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Hurricane season BCS nearly obscured Miami's dominancePosted: Monday November 26, 2001 10:47 AM
Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor touches on a Hot Button issue each Monday on CNNSI.com. After you read Phil's take, give us yours. You may now take all of those ridiculous BCS calculations and dump them in the round file. There's no longer any need to take Nebraska's opponents' winning percentage, multiply it by pi, and divide it by the square root of Beano Cook's shoe size. The BCS, for the rest of this season, is irrelevant. In fact, there's very little left in college football that matters much anymore, least of all the oh-so-unpredictable Thanksgiving weekend that just ended. Nebraska's defense went soft in the middle in an upset loss to Colorado, but it just doesn't matter. Oklahoma went flatter than a slashed tire in falling to Oklahoma State, but it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference. Michigan bungled a chance to get the inside track on a spot in the national championship game by losing to Ohio State, but that changes nothing. That's because there's nothing any team can do, no mathematical formula anyone can devise, that can hide the obvious any longer. The University of Miami has the best team in college football. Hands down. End of story. Everyone else might as well start looking ahead to spring practice. The undefeated Hurricanes are so clearly superior to the rest of the field that they shouldn't just be No. 1, they ought to be 2, 3 and 4 as well. While the other supposed title contenders have been tripping all over themselves lately, the 'Canes have separated themselves from the rest of the field. They spanked 14th-ranked Syracuse 59-0 two weeks ago and last weekend made No. 12 Washington look like Appalachian State, humiliating the Huskies, 65-7. It's true that Miami will never quite be the classiest program in the country. The Hurricanes overdid it against Washington, doing swan dives into the end zone, getting penalized for excessive celebration, going for it on fourth-and-goal with a 51-7 lead and passing for their final touchdown. But compared to the great Miami teams of the past, that amounts to a study in moderation. The 'Canes have always been close to insufferable when they're this good. It's hard to whack them too hard, though, for running up the score against the Huskies, not when quarterback Ken Dorsey only played three quarters and coach Larry Coker put everyone in the game in the second half except the English department faculty. These Hurricanes are shaping up to be every bit as good as Miami's four national championship teams. They have speed everywhere. Their cheerleaders probably run 4.4 40s. They have game-breakers in the backfield, at wide receiver and on special teams, and they're an attacking, gang-tackling bunch on defense. The scary thing is that the BC-Mess nearly obscured how dominant a team Miami is. Until Thanksgiving weekend, the 'Canes were locked in a tight battle for a spot in the championship game, hoping they would look as good to a computer as they did to the teams lined up across from them. That's the real danger of the BCS -- it can make us so preoccupied with data that we barely notice what we're seeing on the field. But in the end, excellence almost always reveals itself. We should be grateful for that, even if it means that unless you've been up nights wondering who's going to the Sun Bowl, there's very little drama left in the season. Miami will sew up the national title with a win over Florida in the Rose Bowl. It doesn't even take a calculator to figure that out. Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the
writer.
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