Goat Holder said:
but I do look at all 3 sports' recruiting. And there's no doubt football's the money sport.
However I like basketball and baseball postseason much more than football postseason, except for whatever bowl MSU might be playing in. I hardly watch the
bowls. I turn to the NFL at that point. I still favor the bowl system, because I think it favors the little people like MSU, but if I pulled for Georgia or
LSU, I'm sure I'd want the playoff. Which is another thread altogether.
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I agree. Basketball and baseball season have better postseasons. I also agree though that I don't look forward to those sports nearly as much. With football, I start looking forward to it right after the previous season ends. With basketball, and baseball, I really don't even get too excited about it until the previous sport finishes.
On all the national championship talk that's decided to come out, I don't believe that any national championship claim is legit. Even the AP and UPI are bogus titles in my book. The BCS title is not a legit title either, though it's probably the most legit title of all of the titles recently, since it at least incorporates a 2 team playoff. In my book, voters do not determine a national champion, and they don't hold any more weight than a computer ranking system. Until there exists a playoff involving at least 8 teams, there won't be a true national champion.
Polls are all opinion. If it isn't being played out on the field, then it's not a true title. I'll give you that there are teams with better claims for titles, but never has a football team ever proved it on the field. For this reason, you see a whole lot of coaches that don't even talk about national titles in football. They realize that they have no control over a national title, so they instead focus on what they can control, conference titles.
As far as our national championship claims, who really cares? What it means is that we had some teams that were good enough that someone thought they might have been the best in the country. How does anyone know whether Syracuse or Minnesota or whoever was better or worse? Answer: They don't, and how could they know since there were so few non-regional games to help compare conferences and teams?
Even though our 1959 team doesn't have as many claims to titles as some other of our teams, they were probably the best one ever. They gave up a grand total of 21 points the entire season. That's an average of less than 2 points a game. Along with that, they held the record for highest scoring average per game by an Ole Miss team until 2001 (Eli's sophomore year). If you eliminate the 3 teams Eli QB'd the 1959 team still has the highest scoring average in Ole Miss history. It was a great team regardless of what polls said, and that's all that really matters. When you factor in that they avenged their only loss with a very convincing win in the Sugar Bowl over the only team that had beaten them, it's hard to argue that they might not have been the best in the country. So why does one opinion mean more than another? To me, they're all the same. An opinion by one group is no better than an opinion by another.
If you'll go back and do some reading on how the polls developed, you'll probably agree with me that all national championship claims are bogus, because all of the polls are really bogus.
