The start of my college football season

Last weekend my wife and I flew to Alabama, which happened to coincide with the state of the college football season. My wife, a Mizzou alum, is all upbeat about this season and my sister is an Alabama fan, who put a beating on Clemson. Both games were on tv at the same time, so we did a picture-in-picture, and watched both teams win their opening games. The Thursday before that, I went to the Oregon State/Stanford game. A friend of ours is an Oregon State graduate and lives near Stanford now, so thought it would a fun time to hang out, drink and watch some Pac-10 football. Oregon State coughed up the ball at the end of the game allowing Stanford to win the first game of the season. Luckily for all of us, we were in the parking lot drinking when the running back fumbled the ball on the 3 yard line.

Why do I bring all of this up? Well, it's all I got. See, I went to Baylor. We don't have a good football team, and haven't been good for over 10 years now. Our last bowl game was the 1994 Alamo Bowl where we lost to Washington State 10-3. 1994 was also the second to last year of the Southwest Conference and we tied for the conference championship with 4 other teams (Texas Tech, Rice, Texas, and TCU) with a 4-3 conference record; Texas A&M was ineligble that year.

But, what truly got me to commiserate on this history of losing was a series of articles in today's Page 2 on espn.com. The first article lists the top 10 BCS teams that beat up on non-BCS teams, including Division 1-AA teams. Now, Baylor is not on that list, although, I guess they could, it's just that they don't win anyway, but we'll get to that later. No, what got me was the three references to Baylor in the article. Basically, these 10 teams schedule easy wins, primarily from non-BCS conferences, and the article is there to call them out on it. The article also notes that while these teams regularly schedule and beat the non-BCS teams, they also have a history of losing to BCS conference teams. And that's where Baylor comes in.

The first mention of Baylor comes in talking about the Minnesota program; Minnesota's forte has been to schedule easy games up front to make their goal of 6 wins for bowl eligibility get easier. Anyway, in the Minnesota discussion the article notes that Minnesota since 1997 played only two nonconference games against BCS teams, losing to Cal, but beating Baylor. Ok, that seems fine.

The second mention is in Oklahoma State. Here the article notes "From 1998 to 2007, only Baylor lost more games to non-BCS teams than the Cowboys among Big 12 teams." Great, not only do we schedule a fair amount of non-BCS games, but we lose a lot of them.

The third mention is in Oregon State. Here they note that one of Oregon State's three non-conference wins since 1997 came against "lowly Baylor." Hey, you know what? Baylor beat Oregon State in 1996, so there!

The next article that got me going was a discussion of the 10 most dangerous non-BCS teams. The article starts with a discussion of Fresno State football and how BCS teams don't like playing them, and will often cancel games at risk of losing to a non-BCS team. In the discussion with Fresno State head coach Pat Hill, he notes that "We don't usually get [programs such as] Indiana or Baylor" wanting to play them. Hey, you know what? Baylor beat Fresno State in 1997, and Baylor only had 2 wins that year.

The article goes on to list the top 10 giant killers in Division 1-A football, and number one is TCU. TCU used to be in the Southwest Conference with Baylor and Baylor still plays them. The first two lines in this section?

"We're still trying to figure out how Baylor got into the Big 12 while the Horned Frogs did not when the Southwest Conference disintegrated. We're going to go out on a limb and suggest that it had more to do with money and influential alumni than athletic performance."

So what if we had former Texas governor Ann Richards as an alumni. . .ok, that was what probably got Baylor into the Big 12. Fine. It then concludes with this slap: "Frankly, we expect an upper-tier team from the Mountain West or WAC to drop the hammer on Northwestern, Vanderbilt and Baylor." Sigh.

At the end of this article, they list 52 non-BCS conference teams and their various victories over BCS teams. Baylor has lost 8 times times to non-BCS opponents. Other than losing twice to TCU, Baylor has lost to UAB (twice), New Mexico, UNLV, North Texas and Army. What's even more astounding is that UAB is 4-22 against BCS teams, so Baylor has provided UAB 2 of their 4 wins; North Texas is 2-25 against BCS teams, so Baylor has provided North Texas with 1 of their 2 wins and Army is 1-19 against BCS teams, so Baylor has provided Army with their sole victory over BCS teams. Not so good.

Helpfully, ESPN also has put together a list of 61 BCS teams, including Norte Dame, on how they've fared against non-conference BCS opponents, non-BCS Divison 1-A opponents and Division 1-AA opponents. What we find is that the teams at the bottom of this is where the top 10 cupcake programs come from. And where's Baylor? Sitting at 49 out of 61; in other words, they schedule non-BCS teams almost 80% of the time, and are just out of the top 10 cupcake programs. But what this also shows is that Baylor has the third most losses against non-BCS teams, only behind Vanderbilt (5-9 against non-BCS) and Northwestern (13-10 against non-BCS). Baylor is 11-8 against non-BCS opponents. Baylor is also 1-6 against non-conference BCS opponents, which looks bad, but it could be worse since Kansas and Ole Miss haven't beat a non-conference BCS opponent. I was going to say that even crappy Minnesota has beat a non-conference BCS opponent, but then, as I noted above, they beat Baylor. On the good side, Baylor is 8-0 against 1-AA opponents, so that's something.

By the way, who was Baylor's one non-conference BCS win since 1998?? North Carolina State in 1998. Suck it N.C. State!

Anyway, Baylor didn't start the season off so well this year with a 41-13 beat down by Wake Forest on national television. This weekend looks to be brighter as we take on Division 1-AA Northwestern State. Then we've got Washington State and at UConn after that, both of which will be televised. Can't wait.