to their dream. The Tigers
still don’t have much of a passing game that doesn’t involve bouncing the
ball off of several defenders first and Auburn’s average of 27.5 points per game
allowed vs. opponents from BCS conferences hardly portrays itself as a
national title contender. And yet, here we are. Of course, there’s still
the little matter of beating…
- Missouri (defeated
Texas A&M 28-21) – It’s a good thing kickers are so forgettable or
else Mizzou’s halfway football player with a weird number and a special
shoe might be catching some flak. If not for whatshisname (not bothering
to look it up since Bama fans with Twitter accounts are making us feel bad
for kickers all of a sudden) missing two kicks in regulation and doinking
another off the uprights in overtime against South Carolina, the Tigers
would be assured of a spot in the national championship game with a win
over Auburn this week. That said, Missouri
still has a good chance of playing for the title if Ohio State
loses the Big Ten championship game. Do you suppose the ‘old man football’
insults will stop if the rest of the SEC realizes that Missouri is its best chance to bring
home another national title?
- Oklahoma State
(did not play) – Speaking of close losses coming back to haunt a team, at
least Missouri’s setback came against a
very good South Carolina
squad. The Cowboys could easily be sitting at No. 2 if not for an
inexplicable loss to West
Virginia back in September. And inexplicable is
about the only way to describe it. Sure, huge underdogs win a few games
every season, but it’s usually due to a couple of big special teams plays
or crippling turnovers or flat-out bad luck. Oklahoma State
simply didn’t show up one day two months ago and got walked up and down
the field by a thoroughly mediocre Mountaineer squad. The Cowboys arguably
deserved to play in the national championship game two years ago after
winning the Big XII, yet watched as an Alabama squad that didn’t even play
in the SEC title game was pushed ahead of them. This season, Okie State simply blew its shot and it
will take a miracle to get the nod.
- Alabama (lost to
No. 4 Auburn 34-28) – Forget the dropped passes, turnovers, missed
assignments and all of the other normal scapegoats for a loss. There is
only one place your finger should be pointing if you’re looking to cast
blame for the Crimson Tide’s year-long reign of terror at the top of the
USELESS Poll coming to an end. That’s right. We’re looking at you, Nick
Saban. There’s no other option. When you spend every waking moment of your
non-coaching time doing your best Bill Belichick impersonation and talking
down to anyone with football-related questions, you get no slack when
something (even something as fluky as a 109-yard missed field goal return)
goes wrong. You’re the guy who looks pissed after winning the crystal ball
at the end of the year. You’re the guy who is on the record complaining
that the long lead up to bowl games interferes with recruiting. If you’re
so insistent on showing no joy in your job and trying to sell us on your
25-hour workday, there’s no escaping blame for last week’s loss. If you
want to be a football robot, you have to see those 109-yarders coming.
- Preseason
hopes and dreams (defeating the cold, harsh reality of the oncoming winter)
– We here at the USELESS Poll love chaos. In fact, we actively root for it
most of the time. But there comes a point where only so much more can
happen. There are still a handful of conference championship games left to
be played and who knows what weird ideas the computers will come up with
in the final poll of the season. That said, it’s impossible to imagine any
sort of scenario where any team other than one of the top six teams in
this week’s poll will find itself in the national championship game. To
everyone else, thanks for playing. Pick up a lower-tier bowl game swag-bag
on your way out.
- Michigan State
(defeated Minnesota
14-3) – The Spartans seem to like toying with the emotions of the typical
college football fan. Back in September, Michigan State dropped a close
game to Notre Dame and thus infuriated the kinds of people who have
nothing better to do than to rehash their ‘Notre Dame is always overrated
and always gets lucky’ diatribes. But now Sparty has a chance to win back
a large chunk of the college-football-loving public. You can’t walk a block
these days without tripping over someone screaming about how Ohio State shouldn’t be in the national
championship game. We assume that the years of saying no to teams like
Boise State and TCU has lost its luster and some folks now feel it’s
necessary to find bigger, more storied programs to try and take down via
the strength of schedule argument. If MSU pulls off the upset this week,
they’ll have a bunch of new fans that will love them until its time for
them to criticize the Spartans’ Rose Bowl berth because of their weak
schedule.
