College Football Championships with A Plus-One: The 2012 Season
There’s no sugarcoating it: The 2012-13 bowl season sucked.
The non-Bowl Championship Series provided some memorable moments. Arizona and Nevada seemingly got into Heisenberg’s supply ahead of a wild New Mexico Bowl, for example.
A New Year’s Eve Peach Bowl between Clemson and LSU also offered an unofficial preview of the Tigers…sorry, that’s the Death Valley Tigers…SORRY, that’s the purple-and-orange Tigers impending dynastic era.
But the penultimate BCS was by-and-large a dud, with the most drama coming a week after the National Championship Game.
Alabama’s thorough deconstruction of an overmatched Notre Dame in the title game provided a fittingly uninteresting conclusion to the postseason.
For the second consecutive year, the Crimson Tide recovered from a November loss to get back into the title game on a weekend they played an FCS opponent, while other title championship contenders — this time, Oregon and Kansas State — lost in conference. Unlike 2011, however, there’s really no argument a team other than Alabama deserved that title-game berth.
What’s more, this Alabama team was top-to-bottom Nick Saban’s best of the BCS era. The defense, though not as lights-out in 2011, was still among the best in modern history. A.J. McCarron made considerable strides in his second season starting at quarterback, a process helped along playing behind one of the best offensive lines ever.
Alabama wasn’t unbeatable — obviously. The Tide took a home defeat to Texas A&M courtesy of an all-time performance by 2012 Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel.
Georgia also took the Crimson Tide to the brink in an SEC Championship Game that ranks among the best games I’ve ever watched.
This installment of the Plus-One series ostensibly doubles as a What-If Wednesday entry, too, because boy, imagine the ramifications had the Bulldogs covered the final few yards between them and the SEC title.
Georgia — which, I don’t think it’s a reach to declare was pretty clearly the second-best team in the nation by season’s end — advances to the BCS Championship Game and likely molly whops Notre Dame in fashion to similar to Alabama’s rout of the Fighting Irish.
The end of the program’s national title drought presumably keeps Mark Richt in Athens for a few years — maybe even several years beyond his exit in 2015 — leaving Kirby Smart in Tuscaloosa for a bit longer.
Or, perhaps landing in a head-coaching vacancy elsewhere in the SEC that came open around the same time? Tennessee, Florida…or to the ACC and Florida State after Jimbo Fisher’s departure?
Smart had been a graduate assistant under Bobby Bowden in the early 2000s, after all.
But that’s all material for another time. As far as the topic at hand and determining a national champion in 2012, the SEC Championship Game effectively handled that. The Plus-One in this instance is less about solving past controversies, and instead crafting a more interesting postseason than what the BCS produced.
Of the BCS bowls, only Louisville’s Sugar Bowl win over Florida offered any real drama; The Press Break will dive further into that game as part of the Death of the Big East exploration1.
Let’s fix that and craft a more exciting bowl season!
In past editions of this series, we’ve focused primarily on bowl matchups with title implications. However, there’s not many viable paths to the title game with one curveball I’m throwing: Ohio State’s in the Rose Bowl Game at 13-0.
Ohio State finished the 2012 regular season, Urban Meyer’s first at the helm of the Buckeyes, 12-0. However, because the athletic department opted to hold off its one-year bowl ban until after the 2011 season, when the Buckeyes went 6-6, Ohio State was ineligible for the Big Ten Championship Game and thus the Rose Bowl.
I’m admittedly and obviously projecting Ohio State into the Granddaddy of ‘Em All off conjecture. Sure, the Buckeyes had already resoundingly beaten the opponent they would have seen in the Big Ten Championship2, Nebraska, in a 63-38 rout on Oct. 6.
But otherwise, Ohio State consistently eeked through on its way to 12-0 with wins of 17-16 at Michigan State; a 29-22 overtime win at home over Purdue; another overtime win against Wisconsin and a one-possession defeat of Michigan. That’s all to say there’s no guaranteed 12-0 would have translated to 13-0 for the Buckeyes.
Rose Bowl: No. 8 Stanford vs. No. 3 Ohio State - OR - No. 8 Stanford vs. TBD Nebraska
With the exception of the first half of the BCS years, the Rose Bowl has featured champions of the Big Ten against the present-day Pac-12 each season since 1947. I’m as vocal of an advocate for adhering to tradition in college football as there is, but everyone has a limit.
A game pitting undefeated yet vulnerable Ohio State, playing for a potential National Championship Game, opposite a Stanford team that was peaking by season’s end — each of the Cardinal’s final four wins heading into the postseason came against teams ranked No. 17 or better — would have been a terrific entry into the Rose Bowl’s illustrious history.
