When Boise State knocked off Virginia Tech on Monday night, their hope was that the Hokies would go on to run the table so that the victory looked great in the eyes of BCS voters come the end of the year.

So much for that idea.

James Madison shocked the college football nation on Saturday by knocking off the Hokies 21-16 in Blacksburg. The Dukes were only able to produce 14 first downs but they forced three turnovers, which included a fumble recovery with 5:21 remaining to seal the game. Quarterback Drew Duzik also ran for two touchdowns as James Madison beat the Hokies for the first time in school history.

The loss destroys VA Tech’s national title hopes, although they haven’t even begun conference play yet so they still have plenty to push on for this season. The biggest blow will likely be felt by Boise State, as their win on Monday night now holds less water than a colander. Thanks to a soft WAC slate, they don’t have another team on their schedule to help prop them up in the eyes’ of voters.

While the Broncos did what they had to do in beating Virginia Tech on Monday, unfortunately the Hokies didn’t live up to their end of the bargain. The coaches will have their vote and will never put a Boise team in the title game when their claim to fame was knocking off a team that was beat by James Madison the very next week.

Boise State might have well just won the Super Bowl.

Thanks to a Charmin extra soft schedule every year, when the Broncos play a team from a BCS conference they have to make it count. A loss guarantees that they won’t be playing for a national title, while a win essentially sets them up to run the table the rest of the season.

On Monday night, their game with No. 10 Virginia Tech lived up to the hype. Boise led 17-0 after one quarter, but VA Tech erased the deficit and then went up by one point after Ryan Williams scored on a one-yard touchdown run midway through the third quarter. From that point on, the lead changed three more times before the Broncos seized a 33-30 victory when Kellen Moore found Austin Pettis on a 13-yard touchdown pass with only 1:09 remaining on the clock.

And what a final drive that Moore orchestrated to win the game. He led the Broncos on a five-play, 56-yard jaunt that took just 38 seconds to complete. He was 4-for-5 passing on the drive for 43 yards, which included the 13-yard strike to Pettis.

Moore once again proved that he has ice water running through his veins. Of course he had to, because VA Tech quarterback Tyrod Taylor played out of his mind and almost willed the Hokies to victory himself. He was 15-for-22 on the night for 186 yards passing, two passing touchdowns and 73 yards rushing on 16 carries. He also scrambled for 11 yards on a broken play were he slipped out of the grasp of a Boise defender, kept his knee off the ground and then ran for a first down.

Houdini couldn’t have pulled the play off.

But back to Boise State. I laugh when people comment about how overrated this team is. I don’t understand how a team that went 14-0 last year and had 20 starters coming back could be overrated. Some get too caught up with the big school/little school aspect of college football and they push aside experience, coaching and fundamentals. I’m not saying that Boise deserves to go to a national championship just for beating one quality opponent a year. But time and time again they prove their mettle in big games.

The bottom line is that Boise State is a damn good football team, VA Tech is going to be tough to beat in the ACC, that was a freaking thrilling way to end Week 1 of the 2010 college football season and the Broncos’ season has been saved.

Welcome to a new feature on The Scores Report. We thought it would be interesting to tally up all the major accomplishments of a college football program and assign a point value to each category in order to rank them against one another. Then our football guru, Anthony Stalter, wrote a little bit about each program and the direction that it’s headed.

Here’s how the points are calculated — 20 points for a national championship, 10 for a BCS title game loss, seven for a BCS bowl win, five for a BCS bowl loss, five for a BCS conference championship, three for a mid-major conference championship, two for a BCS conference runner-up and one for a major bowl appearance (i.e. a bowl that has a recent payout of more than $2 million — Capital One, Outback, Chick-fil-A, Cotton, Gator, Holiday, Champs Sports and Alamo.) You’ll see the total points in parenthesis after the team’s name.

We put some thought into the point values for each accomplishment, paying special attention to how the point values are relative to one another. For example, we figured that one national championship would equate to four BCS conference championships, or three BCS bowl wins. We only looked at the last five years, as college football has increasingly become a fluid and fickle sport, and that’s about how far back a recruit will go when deciding amongst a list of schools.

Lastly, since a program is so dependent on the guy in charge, we added or subtracted points if the program upgraded or downgraded its head coach in the last five years. A max of 10 points would be granted (or docked) based on the level of upgrade or downgrade. Again, we tried to quantify the hire relative to the program’s other accomplishments. For example, hiring Nick Saban is probably worth two BCS bowl appearances, or 10 points. (Sure, he might lead Alabama to more, but he also might bolt for another job in a year or two.)

So, without further ado, here are the rankings. Every year we’ll go through and update the numbers based on what the program did that year (while throwing out the oldest year of data), so don’t fret if your team isn’t quite where you want them right now. Everyone has a chance to move up.

1. Florida Gators (61)

National Championship: ’08-W, ’06-W
BCS Bowl: ’09-W
Conference Championship: ’09-RU, ’08-W, ’06-W
Major Bowl Appearance: ’07, ’05
It’s hard to argue that the Gators don’t deserve the top spot with two national championship victories, three BCS bowl wins, two conference championships and five bowl appearances in the past five years. Considering they play in college football’s toughest conference, what Urban Meyer’s program has been able to accomplish in the past five years has been incredibly impressive. The program dodged a bullet when Meyer rejoined the team.