- Stanford
(defeated Notre Dame 27-20) – The Cardinal are in a weird spot right now.
Immediately following their upset of Oregon, they were cast as the dark
horse of the national title hunt, waiting to pounce as soon as a top team
fell. And yet that lasted just a week as USC jumped up and dealt Stanford
its second loss to take away any hopes of hoisting the crystal ball.
Stanford looked like it was going through the motions a bit last week in
letting an outmatched Notre Dame squad hang around all day. If the
Cardinal don’t get their act together in a hurry, they’ll wake up this
weekend to find they’ve been so busy feeling sorry for themselves that
they no longer even have another BCS bowl to look forward to.
- South Carolina (defeated
No. 6 Clemson 31-17) – Absolutely nothing went according to plan in the
SEC East this season. Once everything shook out, it was South Carolina that ended up getting
the harshest break. The Gamecocks have looked like a top-5 team in at
least half of their games this season, but managed to trip up at Tennessee and was one of the few teams to face Georgia before every single able-bodied
college-aged male in Athens
got injured. South Carolina extended its
long winning streak over hated rival Clemson last week, but it seems clear
(to everyone who isn’t a Clemson or Carolina
fan) that these teams are one in the same. It just doesn’t matter how
things play out over the course of a season. At the end of the day, both
of these schools – sometimes through no real fault of their own – are
going to wind up falling juuuuust short of greatness. Don’t take our word
on it, just go find a fan of either of these 10-2 teams and ask them how
much they’re going to enjoy their generic, Florida-based, noon kickoff on
New Year’s Day.
- Northern
Illinois (defeated Western Michigan 33-14) – If the Huskies aren’t
careful, they’re going to start angering all of the curmudgeons that have
just settled down after raging against that string of great Boise and TCU
teams. If NIU can take home the MAC championship game for a second
consecutive season, it will be heading to another BCS bowl. Sure, the
Huskies didn’t look good in last year’s Orange Bowl, but most of that team
has matured and is ready to prove itself. Let’s also keep in mind that
Northern Illinois looked so bad last year against a Florida State
team that has been giving encore performances of that game for the last
three months. If nothing else, NFL teams should take a good look at NIU
quarterback Jordan Lynch. The league already counts established
quarterbacks from the ranks of Eastern Illinois, Miami of Ohio, Delaware, Utah, and
Nevada.
Those guys have never had anything come easy, so they seem to take the
increased pressure of NFL defenses in stride.
- Baylor
(defeated TCU 41-38) – The magic may be gone from the Bears’ Cinderella
run, but the points are still piling up. With the BCS games being anyone’s
guess at this point – and assuming that only the Big XII champion will go
to a BCS bowl – whichever bowl that lands Baylor could set itself up for
an entertaining matchup. Our dream matchup would be a Holiday Bowl
featuring the Bears and Oregon.
First one to 100 wins and both teams have to change up their uniform after
every score.
- Arizona State (defeated Arizona 58-21) – The Sun Devils managed
to make it through the entire regular season playing the fame game
perfectly. Arizona State got a bit of a break early in the season
when officials prevented Wisconsin
from attempting a chip shot field goal that would have won the game. Since
then, the Devils have managed to fly below the media storm that has
focused on the big wins and devastating losses of Oregon and Stanford. When focus has
wandered toward the Pac-12’s South Division, the coaching drama at USC has
continued to keep ASU from feeling too much heat from interested viewers.
Arizona State dropped just one game in conference play and – facing a
downtrodden-looking Stanford squad in the conference title game this week
– could clinch its first ever BCS bowl bid.