But with the Buckeyes ineligible, and 10-win Nebraska laying an egg in the Big Ten Championship Game, 8-5 and unranked Wisconsin advanced to Pasadena. Making matters worse, Bret Bielema accepted the head-coaching vacancy at Arkansas and Barry Alvarez assumed duties ahead of the Rose Bowl.
Alvarez employed a relatively effective strategy, pulling an offensively limited Stanford team into a rock fight. However, the Badgers never truly felt competitive despite it being a one-score contest, and the game play left the average viewer rooting under the sink for bleach to wash their eyes afterward.
Given the SEC had a remarkable six teams ranked in the top 12 of the final regular-season poll, the Rose Bowl should have been able to cite its tradition of inviting Southeastern teams before 1947.
An eligible Ohio State, win or lose the Big Ten Championship Game, spares us the ugliness of that Stanford-Wisconsin mess. In all likelihood, based on the prior result and Nebraska’s performance against UW in the actual 2012 Big Ten title game, it’s Ohio State in this spot.
However, let’s say the Cornhuskers regroup successfully in a rematch and score the win. At 11-2, beating the third-ranked team and avenging one of its two losses, Nebraska presumably moves into the top 10.
What’s more, claiming a conference championship — which would have been the program’s first since 1999 — in Nebraska’s second year of Big Ten membership has an interesting butterfly effect. Would that have been a cornerstone for the Huskers to rebuild into a perennial Big Ten contender, if not regain their place as a national brand?
Would that have been enough to buy Bo Pelini more time as head coach — or, conversely, temporarily cooled Pelini’s frustrations with the fan base enough to avoid hurt feelings?
A Big Ten title and Rose Bowl appearance may have simply been a higher high-point of the Pelini before an inevitable firing in 2014 — Frank Solich was fired just a decade prior with a more accomplished resume and without audio circulating of him saying “Fuck you” about the fans.
If nothing else, a Nebraska-Stanford Rose Bowl would have be a helluva lot more entertaining than the Stanford-Wisconsin slog.
Sugar Bowl: No. 2 Alabama vs. No. 5 Oregon
Alabama vs. Oregon was the matchup of the BCS era (and first Playoff season) most every fan wanted but never got.
Mike Bellotti, after watching an under-manned Northwestern team hang tough with the physical defenses of the Big Ten using a spread offense3, brought in New Hampshire assistant Chip Kelly as offensive coordinator in the latter-half of the 2000s.
Kelly’s quick ascension from coordinator to head coach ushered in a transformative era for college football. His offensive scheme in his time at Oregon cannot really be summarized with a single adjective, except to say it was a Frankenstein Monster built from assorted parts of other innovative offenses.
The Ducks mastered the hurry-up/no-huddle; sometimes employed four-receiver sets akin to the Run & Shoot, but also made frequent use of tight ends and/or an H-Back while the quarterback lined up in the Pistol — a look Chris Ault popularized at Nevada.
Oregon quarterbacks thrived running option variations, but weren’t option quarterbacks in a traditional sense. Consider that freshman Marcus Mariota’s 336 pass attempts in 2012 ranked in the top-half of the Pac-12 at a time when the conference was pass-heavy, and his 32 touchdown throws were second-most in the league.
All told, it was an interesting juxtaposition to the methodical, physically imposing style of Alabama.
Texas A&M joined the SEC in 2012, using an offense with head coach Kevin Sumlin and coordinator Kliff Kingsbury that was rooted in the Hal Mumme/Mike Leach air raid. However, in their shared time together at Houston, Sumlin and Kingsbury adopted wrinkles akin to Kelly’s zone-read looks that helped maximize Johnny Manziel’s dual-threat abilities.
The strategy came to a head in A&M’s 29-24 win at Alabama that November. That game is widely viewed as the turning point for Nick Saban’s views on offense.
However, I noted in the 2011 Plus-One installment that former Saban assistant and current Miami head coach (then, coincidentally, as Oregon coach) Mario Cristobal told a few other reporters and me the next season’s Sugar Bowl matchup with Oklahoma as the moment Saban decided he needed to embrace new offensive concepts to stay ahead of the curve.
Could a meeting one year prior with Oregon and one of the most seminal figures in college football’s offensive revolution, Chip Kelly, have expedited the process for Alabama?
It’s one of those great questions to which we’ll never know the answer.
Orange Bowl: No. 1 Notre Dame vs. No. 6 Georgia
Something that needs to be made perfectly clear from the jump: Despite any retconning that may have happened since Alabama steamrolled Notre Dame in the BCS Championship Game, the Fighting Irish deserved to be there.
Their schedule was among the more impressive of the title-game contenders, including road routs of Michigan State and Oklahoma, they beat a solid Michigan team, and outlasted Pac-12 champion Stanford.
