(07-29-2018 11:27 AM)Go College Sports Wrote: (07-29-2018 10:05 AM)johnbragg Wrote: As an at-large.
With the dawning of conference TV contracts and the wiping out of the football independents, the ACC (and Big East) were on the right side of the line, while CUSA and the WAC weren't. But before that sorting out process, ACC football wasn't much more prominent than the WAC.
Well, that just isn't true.
https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/years/1984.html
You can scroll through the years in either direction up through when Florida State joined the conference and you won't find anything that shows the WAC being even close to as good a conference as the ACC.
What everyone is missing here is my nuance. Prior to the whole comprehensive bowl tie in shenanigans there were no power conferences, only conferences. And outstanding teams were simply outstanding teams. They weren't outstanding G5 schools or P5 schools. Back then a small school might not get invited to a top 4 bowl but if they were passed over it was because of travel crowd, not strength of schedule.
Everybody knew the football power programs like USC, Ohio State, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Notre Dame etc, but nobody thought of Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forest, or Northwestern as power football schools because they shared a conference with one.
And going back and looking at old records doesn't prove anything, and it doesn't disprove anything. Yeah the Rose bowl had a two sided tie in for a couple of decades, but most major bowls had a one sided tie in and the other side was open for selection, but even that was something for the relatively modern era, roughly 50's - 80's.
The whole term Power conference was a BCS creation as much as anything.
So my point was Maryland didn't know it was a power conference school until the term "power conference" was first used as an official categorization. Alabama knew it was a historically powerful football school but didn't know it was a "power 5 team" until so categorized.
The distinctions were created by network people who wanted to thin the herd every bowl season so that they could bring in the schools with the largest national appeal to maximize advertising revenue at bowl time.
I'd say they've been quite effective. The distinctions which didn't exist prior are now ingrained in our language and thought and accepted as valid distinctions in discussions and arguments.
Let this be a lesson to everyone that when people start monkeying around with our language in ways that change terminology, or regroup associations, they are setting you up. PC works the same way. Some scientific language used to talk about distinctions between race and gender preference are now considered to be rude or worse. These changes don't alter the facts, but they alter how we categorize data and information and what we feel comfortable about discussing, even though talking about any subject intelligently and without invective should be fair game in a free society, only now it's not!
Your freedom and my freedom gets stolen by those who approve and disapprove our word usage, and I'm not speaking of the use of pejoratives.
Maryland, and for that matter Ohio State or Alabama, didn't know they were "Power 5" until the networks and the BCS committee told them they were. And Brigham Young didn't know they were G5 until they were told they were. And now some P5 conferences have granted B.Y.U. and Navy and Army P5 status for scheduling when prior to the BCS no school would have ever dared to categorize another or dared to behave so snootily as to grant them the boon of counting as a P5 for the purposes of scheduling.
But play around with language and classifications and this is what you get. In the late 1800's those studying the different classifications of race had it broken down into 3 groups Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. Use those terms today to discuss facial and bone characteristics and see how far you get before you are labeled. Only with issues such as this it is because the ignorant mispronounced, and then misused the mispronunciations to behave in a demeaning fashion toward people from one of the categorizations. Then those words took on hateful characteristics and now we've had to adopt a new language to work around a history of misuse. But with those changes the ability to discuss the topic rationally has been altered as well.
P5 and G5 have done the same to discussions about football. And if you want to know just how misleading it can be then simply refer to Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Duke, and Northwestern as Power football schools and try to do it with a straight face! And if you feel really awkward then start referring to Kansas and a Power football school and you'll get the point.
By the way, when your government changes their terms watch out! They are almost certainly skirting old law and trying to create an advantage over you in doing it. I for one like for my vocabulary to remain static. Precise words mean precise interpretations.
So Maryland never knew they were a Power 5 school until the Power 5 became a classification, and that was shortly after the Power 6 ceased to be. So now Maryland in just a couple of decades has gone from being a football playing college or university to being a Power 6 school, and now a Power 5 school and they haven't done one damned thing to earn it that they didn't do better back when they were simply a football playing college or university.
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Big 10 network could be pulled out of even big 10 markets