- Oregon (defeated Oregon State
36-35) – There are so many ways to look at the Oregon Ducks. On one hand,
they’ve proven themselves to be an irresistible force that can run up
50-plus points at a moment’s notice. On the other, there have been reports
of Oregon
players wallowing in another blown chance at a national title and the last
few weeks have seen the team perform well below its potential. It seems
impossible to get an exact read on the Ducks. If people underestimate them
or call them out on sub-par performances, they’re bound to score 80 on a
good team just to prove a point. If everyone sings their praises, they
only get set up for another shooting gallery of pundits calling them choke
artists when they eventually have a down game.
- Central
Florida (defeated South Florida 23-20) – The Knights dodged their third
bullet in four weeks as they got themselves in serious trouble against a
pretty terrible South Florida squad
before pulling it out in the final minutes. The Knights will have to
survive one more challenge this week if they want to claim the outright
Zombie Big East championship and clinch a spot in a BCS bowl game. Where
do you suppose UCF players want to go after big wins? Disney World has to
be a bit redundant when you live in Orlando.
Then again, it will probably cost the UCF athletic department less money
to fly the team to their bowl game and put over 100 personnel up in a
hotel for a week than it would for them to send the team to Epcot for a
day.
- UCLA
(defeated No. 25 USC 35-14) – The Bruins are still in line for a possible
10-win season, but may have actually done themselves a bigger favor if
they had just folded against their arch rivals from the less fashionable
side of L.A. last week. If USC had found a way to beat UCLA, it would have
been VERY difficult for the Trojans to let interim head coach and
full-time Duck Dynasty cast member Ed Ogeron walk. While Coach O did a
great job in a pinch, just about anyone outside of Los Angeles (or Cajun country) would
agree that he isn’t exactly ready to be the head coach of what should be a
perennial top-25 program. UCLA was already going to miss out on the Pac-12
championship game, why not at least take a dive and feed your biggest
rival a poison pill? That’s the kind of spite and forward thinking that is
necessary to get ahead in the modern age of college football.
- Clemson
(lost to No. 11 South Carolina 31-17) – Even when the exact phrasing of
Urban Dictionary doesn’t imply that the Tigers are ‘pulling a Clemson’,
it’s still hard to see this year’s Clemson squad as anything other than
the same Greek tragedy it’s been for most of the last decade. The Tigers
have had no shot at the ACC title ever since they were crushed by Florida State in October and then watched
as their most bitter rivals wrestled away any remaining hope of making a
BCS bowl game last week. Once again, Clemson has been relegated to
bridesmaid status – which is unfortunate, because orange and purple are
just awful colors for a sobbing drunk girl at a reception.
- Online
Shopping (defeating 3 a.m. wake-up calls) – Black Friday has very few
redeeming qualities. About a decade ago, it was a quirky and fun
tradition. There were some good deals to be had and you hardly ever heard
about violence or mobs forming outside of malls. Nowadays, venturing
outside anytime in the 24 hours immediately following Thanksgiving dinner
is taking your life into your own hands. Luckily, stores could care less
about how many grandmothers are trampled to death in their parking lot, so
long as they’re making money. While that doesn’t help grandma at all, it’s
great for those of us who are sane enough to stay in our backup pajama
pants (the first string pair fell victim to gravy and mashed potato
stains) and order things online for the same price as we could get in
stores.
- Louisville (did not
play) – If it’s possible for a 10-1 team (who is also a defending BCS bowl
champion) to have an entirely forgettable season, we’re seeing it with
this year’s Cardinals. Louisville was
getting a good bit of love early in the season, but has dropped off of
nearly every media platform since losing to Central
Florida. Even the Cardinals’ biggest talking point –
quarterback Teddy Bridgewater – has been eclipsed with other Heisman
candidates having stupidly good seasons. Louisville
can forget about another BCS bowl appearance unless UCF implodes and we
might not hear from Bridgewater
again until the NFL draft.
- Duke
(defeated North Carolina
27-25) – What kind of ass-backward world are we living in when the Duke
Blue Devils are playing for the ACC championship? Honestly, we could have
seen this happening in a season like last year where a thoroughly mediocre
Coastal Division was compounded by the fact that half of its teams were
ineligible for the postseason, but this is something totally different.