2. Ohio State Buckeyes (58)

National Championship: ’07-L, ’06-RU
BCS Bowl: ’09-W, ’08-L, ’05-W
Conference Championship: ’09-W, ’08-RU, ’07-W, ’06-W, ’05-RU
The Buckeyes are subjected to criticism every year because they play in a weak conference that doesn’t have a title game, but keep in mind that they have absolutely owned the Big Ten over the past five years. They have finished no worse than second in each of the past five seasons and have also appeared in two title games. While it’s true they lost in both of those appearances, just getting there helped them greatly in these rankings.

3. Texas Longhorns (49)

National Championship: ’09-L, ’05-W
BCS Bowl: ’08-W,
Conference Championship: ’09-W, ’05-W
Major Bowl Appearance: ’07, ’06
The Longhorns have been a model of consistency. They’ve made a bowl appearance in each of the last five years, won a national championship in 2005 and made a title appearance this past last year. It’ll be interesting to see how Mack Brown’s program fares in 2010 now that Colt McCoy has graduated and youngster Garrett Gilbert is set to take over at quarterback.

Read the rest of this entry »

One Bronco Nation Under God put together an interesting breakdown of the final AP vote for the 2009-10 college football season.

Why is it interesting? Well, Alabama finished #1, as they should. But it was Texas, not Florida, that finished #2. The Gators finished third and the Broncos finished at #4. The site points out a couple of voters who actually had the Broncos ranked lower than #4:

[Craig] James was far and away the most anti-Boise AP voter of the bunch. Voting Boise State at No. 7 is inexcusable. Voting TCU at No. 14 is just as bad.

The worst part is that the Broncos only finished four points behind Florida in the AP poll. Hmm, where might you find four extra points? If Craig James had voted like a rational human being, the Broncos could have at least got three more points (if James put them at No. 4).

James had Ohio State, Penn State and Iowa ahead of the Broncos. I guess he’s a big fan of the Big Ten.

Then there’s the case of the only other writer in the country to put the Broncos lower than #4 — Kirk Bohls, of Austin, Texas.

He dropped the Broncos below … wait for it … THE Ohio State University. We’ll laugh about this later. I swear we will. Bohls and James were the only ones with OSU in front of BSU. Had Bohls swapped the Broncos and the Buckeyes, Boise State would have picked up an extra AP point and been tied with Florida for No. 3.

In addition to James’ #7 ranking and Bohls’ #5 ranking, 22 voters had the Broncos at #2, six ranked them #3 and 30 voters had Boise State at #4, so it appears that the voters are split into two camps: 1) those that believe that the Broncos belong (ranking them #2 or #3), 2) and those that still don’t think they are as good as one-loss BCS teams like Texas and Florida (ranking them #4 or lower).

The bottom line is that nothing has changed. A Colt McCoy-less Texas squad looked good enough against Alabama to stay at #2, while Florida thrashed a head coach-less Cincy squad in the Sugar Bowl. Boise State played TCU in the Fiesta Bowl, which made for a “fun” (i.e. non-BCS) matchup, but neither team got the opportunity to play against the big boys.

And that’s exactly the way the BCS wanted it. If Boise State and TCU got matchups with BCS schools this bowl seasons and won (or at least made it a game), it would add more fuel to the we-need-a-playoff fire.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Maybe we should have seen it coming from the start: There was TCU, a college football juggernaut this season, wound as tight as a rubber band ball and failing miserably to shake the nerves.

Maybe we should have known that the 2010 Fiesta Bowl was going to play out exactly how it did. Boise State, the more experienced team, managed to limit its mistakes and stay within itself on its way to a 17-10 win on Monday night. TCU, a team playing in its first BCS bowl game, looked incredibly nervous from the start and seemingly couldn’t get out of its own way for four quarters.

Chris Petersen’s Broncos had been there before after shocking Oklahoma in the 2006 Fiesta Bowl. They knew what playing in a BCS bowl was all about and they executed that way. They were the more settled team and they parlayed patience into a 7-0 lead when TCU made the first mistake of the game when Brandyn Thompson picked off Andy Dalton and returned it 51 yards for a touchdown.

What’s interesting is that wasn’t the best Boise State can look. Kellen Moore, who statistically was the best quarterback in the nation coming into the game, wasn’t particularly crisp and an offense that is predicated on consistency and rhythm looked out of sync from the start.

Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted TCU to be successfully – I really did. I kept waiting for its high-powered offense to settle in and start lighting up the scoreboard like it had all season, and for the Frogs to make a definitive statement on national television that they deserved to at least be in the national title discussion.

But it never happened.

TCU’s 17-10 loss to Boise State in the 2010 Fiesta Bowl left little doubt that Glendale was all the Frogs deserved this year. Their No. 1 rated defense was good, but not great as Kellen Moore and the Broncos’ offense routinely moved the ball into TCU territory. Andy Dalton looked nervous the entire night and the same could be said for his offensive line and receivers.

The Frogs failed on many levels last night. They failed to move the ball, they failed to prove that they deserved better and they failed to entertain. I was one of the many who watched them dismantle Utah earlier in the year and think to myself, “Damn, this team is special. This team has something and it can contend with the big boys in the SEC, Big 12, etc.”

But they can’t, or at least, not based on what they showed last night. Special teams score more than 10 points in BCS bowl games when they averaged 35-plus during the regular season. Special teams have quarterbacks that can consistently throw the ball vertical with success. Special teams have receivers that can make plays and make routine catches in crunch time.

Read the rest of this entry »