Sequels usually stink. This is the lesson the past few years (decades?) of movies have taught us. And yet, even with the college football season's much-anticipated blockbuster finally playing on Saturday, we should start thinking about a January release of LSU/Alabama II.
The road to a rematch is not hard to construct, especially if LSU loses a close game that could be attributed to Alabama's home-field advantage. A quick survey of national sentiment suggests that the Tigers and Tide are clearly viewed as the top two teams in the country. If that is as widely believed as it seems, why should that change if the two teams play fairly evenly on Saturday?
The potential for a BCS championship rematch is even stronger when we examine the other potential participants. With apologies to Oklahoma State, Boise State, and Stanford, this is not a banner year for traditional powerhouses outside the top two.
Furthermore, OSU and Stanford both still have major tests where they will be, at best, slim favorites (vs. Oklahoma and Oregon, respectively). While both games are at home, that will make a potential loss late in the season even more damning to their BCS campaigns.
Of course, we have already seen a season that seemed to setup ideally for a BCS rematch. In 2006, Ohio State and Michigan had their own No. 1 vs. No. 2 game-of-the-century of the year. Interestingly, the Buckeyes pulled out a 3-point home win very similar to the scenario described above for Alabama. However, that season differed from 2011 in several key ways.
First of all, the OSU/UM game was the last of the season for each, giving Michigan no opportunities to demonstrate it still deserved another chance. And while the Wolverines climbed back to the No. 2 position a week later following UCLA's upset of USC, they were vulnerable to the shortcomings of the voters' memories. One week after that, Florida won the SEC title game (more on that shortly), giving the Gators the last word in the debate for No. 2. LSU and Alabama, in contrast, still have three regular season games — including LSU's game with current No. 7 Arkansas — to prove that they belong.
Also in direct contrast to 2006, the LSU/Alabama loser will have the SEC PR complex in its corner. That year, Florida leapt Michigan after a 38-28 SEC Championship Game win best remembered for CBS's Gary Danielson's second-half campaign speech endorsing the Gators' BCS bona fides over Michigan's. Given the amount of research and preparation the CBS crew had clearly done in advance of this scenario, it is hard to attribute the position to anything but CBS's ties to the SEC, the only college football conference it covers on the network. Will Danielson make as strong a case from his seat in Atlanta next month if the alternative to LSU/Alabama II is one-loss Oklahoma or, God forbid, undefeated Boise State?
In 2011, the college football landscape is significantly different. The myth of SEC supremacy has been ingrained in voters by an active streak of five straight BCS champions and the hysterics of Southern football elitists who claim communal glory in the achievements of their league-mates. To summarize a common justification that will be made for the SEC West runner-up, if any league at any time deserved to have two teams in the BCS championship, it is today's SEC.
Immediately following Saturday's game, the winner will essentially be handed an open invitation to New Orleans for January. Barring a colossal upset, the victorious Tigers or Crimson Tide will be able to ignore style points on the way to 13-0 thanks to the shiniest notch of the season on its belt. However, especially if the game is relatively even, the defeated team will instantly have its season reframed into an ice skating routine.
Saturday's loser will have done the equivalent to falling attempting a quadruple axel in its routine's first jump. That team will no longer be unblemished, but if it puts together a stylish high-octane performance to end the season, that might be enough for a chance at revenge on the biggest stage.
At the end of the regular season, we have so few data points for each team that ranking them requires subjective interpretation of each game of significance. Maybe an Alabama or LSU loss on Saturday will cast that team in a better light than a middling win for another. This is the shame of Division 1 college football: the sport's most compelling matchups play out in our imaginations.
In a playoff-less system that drains national relevance from all but the most premiere games, this is the price we pay for sleepwalking through two months to get to this game. There is a good chance we will have to wait another two months for the next game of significance, only to have it crumble under the hype like so many sequels before it.
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