The Coastal still wasn’t exactly strong, but the Devils took down both
Virginia Tech and Miami
to earn their way in. Things might get a little less fairytale-ish when
Duke takes on Florida
State. Still, we
think the early 29-point spread is selling the Devils a bit short.
- Oklahoma (did not play) – The Sooners could throw a
huge wrench into the Big XII title chase with a win over Oklahoma State
in this weekend’s gloriously titled ‘Bedlam’ game. Oklahoma is a double-digit underdog and
has provided the nation with its usual act of looking great for most of
the season while disappearing entirely in a couple of high-profile games. A
win would give the Sooners an outside chance at an at-large BCS bid and
would at least get them to a nice New Year’s Day game. That said, Oklahoma’s recent
reputation isn’t boding well for them. Can we have a public removal of
Stoops’ ‘Big Game Bob’ moniker if he loses one more big game by two or
more touchdowns?
- LSU
(defeated Arkansas 31-27) – In keeping
with the trend of closer-than-they-should-have-been rivalry games, Arkansas nearly
salvaged a winless SEC campaign before LSU’s backup quarterback led the
Tigers on a last-minute drive to steal away the win. LSU has to be a
little disappointed in itself. In a year where many SEC teams were ravaged
by injury and others started off inexperienced and had to grow up, the
Tigers began the year as one of the strongest looking teams in the
conference, yet seemed to get worse as time went on. LSU should still get
a decent bowl bid, but surrendering 27 points to Arkansas is no way to
close out the regular season.
- Texas (defeated
Texas Tech 41-16) – Much like USC, the Longhorns have taken more flak than
their record warrants this season. Mack Brown was seemingly waiting for
the axe to fall just a few weeks into the season. Now Texas
stands at 8-3 and could share the Big XII title with a win and an Oklahoma State loss this season. Texas has
carved out a very respectable season for itself, but the long term might
not be looking so bright. When Texas A&M set sail for the SEC, it
swung some of the recruiting balance in the Lone Star State. Texas has
always reigned supreme, but the state has also lost more and more talent
to the SEC during the conference’s decade-long run of dominance. Texas
A&M now offers the state’s best prep players a chance to compete
against the Alabama’s and LSU’s of the world while staying close to home.
The Longhorns will never be starved for 4 and 5-star recruits, but Texas
A&M now provides a better stage for recruits who want to play in the
most hyped games of each season.
- Fresno
State (lost to San Jose State 62-52) – And down goes Cinderella. The
Bulldogs were already in danger of losing the non-AQ conference BCS bowl
opportunity to Northern Illinois, but any hopes of making the (probably)
Fiesta Bowl went up in smoke when the Spartans destroyed the scoreboard
last week. Fresno hadn’t shown many fatal flaws on defense throughout the
season and had looked good in the few challenging games it encountered,
but everything went downhill in a hurry. Fresno gets a chance to save some
face against Utah State in the Mountain West championship game Friday
night, but we somehow think that even a win won’t help take away the sting
of an undefeated season that just barely slipped away.
- USC
(lost to No. 18 UCLA 35-14) – Poor Ed Ogeron. It seems as if even a win
over UCLA wouldn’t have been enough to keep him installed as the Trojans’
head coach, but a rivalry win would have put a cherry on top of one of the
better midseason salvage jobs in recent memory. Someone definitely needs
to hire Ogeron. His sound bites are a national treasure. We could listen
to him mumble his way through War and Peace. To top it all off, he’s a
great recruiter and none of the players have had anything but the highest
praise to heap on him. Ogeron might not be the best Xs and Os guy, but we
think he’ll easily land on his feet in a head coaching job somewhere out
there.
Teams that probably are Top-25, but I ran out of good jokes: Georgia,
Cincinnati
Teams that are good, but not quite good enough: Wisconsin, Texas A&M
I enjoy making this poll every week, but it’s time consuming and
I can’t always catch all of the unique storylines that are vital to the unique
weighting of my rankings. If you have something (dirt on a player, pictures of
cheerleaders, valuable betting information, etc.) that you think should affect
a team’s ranking, feel free to bring it up in the comments section.
