Should Conferences have Reg. Season Champ and Champ game Champ?

Submitted by Space Coyote on

Was talking to an MSU fan the other night after the game and I came up with a thought.  I told him that I thought teams should earn the recognition of being the reg. season champ and there should be another distinction for the championship game.  I said this on a bit of a whim, but the more I thought abut it the more it made sense.

Say UCLA would have won the PAC 12 Championship game.  Would they really the PAC 12 champion even though they lost more conference games than both Oregon and Stanford?  In my opinion they wouldn't be, they would be the championship game champion and should be rewarded with a BCS bowl game, but if you want every game to count, you have co-PAC 12 champions in Oregon and Stanford, which makes sense to me.  They earned the right over the course of the regular season to get that distinction IMO.  This is similar to what happens in basketball, where you have regular season champs and tourney champs.

So I'm wondering what you all think.  I'm guessing this will have a negative reaction because it would help State, but I don't really care about that.  I care about what is right overall, which I think is to have seperate distictions.  I don't think a pure champion should be determined by a single game in this case, the teams should be rewarded with their season.  If they want to make a BCS bowl outright then win both regular season champion and championship game champion.  Technically they should but it doesn't always work out that way.

By the way, this isn't a defense for MSU, they don't deserve a BCS game IMO, but I do think they deserve a regular season champion for whatever that is actually worth.  Any other year in the Big Ten they would be in the Rose Bowl.  Now everyone has the same rules, so the new system isn't unfair to MSU, Wisc should go to the Rose Bowl, but they were the outright regular season champ, beating Wisc. during the season (regardless of luck).

MGoPietrowski

December 4th, 2011 at 1:55 PM ^

I think there should be one champion, based on the system outlined. If UCLA did what I had to do to get to the PAC title game and won, they deserve to be The PAC 12 champions, outright. It's like if the Lions got hot this year, won the super bowl, but we're only half NFL champions because Green Bay had a better regular season.
<br>
<br>That's what I don't like about bb tourneys in march. If we have 12 teams, only 8 or 6 should get to play. I always thought it was weird to have two champions from the same season.

steviebrownfor…

December 4th, 2011 at 1:56 PM ^

is to elimate any scenario in which a lousier team in the conference is considered the conference champion. 

It's pretty hard to argue that if a team earned the right to be in the game and then went on to win said game they shouldn't be considered the champion.

So while the UCLA example is intriguing; it didn't happen because they LOST the game.

MGoblu8

December 4th, 2011 at 1:56 PM ^

I would say no, just because they simply don't play enough games. In basketball or baseball for example, you get to see every team in the league against one another. Michigan didn't play Wisconsin this year, so had it come down to the two, how would you pick. However, don't they name the winners of each division? I guess that this would be as close as you are going to get. 

Gorgeous Borges

December 4th, 2011 at 1:57 PM ^

The whole point of a championship game is to produce one championship team. I'm not sure why you want conference-sanctioned moral victories. Maybe the team with the better regular-season record should play at home. This sounds pretty unnecessarily complicated.

Red is Blue

December 4th, 2011 at 4:07 PM ^

The team with the better regular-season record is intriguing from a football prospective.  There would be issues with determining who hosts in the events of ties. 

Howeva -- While this year seems like it would have been fairly straight forward in the B1G wrt who would have hosted (MSU).  But, MSU would have earned the right to host partially because of the advantage they gained over Wiscy by beating them at home (barely) the first time.  So having Wiscy play at MSU a second time perpetuates the disadvantage that Wiscy had by having to play MSU at MSU the first time.

Also, these games are like bowls games.  And there would be real issues with fans/teams making travel arrangements.  Remember the regular season ended 1 week before the championship game.  In some years, you might have multiple contenders for spots in either division.  So, not only do those fans/teams need to make potential travel arrangements, they have to figure out those plans for different potential destinations.

wildbackdunesman

December 4th, 2011 at 1:57 PM ^

"but they were the outright regular season champ, beating Wisc. during the season"



Life isn't fair, no system can be 100% fair.



Last year MSU fans were saying it was unfair and they wanted a CCG to get a shot at Ohio State for the Rose Bowl.  Now we have a CCG and it is unfair that they had to play it?



