re: Art Briles blamed Condoleeza Rice

quote:

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I'm not sure I'd go so far as saying that they don't like southern football, but they certainly and clearly value the Big Ten far more than it should be. That was obvious all year. Michigan State stayed in the top ten basically all year without having beaten a single top 25 team.

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I agree with this.

While, of course, most of the attention was on the committee's ranking of the top teams, how they ranked all the teams from say #8-25 was often inconsistent with the same logic.

Mainly that for all the weight they put on "quality wins" for the playoff aspirants, this seemed to really not matter that much when applied to the rest of Top25.

I'm not sure I would say it was Big10 bias as it simply may have been "reverting" to the old AP method:

ranking teams in order by amount of total losses and then ranking those by who's loss was more recent.

This may have simply been out of laziness in going through the actual "resumes" of lower ranked teams but I completely agree that Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan St (though I would add Clemson from the ACC as well) were consistently ranked over teams with more high quality wins.

The irony or logical inconsistency, of course, is that "quality wins" are then based on beating these teams.