COMMENTARY: Gee shows ignorance, reality of BCS

RALEIGH, N.C. — Ohio State President Gordon Gee’s stance against TCU and Boise State onWednesday was nothing more than business as usual in the BCS world.

Simple, “nothing to see here” rhetoric from the president of one the main schools that benefits the most (to the tune of $123 million) from thecurrent power structure of college football.

If Sports Illustrated had a weekly feature the opposite of “This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse,” Gee’s remarks would qualify.

To summarize, Gee said that Boise State and TCU, two teams from outside the six-conference Bowl Championship Series cartel, don’t deserve to be in the BCS title game, even if they finish the season unbeaten.

Gee lampooned the strength of schedule of Boise State and TCU (more on that in a minute) and, ina shocking turn of events, hailed a BCS system that put his Buckeyes in the mythical title game three times in a six-year span earlier in the 2000s.

“Well, I don’t know enough about the X’s and O’s of college football,” Gee, formerly the president at Vanderbilt, told The Associated Press. “I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it’s like murderer’s row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gantlet that there’s some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to [be] in the big ballgame.”

Gee is not the first person to express doubt about the quality of competition Boise State and TCU face on a weekly basis. It’s a validpoint, and during seasons in which a team, or two teams, from one of the six BCS conferences run away from the pack, a point that historically has held up in the voting process by humans and computers.

But in 2010, with as many unbeaten teams outside the BCSstructure (Boise State and TCU) as there are inside (Oregon and Auburn), the system should be more inclusive and open to the best possible team(s).

Which brings us back to Gee’s strength-of-schedule argument.

Ohio State is one of three Big Ten teams ranked in the AP top 15. Since the Buckeyes can’t play the Buckeyes, that eliminates one quality opponent from the schedule.

Because the Big Ten really has 11 teams, Ohio State doesn’t play every conference opponent each season. This year, as luck would have it, Ohio State didn’t play No. 11 Michigan State, which means Ohio State played one opponent now ranked in the top 15 and one in the top 25.

Outside the league, Ohio State played two Mid-American Conference teams (Ohio and Eastern Michigan) and one Conference USA team (Marshall). The Buckeyes also played Miami, an Atlantic Coast Conference team that is not ranked.

In all, Ohio State has played two teams now in the AP Top 25 (one in the top 15) and six teams, counting Michigan on Saturday, who are twogames above .500.

Jeff Sagarin, who is responsible for one-sixth of the BCS computer ranking, gives Ohio State’s schedule a rating of 68.92, or the 59th-toughest in the country.

Let’s compare Gee’s “murderer’s row” to the tulip trot for Boise State, of the Western Athletic Conference.

Boise has played one team now in the top 15 (No. 13 Virginia Tech) with a second game against a top 25 team tonight (No. 19 Nevada) and five teams (counting Nevada) who are now two games above .500.

Sagarin pegs Boise State’s SOS at 67.69, or 73rd-toughest.

So in addition to stating the obvious, Gee is blissfully ignorant to the relative similarity between his school’s “gantlet” and Boise State’s.

The depressing subtext of Gee’s comments are that we’re closer to colonizing Mars than we are to implementing a college football playoff system.

As long as the big schools like Ohio State have the power and control the money, they have no incentive to change and counterfeit their own share of the pot.