Not so much for contention into getting into a bowl (I'm pretty sure we've reached the point of bowl saturation that any team with a .500 or better record that doesn't get into a bowl should ask their friends if they're using the right mouthwash/deodorant), but for the big five bowls and national championship.
Thing is, there is something to say about strength of schedule. As much as Boise State has proven they can play with the big boys, they're still only playing 1-2, maybe 3 games a season against them, sometimes including the bowl game. Meanwhile, the other undefeated/one loss teams in the strong conferences are fairly consistently playing 4-6 teams of higher quality than the bulk of Boise State's schedule. If you somehow calculated an accurate "percentage of the time these two teams played that team A should win", Boise State's odds of running the table, obtained by multiplying that stat from each game, would be considerably better than the team having to play more games where their odds are, say, 60% rather than 80%. Also, odds of injury are probably higher against the better teams, if for no other reason than they probably have more of the 300 pound behemoths playing.
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Date: 2010-09-14 05:45 pm (UTC)Thing is, there is something to say about strength of schedule. As much as Boise State has proven they can play with the big boys, they're still only playing 1-2, maybe 3 games a season against them, sometimes including the bowl game. Meanwhile, the other undefeated/one loss teams in the strong conferences are fairly consistently playing 4-6 teams of higher quality than the bulk of Boise State's schedule. If you somehow calculated an accurate "percentage of the time these two teams played that team A should win", Boise State's odds of running the table, obtained by multiplying that stat from each game, would be considerably better than the team having to play more games where their odds are, say, 60% rather than 80%. Also, odds of injury are probably higher against the better teams, if for no other reason than they probably have more of the 300 pound behemoths playing.