1997 Title Now in Question!

Rose Toilet Bowl

How bad is it for the Big Ten after the humiliation handed out in the BCS bowls to Ohio State and Michigan (and to some degree, quasi Big Ten Notre Dame)? Fans are questioning the ability of recently annointed geniuses (Tressel, Weis), and resuming the drum beat of too conservative/can’t coach of a 2006 Coach of the Year candidate (Carr).

I knew things were bad but it just got worse. Everyone is rethinking all their pre-bowl BCS slotting and all the time spent on those arguments, and rightly many are bringing the whole BCS system into question again. Now College Football News is taking it a step further by questioning titles decided nearly a decade ago. Check out Pete Fiutak’s Cavalcade of Whimsey column posted January 10th:

6. I still want to see the 1997 Michigan national championship team play someone.
In this week’s Let It Go file, after watching Michigan get ripped up by USC in the Rose Bowl, and seeing Ohio State’s performance in the title game, I’d like to find a way to go back and see what the 1997 national champion Wolverines would’ve done against 1997 Florida, Florida State, Georgia, Tennessee, LSU, Auburn, or what appeared to be that year’s best team at the end of the year, Nebraska. Even more so than the 2004 USC-Oklahoma-Auburn fiasco, the historian side of me has the most questions about the overall validity of that Michigan national title

Ok Pete, I think that’s quite enough. Please focus your energy on getting a playoff. No one outside the BCS is disputing that the system sucks but let’s not drop into the Wayback machine and start questioning national titles from a decade ago. So “Fiu”, please take it back.

5 Comments

  • Lew

    That settles it. That’s the last time I’ll ever read that guy’s column (not that I’ve ever read it before).

  • Bonus

    Any time you leave it to writers to decide champions rather than the players themselves, you have a-holes like this trying to anoint paper champions based on personal bias and agendas. Maybe somebody should send this jerk a xbox college football rivals game and see who comes out on top, it would hold just as much water.

  • joe chatel

    screw this guy……I am soooo sick of everybody pissing and moaning whenever they can about Michigan. Shut the f*** up and give it a rest. HAIL TO THE VICTORS….GO BLUE!!!

  • michiganfan1997and4ever

    I am late in reading this joker’s sh##, but I am not too late to remind him that his “best” team Nebraska had no business sharing the 1997 National Championship as they could not beat Missouri fair and square. I thought kicking balls in the air was left to the kickers and punters not receivers or backs in the endzones. On an ending note, let me give belated congrats to Tom Osborne on the undeserved shared national championship handed to him on a silver platter as a retirement gift.