College Football Championships with A Plus-One: The 2009 Season
Much like the 2008 season, the 2009 campaign ended with a logjam on top that helped devalue the Bowl Championship Series’ billing as a means to crown a real champion. And, like 2008, 2009 is another example of even a four-team Playoff being insufficient for the purpose of determining a “true” national champion — with five undefeated teams at the end of the regular season — but anything more than five would have been unnecessary.
To that end, the Plus-One format may well have been better for determining a champion than the Playoff — and certainly an improvement from the BCS, which perpetrated one of its more egregious slights against the non-automatic qualifiers during the system’s 15-year existence when it paired undefeated Boise State against undefeated TCU in the Fiesta Bowl.
The NCAA Basketball Tournament selection committee pulls this same nonsense pretty regularly, like this year pitting 12th-seeded College of Charleston against No. 5 seed San Diego State. Whether or not it’s the case, it comes off as a move to eliminate as many mid-majors as possible right away — and in football’s case, avoid a repeat of Utah invalidating the previous season’s national championship with its thorough beating of Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.
As for the Plus-One determining a champion, a situation in which three of the five undefeated teams win their bowl games creates a problem. However, there’s also the possibility of one losing to an opponent that didn’t win its conference and wouldn’t have much argument for advancing to the Championship Game.
Before diving into the matchups, a necessary preamble on the 2009 season: Ndamukong Suh not winning the Heisman was a major misfire.
ROSE BOWL: No. 7 Oregon vs. No. 8 Ohio State
Neither Pac-10 champion Oregon nor Big Ten champ Ohio State factors into the national championship discussion, but this matchup is noteworthy for marking the end of USC’s stranglehold on the West and the beginning of Oregon’s sustained run as a national powerhouse.
The Ducks emerged from a wild Pac-10 season in which each of Arizona, Oregon State and Stanford were in the mix for the Rose Bowl come November. The 2009 Civil War determined the Pac-10’s bid for the Rose Bowl Game, and rivals Oregon and Oregon State delivered a classic.
With the Ducks’ 37-33 win, it extended the Beavers’ Rose Bowl drought that dates back to the 1964 season.
SUGAR BOWL: No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 3 TCU
The first national championship of the Nick Saban dynasty concluded with the Crimson Tide smashing Florida in the SEC Championship Game, then handled Texas by 16 points in the BCS Championship Game.
Putting such an emphatic punctuation mark on the campaign suggests the ‘09 Tide were the typical Saban-era machine, clearly head-and-shoulders above the rest of the nation. And perhaps they were.
But it’s fascinating to imagine how the college football landscape might have shifted with any number of developments. Texas fans will loudly kvetch to this day about Colt McCoy’s injury in the title game, and it’s an interesting part of this exercise. Maybe a second BCS championship under Mack Brown extends his tenure in Austin, and UT avoids the series of missteps that has plagued the program for more than a decade now since Brown’s exit in 2013.
But then, what if had Virginia Tech maintained its halftime lead over Alabama in Week 1, or if Auburn could have held its fourth-quarter lead in the Iron Bowl, perhaps getting a stop on third down near midfield with a little more than five minutes remaining.
The ultimate hinge play in Alabama’s first championship run under Saban is Terrence Cody’s TWO blocked field goals in a 12-10 Crimson Tide win over Tennessee. If the defensive tackle doesn’t break through for either of those, most notably the Vols’ would-be game-winner as time expired, the 2009 season may well have concluded with Texas playing TCU for the title.
Does having to wait until Year 5 for a national championship with Saban, a five-year stretch in which Alabama wins only one SEC title, sour the fanbase on a coach who proved himself to be the greatest of this generation, if not ever? This was in the era that Paul Finebaum’s WJOX show started to gain traction nationally, and the program had a much more vicious nature to it in its pre-ESPN days.
Here’s a taste from the following season when Alabama lost a conference game to South Carolina.
Alright, with that now stated, Alabama probably still wins the national title in a Plus-One scenario despite showing some vulnerability in the regular season. However, it would have been satisfying to see TCU at least get an opportunity.
Gary Patterson’s best team wasn’t until the following year, but the 2009 Horned Frogs still had a three-man rotation of capable ball-carriers — one of whom was Andy Dalton, who rushed for 512 yards — and a potent offense with Dalton at quarterback that complemented a stout defense.
Daryl Washington, Tanner Brock, Tank Carder made for a top-notch linebacker corps, and Jerry Hughes was one of the best defensive lineman in the country that season.
