BCS Bustin’: Anatomy of a Cinderella
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...September 2, 2009
Mid-major discussions these days seem to quickly devolve from the real, modest goals of obscurity — a conference championship, a bowl game, a decent crowd at homecoming – to the big picture analysis of "BCS Busting": Who’s going to defy the odds for the greatest season in school history and the massive payday? As the offseason proved, even at the highest levels, the distinction is a very big deal.
But that’s what the Series asked for when it expanded from four to five games, and what it’s gotten the last three years (with very different results) in Boise State, Hawaii and Utah. Beginning with Utah in 2004, mid-major teams have crashed the BCS three times now in four years, which makes the question less "Can anyone do it?" than "Who will it be?" Since roughly 2002, there’s been at least one annual challenge to the system from below, from a team (or teams) that otherwise wound up ranked among the top dozen in the country:
• TCU (2003): Defending C-USA champs opened 10-0 and climbed into the top ten before dropping the de facto league title game at streaky Southern Miss; finished regular season 11-1.
• Miami, Ohio (2003): With Roethlisberger, the best MAC team of the decade.
• Utah (2004): Orginal gate-crasher blew out entire schedule behind Urban Meyer, Alex Smith.
• Louisville (2004): Only loss was a Thursday night heartbreaker at Miami.
• Boise State (2004): 12-0 regular season but scorned by BCS for Utah and one-loss Texas.
• TCU (2005): Upset Oklahoma, ripped off 10 in a row en route to MWC title in debut season.
• Boise State (2006): Did more to advance status of mid-major insurgents than any team since BYU’s mythical championship in 1984.
• Hawaii (2007): Beneficiaries of possibly the softest schedule in D-I history blown out in Sugar Bowl.
• Utah (2008): Four wins over ranked teams made Utes the first legit championship contenders.
Using those teams as a composite model, we get five solid trends that a vast majority of that group — all of them, in a couple cases — have in common:
• Trend: The Set Up Year. Teams that struck the memorable season did so as the culmination of a strong, multi-year push, best demonstrated in the quick, dramatic turnarounds orchestrated by Meyer at Utah and Petrino at Louisville in 2004: Both coaches won nine games their first year and blew the doors off everyone in their second. Gary Patterson accomplished more or less the same at TCU, where the Frogs won the C-USA championship in 2002, shut down Colorado State in the Liberty Bowl and finished No. 23 on the year-end AP ballot in Patterson’s second year, prefiguring their undefeated run through the first two-and-a-half months of ‘03. Hawaii had a banner, 11-win season in 2006 and opened 2007 already ranked in most preseason polls. Boise State had three straight one-loss seasons under Dan Hawkins before it went undefeated in the 2004 regular season, and was still on the same track when the Broncos broke through with the Fiesta Bowl upset in ‘06.
The peak rarely lasts more than a season, though — even Boise State and TCU, the programs that have continued to win double digit games through coach and personnel turnover, have suffered through relative down years (the Frogs were 5-6 in 2004; BSU was 9-4 in 2005). Since 2005, no team in any conference, big or small, has lost fewer than two games overall in consecutive seasons.
2008 Candidates: Boise State, East Carolina, Houston, TCU. Boise State and TCU have established themselves as perennial contenders in this category — the Broncos have double-digit wins six of the last seven years, TCU five of the last seven — but East Carolina and Houston are more interesting in the "up-and-coming" category in Conference USA: The Cougars beat the Pirates, eventual C-USA champs, by 17, and knocked Tulsa out of the polls with a 40-point blowout in mid-November en route to finishing second in the country in total offense; all the principles in that attack return, notably quarterback Case Keenum, which gives UH a very Hawaii-like aura on offense if they can stop anybody. Skip Holtz has brought ECU completely out of the depths and turned it into the only team in C-USA that plays any defense.
• Trend: Young/Upwardly Mobile Coach. Coaches who hit the mother lode at this level tend overwhelmingly to do it early, and to have the sense to take the money and get while the gettin’s good. Entrenched career types like Pat Hill still make the occasional ruckus, but the really big, storybook seasons lately have been orchestrated by eager young minds en route to bigger jobs — Urban Meyer, Dan Hawkins, Bobby Petrino, Chris Peterson. The core of TCU’s program was built by unknown Dennis Franchione, who took a winless team in 1998 to 10-2 in 2000 before moving on to consecutive bouts of infamy and ‘Bama and A&M, and has been sustained by Gary Patterson, who remains for now a perpetual hot commodity when big jobs open up every winter. Prior to Hawaii last year, all of the teams that challenged for the BCS since 2003 have done so with a coach less than five years removed from his arrival at the school, most of them – Utah, Louisville, TCU in ‘03 and Boise State in 2006 – within the coach’s first or second season. Back in 1998, Tommy Bowden took Tulane to 12-0 in his second year there and landed his ill-fated gig at Clemson.
If they’re not young, they’re still mobile. The late Terry Hoeppner was not exactly a spring chicken in 2003, but he was in only his fifth season as boss at Miami, and rode that success to the Indiana job. June Jones was also relatively long in the tooth at Hawaii, which made it all the more surprising when he bolted paradise for the post-death penalty hell of SMU.
2008 Candidates (coaches within five years of their arrival at school): Boise State, BYU, Central Michigan, East Carolina, Houston. Again, Houston and East Carolina are the most interesting teams here, because — unlike Boise State and BYU, where Chris Petersen and Bronco Mendenhall have become fairly entrenched and are idling at the top — Holtz and Houston boss Kevin Sumlin are still riding a wave of forward momentum. East Carolina has notably improved every year under Holtz, and with a senior quarterback, a fully intact offensive line and at least three leading All-C-USA candidates on defense, I’m not sure how much more ripe that program is going to get.
