MileHighBronco
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RE: 'The World is Rooting Against Navy'
As the intrigue builds about the access bowl slot, MAC fans wait to see if the committee will shaft an unbeaten conference champion.
Perhaps if things continue today as they are, Temple will make this all much ado about nothing, taking out Navy.
Here's Elton Alexander's take, written prior to gameday.
Western Michigan, MAC wary of College Football Playoff committee reasoning (videos)
Quote:DETROIT, Michigan -- It is pretty easy to understand the paranoia in Ford Field surrounding the Mid-American Conference Football Championship between undefeated West Division champion Western Michigan (12-0) and East champ Ohio University (8-4). The game is Friday at 7 p.m. on ESPN2.
What has generally been considered a foregone conclusion -- Western Michigan goes to the Cotton Bowl with a victory over the Bobcats -- has now become "wait and see" thanks to the latest rankings by the college football playoff selection committee.
Quote:Unlike the national championship playoffs involving teams out of the power five conferences (ACC, SEC, Big 10, Big 12, SEC), there is a mandate for the remaining group of five leagues (C-USA, AAC, MAC, Sun Belt, Mountain West) that only the highest-ranked league champion can go to a New Year's bowl game and get the lucrative payday that goes with it.
This year it's the Jan. 2 Cotton Bowl in Dallas with a $6 million payout. And the committee has implied even an undefeated WMU is not an automatic choice. Navy, with two losses, is very viable in their eyes.
To say this has come out of nowhere is an understatement and quietly puzzling to those inside the MAC office, to the point MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher would not even talk about it. Others, however, did.
"I just don't get it,'' one privately said. "Two weeks ago Navy wasn't even in their rankings."
Quote:WMU is undefeated; Navy already has two losses.
Navy has one win over a power five conference team (Notre Dame 4-8); WMU has two (Northwestern 6-6, Illinois 3-9), both from the Big Ten, the No. 1 conference in the country.
Last week, WMU was ranked No. 21 in the playoff poll and Navy was No. 25, its first appearance on the list. The Broncos then played Toledo (9-3) and won. Navy played SMU (5-7) and won.
This week, WMU moved up four spots but Navy, after beating a team with a losing record, somehow moved up six.
The committee, ironically led by former Ohio University athletic director Kirby Hocutt, points out Navy has three wins over teams with a winning record (Tulsa, Houston, Memphis), while WMU only has two (Eastern Michigan, Toledo).
But peel that onion another layer and Navy has four wins over teams that only won one AAC conference game (UConn, East Carolina, Tulane, SMU) while Western only had two (Ball State and Buffalo).
There's another thing that bothers me about the entitled attitude of P5 leagues, their fans or their media sycophants. When WMU beats NW and Illinois, they get the response that those two teams were "no good." We never hear that reasoning being used to denigrate the wins by the top B1G teams against the weaker teams in their league. IF it doesn't count for much that WMU beat them, it shouldn't count for much for the big boys, either. But that is not how the selective media and secret manipulators operate. It's all hunky dory - just don't let the riff-raff in to spoil their little party.
Go Temple! Beat Navy and by extension, beat the stupid CFP committee.
Otherwise, the message the committee sends to a league like the MAC is - you have NO shot at a major bowl. Unbeaten? Too bad. You had no shot when you started this season. Win them all and we'll reward you with a minor bowl slot like a MAC team usually gets.
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'The World is Rooting Against Navy'
