re: Espn: Sizing up the SEC resumes

The "narrative" drives everything in college football, and the "narrative" would insist on including Alabama.

The main achievement of the BCS was to get conference champions who would be otherwise committed to different bowls to be able to play each other. The inclusion of the Rose Bowl and their commitments from the Pac10 and BigTen were the last hold out from the Bowl Alliance that preceded the BCS.

Each year, the talking heads have latched onto the "narrative" regarding who should have been in the BCSNCG. Every time the BCS "worked as it's supposed to", it was because the resulting matchup had the AP #1 vs #2. So, when Auburn got screwed in 2004 or Oklahoma State got screwed in 2011, the talking heads doing the analysis kept repeating the phrase "the BCS got it right". But when AP#1 USCw got left out in 2003, the talking heads screamed long enough for the AP to eventually pull it's participation in the BCS.

(To be fair, Reese Davis of ESPN carried a lot of water for Okie State in 2011 before the SECCG weekend, but by the time the Bedlam game was being played, the crawl on the bottom during the game was announcing it was going to be LSU & Bama.)

You can bet that the same dynamic will exist with the playoffs. In the years that the committee picks the top 4 in the AP poll, the system will have "worked". Any year that a top 4 team is left out, the lower ranked team that made it will be discussed as the "controversial pick", even if they were a conference champion with the same record.

We complain a lot about message boards being "echo chambers", but we never seem to notice that the talking head guys on TV are just as much an echo chamber. After all, it's a bad idea to get into an argument with a guy that owns a microphone or buys ink by the barrel.

GEAUX TIGERS