Little Sisters of the Poor

I don't normally get into college football too much, and don't really blog all that much about it, but this is just too good... and funny:

Ohio State, ranked 8 in BCS. 10-1 record.
President of Ohio State said this:

In an interview with The Associated Press, the president at the university with the largest athletic program in the country said that TCU and Boise State do not face a difficult enough schedule to play in the national championship game.

"Well, I don't know enough about the X's and O's of college football," said Gee, formerly the president at West Virginia, Colorado, Brown and Vanderbilt universities. "I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it's like murderer's row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gantlet that there's some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to [be] in the big ballgame."

Boise State, Ranked 4 in BCS, 10-0 record.
President of Boise State responded with this:

— “He claims that in the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 it’s murderer’s row every week and there’s absolutely little substance to that claim. … The BCS has finally found someone to stand up and defend the indefensible and Gordon Gee proved it — he not just proved that it’s indefensible but he did so with facts that are simply wrong. … Everyone in intercollegiate football knows that athletic directors of those large power conferences are scheduling more and more teams who are I-AA, who are teams at the weaker end of the non-AQ conferences, and for Gee to stand up and talk about murderer’s row every week is just the height of folly. It’s ridiculous. I think he’s going to set off a firestorm he probably has no interest in creating. To say that he overstated his case is an understatement.”

— “I just hope that when he speaks about his research profile or the quality of his university he’s a little more believable than he is about athletics, because he’s just so wrong on this one. … If anything, ridiculous and inaccurate presentations like this from a major university president will go further to make our case. … It makes the point I’ve been making all along that this fundamentally must be about presidents and not athletic directors and not conference commissioners. Presidents who stand up and talk about values and truth and fairness and access and equity speak with forked tongue when it comes to athletics — and it makes no sense to me how they can be so absolutely wrong and know it and yet stand up as the pillars of moral rectitude.”

TCU, ranked 3 in BCS, 11-0 record:
President of TCU said:

TCU athletic director Chris Del Conte said this on ESPN Radio: "When a president of a major institution is taking shots at us, I know we've arrived... I thank him very much."

Some more stuff from an article on ESPN:

From The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

It's tough for anyone at Ohio State to make a strength of schedule argument this year, when according to Jeff Sagarin's strength of schedule ratings, for instance, Ohio State has the 59th-ranked schedule in the country, while TCU is No. 68 and Boise State 73. In the Massey ratings, Ohio State is No. 34 in schedule strength, Boise State is 47 and TCU 57. In the Colley Matrix, Ohio State's schedule is No. 60, TCU is 72 and Boise State 79. That's not much to argue about.

No, it's not.

One thing several Ohio State fans pointed out on my chat is that Gee has just given Boise State or TCU some bulletin-board material if it should face the Buckeyes in a BCS bowl. Ohio State has had a hard enough time beating SEC schools in bowls. Now the Broncos, who have been brilliant in BCS games, or TCU have some extra incentive to beat the Scarlet and Gray.

It's fine for Gee to support a system that is set up to benefit his school. But singling out Boise State and TCU does nothing to help Ohio State.

I don't know, its all just pretty funny to me. It seems that the non BCS teams have more than proven themselves in recent years. Whenever they get a chance to play against BCS teams in BCS bowls they have fared well and won most of those games. Seems funny that Ohio State president is trying to argue something like this. Their strength of schedule is not all that great either.