What Ohio State does... or Florida does... has little to do with the strength of a conference. One of the homerisms I like best is how poorly all these other teams would do if they were in the mighty SEC, especially since the SEC has had more undefeated teams in conference play since you formed in 1992 than any other conference except the ACC. As far as Ohio State "being the Big Ten", they've won or tied for the Big Ten championship 8 times since 1992 (17 years)... hell, Florida has won the SEC outright 7 times since 1992. If these other conferences suck so much, why do you have a losing bowl record against the Big Ten over the past 8 years of this new century? The SEC is a very good conference, both at the top and "as a conference", but the simple fact is there is not any proof that you dominate any BCS conference... okay, maybe the ACC. Florida seems to be in a league of their own.. the rest of the SEC wasn't that much better than anyone else. Most non-homers know that. Hell, little 'ol Iowa is 3-1 against the SEC this decade... if the SEC was so all-powerful, how the hell could that happen? (God, I hope you go into how it was your #6 team versus the Big Ten #3, or whatever, .... that kinda crap is always fun to respond to....) The difference in most BCS leagues is minimal at best. The proof has always been in on the field records.
Maybe it's the homer in me but, I didn't know they played football in Iowa. I always considered "up there" as really being north Louisiana. If it wasn't for French Louisiana you'd be speaking with a British accent. And, by the way, Why don't you learn how to really pronounce "Des Moines" while you're at it!
We also play tOSU and Notre Dame each at their house. I don't believe anyone here can make the argument that USC has traditionally had soft OOC schedules. We also have an open date on our schedule for the 2010 season. It'll be interesting to see how we fill it.
Pretty sure the SEC is older than I am...:huh: Was that a typo, maybe you meant 1932? How does that stat look after NCAA scholarship limits take hold? I suspect there is significantly more parity in the conference and the division as a whole now vs. the past. This thread is getting quite long in the tooth so menh. :rolleye33:
I'm not defending get 65 points dropped on a team at home, but in the same breath Oregon also has a heckuva an offense. They were the #7 scoring and total offense in FBS this past year. They also had the #2 rushing offense and averaged 43 PPG. Having said that I would at least partially agree about getting 65 points dropped on you at home, but how do you keep the Duck offense off the field when 1/3 of your own offense is missing? BTW I didn't get a chance to watch that particular game because I was watching 2 other games (Big 12 and SEC CG's I believe). As for our game against OSU we have no excuses. They just beat us. They came in sky high and ready to play and we came in flat after our win against tOSU. The problem we had in the 1st half against Oregon State was over penetration by our D line and poor tackling. Quizz is so quick that he's very hard to tackle unless you can wrap him up and we were already too far behind the line of scrimmage on most run plays to do that. Overall the defensive execution in the 1st half was very poor. I can't believe how many tackles we missed. The second half Coach Carroll brought Kevin Ellison up closer to the line of scrimmage to plug the holes and also slowed down our penetration on run plays. That stopped them pretty good. The only score they had in the 2nd half was on an int in the last 2 minutes that was brought back to the 4 yard line or so.