Now, the ending of the Stanford win came with controversy, as the call on the Cardinal’s final goal-line play to extend the contest was iffy. In an alternate timeline, Stanford wins that one and plays for the national title — what-ifs being a recurring theme of the David Shaw era.
Regardless, this went down as a Notre Dame victory. With a perfect record and three victories over teams ranked in the regular season’s final top 20, there’s no doubt the Irish belonged in the National Championship Game.
Likewise, a bowl-game win here would earn Notre Dame a guaranteed spot in the Plus-One Championship. However, this Georgia bunch would have been a brutal matchup for Notre Dame.
Aaron Murray was individually the most productive college quarterback the Bulldogs have had in the 21st Century — Matthew Stafford’s NFL production out-paced his output for Georgia. And while both Jake Fromm and Stetson Bennett quarterbacked teams that achieved more than any of Murray’s, Murray was unquestionably the more individually productive player.
So, with Murray at quarterback captaining an offense that also featured Todd Gurley at running back and Tavarres King at wide receiver, Georgia boasted a loaded defense with Bacarri Rambo, Alec Ogletree, and Jarvis Jones. Jones was arguably every bit as good as Heisman Trophy runner-up Manti Te’o during the 2012 regular season and just as deserving of consideration for college football’s top individual honor.
A win over undefeated Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, coupled with certain breaks going it way, could position the Bulldogs for the Plus-One National Championship Game. Georgia would need Florida to win its bowl game, as the Bulldogs beat the Gators in the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.
A Stanford loss in the Rose Bowl would help Georgia’s chances, too — especially in a Stanford-Wisconsin matchup, rather than Ohio State. The Cardinal having a conference title to their credit gives them an edge.
Cotton Bowl: No. 4 Florida vs. No. 7 Kansas State
The underlying theme of this year’s Plus-One reimagining was creating a more interesting bowl season than the BCS provided. Unfortunately, this is the most logical matchup but removes what was one of the best bowls not just of the 2012 season, but the entire BCS era.
Louisville went into the Sugar Bowl at 10-2, champion of the final Big East football season, and barely making it into the Top 25.
The Cardinals were 14.5-point underdogs against an 11-1 Florida team: For context, Hawaii was a 10-point underdog when it faced Georgia in the Sugar Bowl five years earlier, and the 2006 Boise State team considered the preeminent Cinderella of the BCS era was only a seven-point underdog to Oklahoma.
So, when Teddy Bridgewater stunted all over the Florida defense, and former Gators assistant Charlie Strong worked a masterclass opposite Will Muschamp, it was the literal definition of the greatest upset in BCS history.
Erasing that from the history books for the purpose of this exercise is unfortunate, but necessary. And hey — maybe in this alternate reality, Kansas State would have sufficiently filled the role of conquering underdog.
Such an alternate reality checks two significant boxes: First is the obvious and already stated; second is that, after he came so close to the mountaintop other times in his illustrious career — including and perhaps most notably in the first installment of this Plus-One Series — this theoretical matchup may have been the catalyst for Bill Snyder coaching in a National Championship Game.
Behind quarterback and Heisman Trophy finalist Collin Klein, K-State quietly had an offense averaging almost 40 points per game.
The Wildcats won the Big 12 championship at 11-1, the lone blemish coming in a shocking rout the weekend before Thanksgiving against Baylor.
Perhaps that K-State’s lone loss was a blowout — 52-24 at BU — is enough to disqualify it altogether from the title game. The Wildcats would need breaks beating Florida, like Oregon knocking off Alabama (K-State having the edge of winning its conference) or Georgia beating Notre Dame.
But that K-State would have at least been in the conversation is a prime example of why I tout the Plus-One as a superior model to the current, four-team Playoff — or the impending 12-team Playoff.
Both Playoff models are rigid in ways college football has rarely needed. There are considerably more instances just within the 15 years of BCS existence in which either more than four teams, through the right combination of college football’s patented chaos, could play for the championship; or seasons when anything more than two teams squaring off is overkill.
On the flipside, there’s never been a case — even the wild 2007 and 2008 seasons — through the BCS years demonstrating a need for 12.
This Plus-One series, and the research I have been compiling for the Greatest Days series available to paid subscribers have reinforced my belief college football wasn’t intended to have an inflexible championship system. History and regionalism mattered more to the sport’s boom, and contributed far more to establishing the game’s mystique than singularly focused pursuit of a national championship through a rigid system ever could.
Uniqueness differentiated college football. Its uniqueness is quickly eroding.
Coming June 30!
The Big Ten was in Year 2 of the asinine “Legends and Leaders” divisional split, designations that — as far as I could tell — were determined by putting all members with names beginning with an M or N (Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska and Northwestern…and then Iowa) into one division.
Bellotti was seeking ways for Oregon to counter the size, strength and talent advantages USC had leveraged into dominance of the Pac-10 throughout the 2000s.