Friday Roundtable: Pac-10 raises the bar (while eating its tail)

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August 21, 2009

The Doc, Holly Anderson and Doug Gillett wrap up the week with our written equivalent of tossing a beach ball around the office. This week’s topic: The ninth conference game in the Pac-10 — good for competition, or weighing them down?

Doug: I’m not sure I understand why so many people in the Pac-10 are worried about the round robin format. I gather that one of the biggest worries on the part of the conference is that trading a potential non-conference patsy for a challenging conference game makes a team that much more likely to incur a loss, and thus that much more likely to fall short of bowl eligibility. But since the conference went to a round-robin schedule in 2006, they’ve had 18 total bowl tie-ins, and only once have they failed to put a Pac-10 team in one of them (they didn’t have an eligible team to send to the Poinsettia Bowl last year). And to me, that’s balanced out by the fact that they had a pair of eligible 6-6 teams in 2006 that didn’t get invited because the Pac-10 didn’t have enough tie-ins.

Let’s face it, if a program is that desperate for a bowl bid, they can find a way to engineer six wins whether they’ve got four non-conference games to work with or only three. I can’t see a tangible case that life would be that much rosier for the Pac-10 if they ditched the round-robin schedule.

Holly: What about a conference championship game? I haven’t heard that possibility bandied about much at all.

Doc: I’m not sure it’s bowl bids so much as general national perception — the Pac-10 starts the season basically assured of half its teams carrying a loss they wouldn’t have if they used the 12th game to schedule cupcakes like most teams across the country. Nobody gets to miss USC, Oregon or Cal anymore (or whoever happens to be good in a given year), and they have to play those games instead of, I don’t know, Charleston Southern. But they get very little credit for that decision. What’s the point of playing tougher competition if you don’t get credit for it?

Obviously the coaches don’t like it.

Holly: That’s why I’m wondering about a conference championship game … carrying that extra loss doesn’t seem to do the SEC much harm, given their propensity for blanketing the more prestigious bowls.

Doug: See, that’s the catch-22 here. If your conference is already perceived as a powerhouse, then playing an extra game, even if it’s a loss, can be spun as a positive. But if your conference isn’t perceived as anything special, then adding an extra league game may mean you’re only playing another game against a mediocre team, at least in the eyes of the punditocracy.

And I’m not saying the Pac-10 is a nothing conference, but they’ve had the problem in recent years of being perceived as Southern California and the nine dwarves. A ninth conference game isn’t really going to change that.

Holly: And it’s a bad perception. I don’t know if it’s just the geography talking, if living out here for three years has skewed my judgment, but I’ve seen some excellent football played on this coast, and not all of it happened in the Coliseum. I think all these ostensibly stuck-up SEC and Big 12 fans who’d bother to follow, say, Oregon and Cal with interest would like what they saw.

Maybe instead of staying home, they need to go further afield and do what USC does with Ohio State and Notre Dame, scheduling high-profile games thousands of miles away. Tennessee’s series of home-and-homes with Pac-10 schools has been really fun to watch, despite the losses we’ve sustained along the way, and I wish more schools would make the cross-country slog. There’s big media attention to be had for both schools in an arrangement like that.

Doc: So if the perception is that the Pac-10 should somehow be bringing in more, bigger national games — and looking at this year’s schedule, with Ohio State, Notre Dame (three times), LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, Michigan State, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Boise State, Utah, and Cincinnati, I don’t really see how that’s possible — is that an admission that it’s essentially punished for going the round-robin route?

Holly: I don’t know if should is the right word, because I’m not at all sure they’re being punished (see the numbers Doug posted above). But it would be another way. If the East Coast bias truly exists, maybe the answer is to get themselves some more east coast eyeballs. (Note to Jim Harbaugh: That is a metaphor. Please don’t maim anyone. Thank you.)

Doc: More exposure? You mean, like, with the Alamo Bowl? Straight to the top, baby.