The BCS always got it wrong. Until it didn’t in 2005. By
then, it was too late.
The BCS was supposed to solve that. But college football
being college football decided that having every season end with two undefeated
teams was no fun, and decided to go a little nutty.
It began on the first Saturday in December 1998 when three
teams – Kansas State, UCLA, and Tennessee – entered undefeated and only one
remained. Despite “clean” seasons in 1999 and 2002, the norm was chaos. Florida
State over Miami in 2000. Nebraska over Colorado and Oregon in 2001 despite
losing its last game by 5 touchdowns. The entire 2003 fiasco, when the AP’s #1
team USC didn’t crack the top 2 of the BCS. And the gloriously stupid 2004
season where an undefeated Auburn didn’t play for a title.
Of course, you’d think the BCS would have transitioned into
a playoff then and there, but you don’t know college football. Driven mostly by
Congress poking around about non-BCS teams left out of the party, the BCS
shifted to the dreadful “double hosting model” where the title game was played
where it is currently – the 2nd weekend of January – but without any
semifinals. It ruined the bowl season, it killed the BCS, and by 2011 was on
the verge of killing the sport entirely before the playoff saved it.
Through all this disaster came the greatest season in the
history of the BCS, culminating in arguably the greatest college football game
ever played.
From the moment the 2004 season ended, Texas and USC were on
a collision course. It rarely works out like that in college football. In 2005,
it worked to perfection.
The two very best teams ended up meeting each other for the
national title in a game that felt as big as any Super Bowl, and it brought the
ratings to match. 35.6 million people watched the 2006 Rose Bowl, the largest
TV audience of the BCS era and only one game in the college football playoff
era even came close.
The story of the 2005 season though, and why the sport
peaked, was due to fortuitous scheduling and a perfect confluence of events.
The first came in the second week of September when Texas
traveled to Ohio State to play under the lights at the Horseshoe. ABC’s
Saturday Night Football series didn’t begin until the following year, so this
was a still-rare primetime broadcast game for college football. It lived up to
the hype and then some, as Vince Young led Texas to a thrilling, fourth quarter comeback. Texas would be on its way to an undefeated season. Ohio State ended
up as probably the third-best team in the country.
As with Texas/Ohio State, the game somehow exceeded the
immense hype. The Bush Push touchdown is one of college football’s most iconic plays
and set the USC machine into another stratosphere as if that was even possible.
On the first Saturday in December, I was freezing my ass off
in the parking lot of Rentschler Field tailgating before UConn hosted
Louisville. UConn was playing for a bowl berth and the game time temperature was
about zero.
Every hour, my Dad would go into the car to a) check scores
and b) sit in the heat. At the 7 pm check-in, my buddy Brian joined him. I’ll
never forget looking through the windshield to see the two of them absolutely
losing their minds over the hourly score updates. Did USC lose? Did Texas?
Oh no, the exact opposite. Texas put up 70 on Colorado. USC
put up 66 on UCLA. The matchup was set.
However, if this was just about Texas and USC, it wouldn’t
be a peak season, or a peak for the BCS. Instead, the BCS produced four
standout games with eight deserving teams played in front of a grand total of
zero empty seats. Yes, in the years since, talk about empty seats at bowl games
has dominated conversation. Not so in 2005. In fact, those tickets were
impossible to get.
It began with the Fiesta Bowl, which took the Rose Bowl’s
customary spot on New Year’s Day afternoon and matched up the aforementioned
Ohio State and Notre Dame. Can you say box office? The game was good, if not
great, and exposed that maybe Charlie Weis wasn’t quite the genius he said he
was.
New Year’s night featured the Sugar Bowl, relocated to
Atlanta because of Hurricane Katrina, and by fortune ended up with SEC champion
Georgia. That matchup seemed to be a mismatch, as the Big East – reeling from
the defections of Virginia Tech and Miami – had reformed and sent an unknown
West Virginia team to the deep south. I don’t think the folks at Georgia have
been able to get the nightmare of Pat White and Steve Slaton out of their heads
since. A shocking upset led to a brief resurgence of the Big East through the
end of the decade, and provided one of the more memorable bowl upsets ever.
Then, the main event, the 2005 Rose Bowl. There have been so
many articles, documentaries, and remembrances of the game that I don’t need to
repeat them. All I know is it was the absolute best that college football could
deliver, and it’ll never happen again.
2005 was the last season a national champion was crowned the
same week as New Year’s Day. In the years since, the holiday has become less
and less important as ESPN grinds up everything it can to make money. The
national title game has been played no earlier than January 8th ever since, and
the sport continued its descent into feeling more and more like the NFL.
I’ll never forget that 2005 season because it was the last one that felt like traditional college football. Every important rivalry game was still played. Realignment had yet to destroy the soul of college football. Traditional powers still ruled the sport. There was no “BCS-buster” that angered the football-watching public.
Instead, we just got an autumn of incredible football led by
stars that transcended the sports page in Reggie Bush and Vince Young.
As always with college football, the peak of the BCS also
led to the downfall of the BCS.
The next eight years of the “double-hosting” model was
dreadful, as the sport went through painful and stupid realignment, while doing
its darndest to keep the new kids on the block from joining the party.
It would be nearly a decade before college football once
again hit a new peak.
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