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The Initial Rankings….finally – ESPN.com
Oct 19th
by Brad Edwards of ESPN.com
It’s almost as if 2007 never ended.
The first eight weeks of the 2008 season have provided enough upsets and surprises that, for the first time in BCS history (since 1998), the top three teams in the initial BCS standings all came from outside of the AP’s preseason top 10.
No. 1 Texas (7-0), No. 2 Alabama (7-0) and No. 3 Penn State (8-0) may be traditional college football powers, but they weren’t considered by many people to be national title contenders before this season began. The Longhorns started 11th in the AP poll, the Crimson Tide were 24th, and the Nittany Lions began at No. 22.
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BYU likely out of the BCS race
Oct 17th
FORT WORTH, Texas — As chants of “overrated” rang out through the stands of Amon G. Carter Stadium, No. 9 BYU could only hang its head and quietly jog off the field in an overwhelming cloud of disappointment.
The Cougars had thoroughly been beaten, 32-7, by TCU, a team that admitted earlier in the week that defeating BYU had been on its mind since last January.
It was the second-worst loss in coach Bronco Mendenhall’s four seasons and surprising because the Cougars had come into the game as the non-BCS darling. This was the team that was going to storm the BCS and awake the ghosts of 1984 — the year of BYU’s national championship. The Cougars were riding a 16-game winning streak, hadn’t lost a conference game in more than two years and were ranked higher than any other non-BCS team.
But the Cougars ran into a faster, better organized and driven TCU team. It was the first team with a winning record BYU had faced since playing Northern Iowa of the FCS to begin the season, and the first chance BYU had to show naysayers that it was worthy of its top 10 ranking and national media hype.
Instead of dispelling claims that they weren’t as good as their record, the Cougars merely fueled the fire for the chants that ushered them off the field.
“Coach [Gary] Patterson had his team more prepared than I had our team,” Mendenhall said. “They were sharper in every phase of the game, executed at a higher level from beginning to end, and again that comes down to simply coaching and preparation and their staff did a better job than I did for our program.”
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