Nebraska Among Schools Vying for Championship

4 comments so far June 20, 2006 by Steve Hanway

As summer progresses, the 2006 preseason rankings and college football predictions come out. Rather than try to guess the order each team might finish, I’ll instead try to identify the field of teams in the hunt for the Sears National Championship Trophy in 2006. It might seem like a daunting task with 119 teams to pick from, but using recent history as our guide, we can whittle the field down to about fifteen schools that appear to have a chance.

Without further ado, here are the screening criteria and the results:

1) Only teams from BCS conferences (and Notre Dame) can win it all. Sure, we might one day see a TCU break through to the title game, but as the BCS is now structured, non-BCS teams just don’t have a chance.

2) Only teams that won at least seven games the prior year win it all. I might have set
the bar higher if not for Oklahoma’s performance in 2000. That cuts the field down considerably.

3) Only teams that have won a national championship or have been knocking on the door (i.e. finished in the Top 5 or 10) in recent years have a chance. You have to go back to Florida to find a national champion that hadn’t won a title before and they had been close in the seasons leading up to their title.

4) Teams with QB questions generally don't win titles. Sure you can look at guys like Tee Martin or Matt Leinart and find people who won titles as first-year starters, but they are exceptions. First-year starters tend to make costly mistakes.

Who does that leave? Here’s the list (in alphabetical order):

1) Auburn
2) Clemson
3) Florida
4) Florida State
5) Georgia
6) Georgia Tech
7) LSU
8) Miami
9) Michigan
10) Minnesota
11) Nebraska
12) Notre Dame
13) Ohio State
14) Oklahoma
15) West Virginia

You could probably scratch Minnesota because they are picked eighth in the Big Ten by most prognosticators, but every other team shows up in somebody’s Top 25 and thinking again back to the 2000 OU squad, that team was predicted to just crack the Top 25, if that, by most preseason pollsters.

I probably wouldn’t be surprised to see Texas and USC finish ranked ahead of most the teams mentioned, it’s just each much break in quarterbacks and each will face at least two of the teams listed above (Texas will face three). You'd have to expect that they will trip up somewhere.

So good news Husker fans! NU is in the hunt and may not face another "contender" until the Big XII championship game or even the national championship game. Then again, plenty of chances to trip up before then. But it's fun to dream.

» Enjoy this article?
Send it to your friend or get Husker news by email!

NextPrevious