Other Scores - Week 9

slick wrote:Again .. how about a national championship playoff .. with "conference winners" .. only!!

Not sure I can agree with this. We failed to win the WCC the year we won our first national championship (2002).

fan from afar wrote:I personally love the idea, maybe with a few teams added from strong conferences, but it will never happen. The trend is away from making regular season mean much. Look at pro basketball for the worst example. The regular season means practically nothing for the top teams - an extra home game in the playoffs.

An even more egregious example: In Oregon high school soccer this year there are many conferences in which every team qualifies for a "play-in" game. If it wins the play-in, it's in the state playoffs.

In other words, you can lose every regular-season game 10-0 and still win the state championship if somehow your team miraculously learns how to play the game before the playoffs.

It's the age of a trophy for everyone, no kid has to face the harsh reality that sometimes you lose and that you learn from it. To paraphrase Albert Finney in the movie "A Good Year" - you learn more from losing than you do from winning and what is the most important thing you learn? That you don't like losing.

You guys do get that if only conference champions played, we wouldn't have the trophy in the case from 2002, right?

In fact, neither team in the final game would have been there. Pepperdine was the automatic qualifier that year.

That was great! A national championship game between two WCC teams, neither of which was the conference champion.

Well technically, there were co-champs. But pepperdine got the bid.