• Trend: Upper-Class Quarterback In Second or Third Year in the System. Not only have BCS party crashers been led by veteran quarterbacks, but half of them –Miami, Louisville, Utah and Hawaii — made their names behind once-in-a-generation types who served as the Face of the Program and put up obscene numbers. Louisville’s had a lot of great quarterbacks in the last decade, but none had a single season on par with Stefan LeFors’ shred job in 2004; Alex Smith, Ben Roethlisberger and Colt Brennan will be synonymous with the Utes, Red Hawks and Warriors for the rest of their lives, as will Jared Zabransky with Boise State, albeit for Fiesta Bowl drama and subsequent NCAA Football covers rather than astounding production. Brian Johnson was a three-year starter and MWC Offensive Player of the Year last season. Add TCU’s workmanlike Jeff Ballard, and those seven quarterbacks were combined 146-20 as starters during their junior and senior years.
2008 Candidates: BYU, Central Michigan, East Carolina, Nevada, TCU. Of these teams, BYU, Central Michigan and Nevada have the kinds of potential stars that have led most of the Cinderella runs; Max Hall, Dan LeFevour and Colin Kaepernick all enter the season as pretty clearly the best quarterbacks (and maybe the best overall offensive players) in their respective conferences. Patrick Pinkney has been asked to do a lot less at East Carolina, but given that he’s orchestrated upsets of Boise State, Virginia Tech and West Virginia the last two years, along with the win over Tulsa in last year’s C-USA Championship, he’s capable of a Brian Johnson-like season as a senior: Quiet, consistent competence with a flair for the dramatic when necessary.
• Stop the Run. Most of the examples from the past were led by a great quarterback, but whether they ran or passed or did everything well offensvely, what almost every upstart has in common on the field is a completely suffocating run defense: Eight of the nine model teams held opponents under 3.5 per carry for the season (Utah in ‘04 allowed 3.8). Even Hawaii, vangaurd of high-flying offensive theatrics and forgiving defense, only gave up 3.48 per carry in ‘07 — not great, but best in the WAC, and given the offense and the opposition, more than adequate.
2008 Candidates: East Carolina, Nevada, TCU, Utah. ECU, Nevada and Utah were solid against the run last year and return most of their front seven; TCU loses most of the front that led the nation against the run last year, but the Frogs have finished in the top 15 in rush D seven times in eight seasons under Patterson. TCU is always death against the run.
• Trend: Beat a Decent/Mediocre "Big Six" Team — But Avoid the Elites. Every Cinderella needs an arrogant ugly stepsister to vanquish, a role played with aplomb through the years by Texas A&M, Arizona, Northwestern and, on multiple occasions, Oregon State and North Carolina. Preferably this goes down at home; Utah in ‘04 and Boise State in ‘06 built their seasons by wiping out Texas A&M and Oregon State, respectively, in Thursday night games that counted as their early home showcase for the rest of the country before the conference kittens rolled in for ritual slaughter. Utah opened with a then-impressive win at Michigan last year and later (albeit in more obscure fashion) came from behind to beat Oregon State a week after the Beavers upset USC. Hawaii took a different route in 2007, using Washington in the season finale as validation after three months of consuming delicious, empty calories from the rest of the WAC (and worse).
Before Utah last year, though, no team on this list had a regular season win over a team that finished in the top 20 in the final polls. Technically, Miami beat two ranked teams in ‘03, but both were similarly-positioned MAC opponents late in the season. Louisville built an impressive three-score lead at Miami in 2004 before watching it go up in smoke in the final minutes, its only loss of the season. That leaves TCU, which opened 2005 by shocking Oklahoma on the road, as the only example of a would-be upstart that took on a true heavy and survived — and it immediately lost its next game to SMU.
2008 Candidates: Boise State, TCU. Here is the great divider: Of all the potential party-crashers, almost none has a realistic chance of running of the table because of one giant obstacle in the path — even if you consider Boise State’s date with Oregon Thursday night a "winnable" game for the Broncos, BYU has to survive Oklahoma and Florida State; East Carolina would have to knock off Virginia Tech and West Virginia for the second year in a row; Houston has back-to-back dates with Oklahoma State and Texas Tech; Nevada goes to Notre Dame and then Missouri two weeks later; and Central Michigan will be an underdog in road trips to Arizona, Michigan State and Boston College.
Even TCU, which has the most manageable non-conference lineup of the contenders, has to win at Clemson in addition to the big Mountain West games with BYU and Utah. Nobody’s going to ride in on a pushover schedule, which is commendable on one hand but potentially fatal on the other.
To the scorecard:
TCU’s schedule — the fact that it can claim a pair of "Big Six" wins on top of its big MWC games, but neither one of those games (at Virginia and Clemson) seems at all out of reach — is what really sets the Frogs apart: They’ve been consistent winners this decade, they have a viable schedule, they have a quarterback who knows the ropes, they’ve never suffered a significant drop-off on defense and, subsequently, they have a coach a lot of bigger schools might want. Generically, TCU looks like the safest bet on the board.
But even if the Frogs get out of Clemson unblemished, their odds of beating the Tigers and dropping both BYU and Utah still seem longer than they’re worth. Which brings us back to the obvious choice: Boise State. The Broncos have potential issues against the run thanks to massive turnover on the defensive line and at linebacker, and quarterback Kellen Moore is only a sophomore. But if they get by Oregon Thursday night, the door blocking the path to another undefeated regular season will be blown wide open. From there, if the big-money games decide to snub Boise at 12-0 again, that’s really out of their hands.
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