Everyone knew what the system was at the start of the year.  Tough break, but Wisconsin won the title according to the rules that ALL of the schools agreed to in advance.

morepete

December 4th, 2011 at 2:07 PM ^

My real issue is that the conference championship game doesn't match up the two best teams. It matches up the winners of two arbitrary divisions that are rarely balanced. How much better would a Stanford/Oregon rematch have been than the UCLA nonsense.
<br>
<br>Similarly, there would be no rematch if LSU had to play Bama again this weekend instead of Georgia. If anything, the B1G was the only conference in which the division winners were the two best teams. Maybe the ACC, as well.

wildbackdunesman

December 4th, 2011 at 2:19 PM ^

You have a point, but #1 10-2 USC would have played Oregon if not for the Bush scandal and #2 Georgia was 7-1 in the SEC (albeit with a weak SEC schedule) and deserved a shot to see if they could beat a big boy and #3 if there was an Alabama vs LSU SEC Title game and Alabama won...the media would already be saying it needs to be a best of three.

bklein09

December 4th, 2011 at 2:19 PM ^

Stanford v Oregon II would have been an ok game. Although it would have been at Autzen, and look what Oregon did to them the first time?

How about USC v Oregon II instead? That would have been an amazing game and it exactly what we would have had if USC didn't cheat their asses off.

MSU and Wisky were the two best teams in the B1G this season and earned the right to play each other last night. 

LSU and Georgia both deserved to be in the SEC championship. Alabama had their chance AT HOME to get there and didn't do it.

ACC championship looked good too.

I'm not sure what the complaint is here. 

LSAClassOf2000

December 4th, 2011 at 2:08 PM ^

I don't want "participant ribbons" to lead to co-championships personally, especially when one of the  co-champions didn't win the championship. I don't see a need to honor the salutatorian of a given conference like that, especially when they may not even be that based on conference record. 

Space Coyote

December 4th, 2011 at 4:57 PM ^

It would be who was the best over an 8-game (soon to be 9-game) season.  You may get 3 co-champions but that's the way it has been in the past.

I'm saying that I don't think it's a bad idea.  I think the thought process here is a little different because it helps MSU. If it helped Michigan I think people would agree more.  I'm not sitting here saying what is happening to MSU is unfair.  Everyone went by the same rules and knew the rules entering the season.  I do think the best team over the course on an entire season should get rewarded as such though.  In this case MSU did it, more often it will be Michigan that does.  Having a reg. season and a post season champion isn't bad in my opinion, and is far from "everyone wins a participation award".

LSAClassOf2000

December 4th, 2011 at 5:50 PM ^

....but what is the advantage to having regular season and CG champions? I guess my problem with this idea as presented is that I don't see how this is incorporated into the scheme of, say, the bowl system or, perhaps in the future, a playoff. It seems like this wouldn't resolve the problem of a team being a "regular season champ" but not the CG champion having a lower standing in the polls by default, and it would be a longshot, to say the least, that other factors would allow the RS champ to usurp the CG champ. So, why? 

Space Coyote

December 4th, 2011 at 10:01 PM ^

Your team wins a conference championship and a recruit isn't asking "well how many co-champions were there?"  That's probably the big reason, but also for the players that had the best record during the season.  Again, this isn't a participation ribbon, they actually accomplished something.  It doesn't change much else just like it doesn't really in other sports.  I'm not dying because it isn't the case, I just think it would be a good thing.

SFBlue

December 4th, 2011 at 2:09 PM ^

No, but if I were a Sparty maybe I would see it differently.  Sucks for them that the Big Ten changed its methodology the one year they had a better record than any other team in the conference, and even beat the next-best-team.  This coming off a year that they went 11-1 and got passed over for not only the Rose Bowl, which went to a team they'd beaten, but also the Sugar Bowl, which chose a team who lost to Wisconsin, whom Sparty had beaten.

I think this is KARMA punishing them for having their athletic director vote for Ohio State to go to the 1974 Rose Bowl over Michigan. 

Mr Miggle

December 4th, 2011 at 2:33 PM ^

That was awfully confusing.

What are the conference championship games going to be for if not to determine the conference championship? A "championship game championship", does that really make the least bit of sense?

How would you propose to decide the BCS representatives? Let's look at the ACC this year. VT would be your regular season champion. Clemson won the championship game. Who goes to the BCS and why?

In basketball the conference tournament champion gets the guaranteed spot in the NCAAs. The regular season championship is just for the record books, unless there is no tournament. If the B1G wants to put a regular season champion in their record books, fine.

UMgradMSUdad

December 4th, 2011 at 2:36 PM ^

No. Especially now with so many teams not playing each other, there will not always be a head-to-head matchup between top contenders in the regular season, plus all the other reasons already provided on this thread.