Here’s your fun stat of the day, courtesy of Bill Connelly.
Weeks As Number One, Last Eight Years
USC: 38 weeks
Ohio State: 21 weeks
Oklahoma: 19 weeks
Florida: 14 weeks
Alabama: 12 weeksEverybody Else: 17 weeks (LSU 4, Oregon 4, Texas 4, Auburn 3, Georgia 1, Missouri 1)
Of course, some of those schools can make a good argument that it’s not the number of times you’re number one that matters, it’s the timing.
LSU and Auburn are very efficient.
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Timing is everything. There are only 2 National Championships to be claimed by those top three schools. Both by USC in 2003 and 2004. I’d say it says as much about how over-valued tOSU and Oklahoma have been in the national media as it does anything else.
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I’ll have to correct you, Nate. USC only won the 2004 National Championship.
Seems as though you’ve been brainwashed by the national media as well.
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While I feel no team has ever won a NC, undisputed NC just doesn’t exist, you are correct: USC has the very weakest claim. Being a part of one system (BCS), then claiming a title from another when the BCS didn’t fall their way. This demonstrates how meaningless paper titles are. Not surprisingly, ESPN feels strongly both ways by acknowledging USC as a legit 2003 NC. What a circus this all is.
2010 co-MNC Texas Christian should be heralded for not acting like fools. Let’s settle it on the field, or stop recognizing anyone.
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The AP has been crowning champs since the 1930s. In fact, they berthed the premise. It is a legitimate National Title to claim–like we do for 1980.
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Can’t decide if this is further proof that a championship game formula based mostly on polls from these same folks is clearly flawed because 2 teams is clearly too small a sample size for these ‘independent’ thinkers to actually get it right…
OR
If it shows that despite these idiots, the BCS produces a pretty reliable result that is based upon the whole year’s worth of work and not just the popularity poll going into the season.
Ugh. My head just exploded.
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To the good Senator’s point, I doubt very seriously any Florida fan would trade the results of 2006, where the Gators were #1 for *only* one whole week, while OSU was #1 for the whole season, minus *only* one whole week.
82 yards of offense later………
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I, however would gladly traded our one week at the top for the rest of the season. You could say we had the worst timing of them all.
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+1
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That poll drop for UGA after the first week of play in 2008 may be the most telling of all regarding the silliness of opinion polls. Wait, perhaps the poll at the end of 2007 where it was “engineered” to knock UGA out of the BCS finale is worse. hard to say, there have been so many examples of this weird way of determining a “champ”, and all schools have experienced this (Notre Dumb’s is usually in the opposite direction.)
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Is there a single more overrated program than Oklahoma?
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Yes. Michigan, OSU, and Notre Dame are the most overrated programs in my lifetime. As much heat as the BCS catches, the AP has always been a regionally biased poll. The worst poll of all is the coaches, but the AP is just a half-step better, if only because they seem to fill out their own ballot.
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