Rested or Rusty?

The Auburn Tigers and Oregon Ducks played a great game on Monday night. It was as exciting a finale as anyone (especially SEC homers) expected. However, did anyone have trouble not beating their head against a wall during the first half? These were arguably the two best college football teams in the country (with apologies to TCU) and the college football world watched them bumble around like it was the first session of spring workouts. Call it even play. Call it good defense. Call it whatever you want. But that doesn't change the what it really was: sloppy play. Rusty play.

The two teams that decided the NCAA National Championship had not played a game in 37 days.

How many times do we see it in baseball? One World Series team wraps up their league championship in four games, but it took the other squad seven to clinch a trip to the MLB finals. What happens? The team that didn't have a seven-game gap in between games comes out in ryth, and ready to play. But the team that had a long break comes out flat.

You even see it in the NFL. Teams with first round byes haven't played in two weeks, a big break considering the constant pounding pro football players' bodies are so used to taking every week. So what happens? The team that played in the wildcard round is still used to the real-game contact and outperforms the rested team. Why do you think Bill Bellicheck plays his starters until the last week of the regular season? Because he knows what the consequences are of not doing it.

It doesn't always happen they way I illustrated in the NFL and MLB. But it does happen sometimes and it's something that must be considered. This has been a problem with the BCS system for years, and it's another problem that would be solved by (I don't know...) a playoff system.

I'm not saying that Oregon would have won if both teams were fresh for the BCS National Championship game. Yes, I think that, but I'm not going to say it. All I'm saying is that if the NCAA really wants to determine its champion in the best way possible, the one-month layoff has got to go. True, the BCS has bigger problem to deal with than this, but it's just one more thing wrong with the current system.