Counterpoint on Margin of Victory... but the BCS and Automatic Qualifiers still suck!

Justin, I agree with most of your post, but I want to make a few points. I'll just go point by point on this:

• Margin of victory is VERY prevalent in 66% of the BCS formula. The human polls consider margin of victory. This is why the Harris and AP polls have Oregon/BSU at #1 and #2 respectively. These teams have passed the eyeball test for the human pollsters. The BCS tries to do a better job of considering strength of schedule and quality wins (based on the state of the season at present). Unfortunately for Oregon and BSU, the computers see Tennessee (correctly) as a TERRIBLE team and UCLA and Oregon State as mediocre teams. I'd say that is fair. The problem, as I see it, is that it seems like the computers, by taking margin of victory COMPLETELY out of the picture, don't give a team credit for administering an absolute beat-down of a team (whether they are average, poor, or great) while giving too much credit for beating a terrible team by 3 on a fluke play (see LSU before this week), or beating a 'good' team by 3 in relatively unimpressive fashion (Oklahoma over Air Force before Air Force fell out of the rankings). The early BCS results have a small sample size and generally work themselves out in the end, but there are flaws for sure. I think that there should be 'tiers' when it comes to margin of victory. If you beat a team by one score or less, it's a close win and you don't get any extra benefit. If you beat a team by 1-2 scores (8-14 points), you get a small boost for administering a more convincing win. Anything over 14 points gets the maximum boost for basically establishing your clear dominance over a team. I know that this may lead to teams scoring an 'eff-you' touchdown to obtain those style points, but that's fine by me... it's a risk reward proposition... Imagine if Oregon tried to score an eff-you td and lost their stud RB in the process? Or if Boise, in trying to run it up, lost their QB?
  
• Texas has clearly established that it is NOT a Big 12 Powerhouse this year... actually, the big 12 has begun to establish that it is really not that great overall... that said, I was impressed with Missouri, but more on that later....
• I will return to a familiar argument regarding your beef about Auburn being #1. If you have two basketball players and they each take 8 shots, one of them taking 6 layups a freethrow and a 20-foot jumper, and the other taking one layup, 5 freethrows, and 2 twenty foot jumpers, which one is the better shooter? Let's add that the guy that took all of the layups made every one of them easily and seemed to be comfortable with the freethrow while rattling home the jumper, and the other guy rattled home a couple of the freethrows and one of the twenty foot jumpers... I think anyone would say that you really couldn't say who is better based on that... I think this analogy works for football... Throw Missouri, Michigan State, Utah, TCU, BSU, Auburn, Oregon... hell, even Alabama in the mix. The eyeball test makes me lean towards Oregon being a sure thing, but they have beaten Stanford and a bunch of teams that (based on their records) are pretty average to flat-out terrible. The same could be said for BSU and pretty much every team on this list. Some have better degree of difficulty than others, but I wouldn't want to definitively say that BSU would easily 'handle' Missouri. I think it'd be a hell of a game. BSU only beat VaTech by 3, and I tend to agree with the guy that said if VaTech played them as they've been playing lately, the outcome may be different (similarly, I think Oregon would have fared better against them when they got on a roll at the end of the year last season). That said, they had their chance and failed, so kudos to Boise, they got it done when it mattered... all of the rest is just speculation. I think that this point is why a playoff is so necessary for college football. I want these teams to play each other instead of spending the whole year wondering if that 1-loss Alabama team really deserved to jump BSU to #2 and play for a national championship against Oregon after beating undefeated Auburn and avenging their loss to South Carolina in dominating fashion... Or, to go to things that have actually happened: Would Auburn have beaten USC in 2004? Was USC better than LSU in 2003? Was a team like USC in 2002, who lost 2 close ones to good teams early before hitting their stride and playing like they were the best team in the country at the end of the season, have been able to play their way into a national championship game in a playoff scenario? What about Ohio State in 2005 when they lost a heartbreaker AT Texas early in the year, but, unfortunately, put on a show against a very good Notre Dame team to finish the year... I'd have LOVED to see that rematch with Texas. Seriously, a playoff MUST happen! Sorry for the run-on sentences and lack of paragraphs on this one, but I was rolling... sue me! Oh, and just because I used them so many times in my examples, it doesn't mean I'm a USC apologist... I loathe USC, but know that it would be absurd to say that their cheating asses weren't damn good in those years.
  
• I think BSU is getting PLENTY of credit from the human polls. They're ranked #2 in both of them (all three if you include the coaches poll). The computers don't like them because they put a premium on strength of schedule and degree of difficulty. I like this because I hate how teams in the 'Power' conferences schedule a bunch of absolute cupcakes (which actually works against BSU since these 'power teams' will avoid BSU and other strong teams from weak conferences like the plague) out-of-conference and cite their 'tough conference schedules' as the reason that they need to have some easy games sprinkled in.... I really like degree of difficulty as strong component of a team's overall ranking... the problem is that there is a lot of nuance that a computer can't account for... What's more impressive: Oregon's CRUSHING of Tennessee or MSU's ten point win over Wisconsin? Both were impressive... my eyeballs tell me that Oregon's dominance (and BSU's) is not an accident and it is damn impressive to beat teams that easily... no matter how crappy they are. At the same time, it is very impressive to go toe-to-toe with an excellent football team and beat them by 2 scores (which Oregon did against Stanford). I think the human polls are closer to being right, but I will return to my opinion that the human polls should not be officially recognized, or even posted, until at least half-way through the season. This allows the voters to provide fresh perspective for their first cut at the polls based on actual play instead of speculation and extrapolation based on last year's results and recruiting rankings which leads to pride getting in the way of admitting you were dead wrong about Florida being #5 in the country until they've looked shitty for about 5 weeks. After 6-7 games, you can get a good feel for which teams are really good, and which teams aren't and the first set of official human polls would be much more accurate and unbiased.
  

Alright, I think that about covers it. Flying Leprechaun... Up, Up, and Away!