ORANGE BOWL: No. 2 Texas vs. No. 4 Cincinnati
I won’t pretend having a shot at the national championship in a different system would have kept Brian Kelly at Cincinnati. It’s not a situation akin to Rich Rodriguez and West Virginia, as covered in the 2007 Plus-One entry, where the earth was salted at one destination. Notre Dame just had too much to offer Kelly, who was on a meteoric rise just a few years removed from a 13-season tenure at Div. II Grand Valley State.
Kelly’s departure for Notre Dame a few weeks prior to the Sugar Bowl had an undoubted impact on the Cincinnati’s performance against Florida. No matter if Kelly was leaving or not, though, the Bearcats were quite clearly the weakest of the five undefeated teams — a shame, really, because that’s the lasting impression of that team.
I prefer to think of Mardy Gilyard having one of the most exciting individual seasons from any wide receiver I’d ever watched, or the epic season finale in the snow against Pitt to close out the regular season.
Cincinnati-Pitt was the highlight of an outstanding Championship Saturday that also included the aforementioned Oregon-Oregon State Civil War; Alabama squashing the Tim Tebow era at Florida; and the nerve-racking finale of the Big 12 Championship Game.
While there’s an Alabama Butterfly Effect at play with Terrence Cody’s blocked field goals vs. Tennessee, Texas reaching the BCS Championship Game hung by even more of a thread.
Nebraska took a 10-9 lead with less than 90 seconds remaining, capitalizing on the absolutely masterful performance from Ndamukong Suh leading the Cornhuskers defense. Suh’s play in the 2009 Big 12 Championship remains to this day the most dominant individual effort from a defensive player I’ve ever seen in college football.
That includes his pressuring Colt McCoy on the final Longhorns snaps, including a third-and-13 in which McCoy launched the ball out-of-bounds to stop the clock.
I’m still not convinced the officials made the right call giving Texas one second to kick the game-winning field goal. I’m not certain the call was wrong, either, despite studying the play like it’s the Zapruder Film.
I wonder if Heisman voters, who seem to have the attention span of a preschooler hopped up on Pixie Stix, would have made the right choice and named Suh the first defense-only winner in the award’s history had Nebraska won that game.
What’s more, would TCU have played in the BCS Championship Game?
FIESTA BOWL: No. 6 Boise State vs. No. 5 Florida
Although Cincinnati looked like the most vulnerable of the five undefeated teams, Boise State went into the postseason with the lowest ranking. Once the dust settled on bowl season, however, the Broncos warranted consideration for a split national title that never came.
Chris Petersen’s 2006 Broncos put Boise State on the national radar with their thrilling defeat of Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl. However, the program wasn’t quite to the level of warranting national title consideration until 2009.
For three straight seasons, each with Kellen Moore at quarterback, Boise State wasn’t just in that conversation. It was less than a minute combined away from completing three straight undefeated runs.
In ‘09, the Broncos ran the table culminating in a 17-10 defeat of TCU in the Fiesta Bowl that defied all expectations about the program. In the ‘06 season, BSU employed an explosive offense and beat Oklahoma with well-publicized razzle-dazzle — a fun brand of football, to be sure, but easily dismissed as prototypical WAC football that couldn’t stand up to the physicality defining the true title contenders.
During this stretch, however, Boise State played some of the most physical football anywhere in college football. With that in mind, this is a matchup I’d love to have seen for a few reasons.
First off, Urban Meyer’s quick ascent kicked into overdrive when his Utah team five years prior became the first non-automatic qualifier to play in a BCS bowl. Going back there with the last of his great Gators teams brings things full-circle — plus, sending Florida out west for once was long overdue1.
What’s more, this bowl game could play a critical role in making the Plus-One championship work, albeit under one condition. A Florida win removes Boise State from the ranks of the unbeaten, leaving the winners of the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl as the two teams with clear arguments for the title.
But that’s only if Florida wins.
Given Boise State’s physical style and outstanding defense, which in the actual Fiesta Bowl held the nation’s fifth-highest-scoring offense to 10 points, I’m not so sure the Broncos wouldn’t have limited Tim Tebow and Co. in a vein similar to Alabama in that year’s SEC Championship Game.
Florida’s Week 1 trip to Utah this season is the first time a Gators team will play a regular-season game west of College Station, Texas, since 1983. While this fictitious Fiesta Bowl isn’t a regular-season contest — and UF won its first championship under Urban Meyer in the same spot, Glendale, Arizona — it would be the first time Florida played a Western team in the West since that ‘83 matchup with USC.