Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

a great head coach and his great assistants are well paid to find motivation for the kids and get them to play well.  Even in a meaningless bowl game, because......... because it's not meaningless to the fans who write the checks

and great coaches know enough to recruit kids that are or can be motivated easily to play well
Ehh, mayyyybe some of the fringe guys to fill out a class, but no, i don't believe this comes into play at all.  All coaches think they can motivate anyone.
some 4 and 5 star recruits are only there as a step to the NFL and have been pampered since they put on pads.
Annnnd every program in the country gobbles them up as fast as they can.

clearly you've never been introduced to an SEC loss in a bowl game...  they never wanted to be there, hence the loss.  

On G5 vs P5:
We're often given a very good G5 team from year to year, whether it was Boise or TCU or Utah or BYU or Hawai'i or UCF or whoever it will be 2 years from now, there's a group of 5 conferences, and the best team(s) from them is usually very good.




That beings said, we don't know how good they truly are and never will.  We never will, because we can't go back in time and have an individual team play a difficult slate of games.  2008 Utah might have been the best team in the country.  But we'll never know - and not because of any disservice to them.  We'll never know, because they waited until their last game to peak and they waited until their last game to peak because their schedule was so weak.  Yes, most of that is due to their conference slate, but also OOC:
2 point win vs an eventual 3-9 Michigan
3 point win vs an eventual 9-4 Oregon State
Funny, the UM win probably gave Utah more street cred than the OSU win, but look at the records.  Close wins over a very bad team and a barely ranked/unranked team.  That doesn't suggest they'd be able to swing with the big boys.  That's fair, isn't it?  Looking at past results to make a prediction...the past results didn't say they couldn't beat a top 5 team, just that it was probably unlikely.  But, as luck would have it, Utah got a chance to play a top 5 team.  And they won!  




But we have the issue of my above post here.  Alabama had just lost all of their hopes a dreams the game before.  They had a #1 draft pick suspended.  They were playing an unsexy program.  Blah blah blah...




But toss that aside, they showed they could do it!  And that's great, it really is.  But they did it after playing the 80th-strongest schedule.  They had that magical zero in the loss column against the 80th-ranked schedule.  They literally didn't play back-to-back games in which both teams had a winning record.  Hell, if you go down their schedule, every other game was against a team with 8 or more losses.  It's astounding.




Now for the sake of argument, let's go ahead and say Utah was the best team of 2008.  How would we know?  We don't have enough data points to have any confidence in that.  Even with the comfortable win vs Alabama, their resume is severely lacking.  Is it the employer's fault that the prospective employee came to the interview with a severely deficient resume?  They might become your best worker, but you'd never hire them.  That's not on us, that's on the person/program.




If your conference affiliation prevents an undefeated season from earning you national championships, then you need to exit that conference or change the system.  Period.  TCU and Utah saw this and were proactive about it.  UCF is bitching and moaning.  Think about it - Alabama needed zero consecutive wins to make the playoff - that's how high up their program is.  They could've lost vs Georgia and still been included in the playoff - the Bama program and the SEC conference fuel that.  Right or wrong, it's true.  Now while that is the top of the mountain, other teams have found where they're at - OU found out they could make the playoff with 'only' 7 straight wins.  Ohio State found out they couldn't get in with only 5 straight wins.  Georgia, thanks to its program and conference affiliation, learned it could almost get in with zero wins, but not quite.  But it's probably a number in the single digits, to be sure.




So UCF learned this year that 25 consecutive wins wasn't enough to make the playoff.  No, last year shouldn't matter, but alas, as limited human minds involved in the decision-making process, it does.  Which is why Alabama's magic number is lower than anyone else's.  Clemson's is next lowest, and so on.  UCF needs to do what TCU/Utah did and get into a better conference OR change the system, like 2004 Auburn had a hand in, or the programs/conferences left out in 2011 did.




Saying we're pretend national champs or wanting brownie points for keeping it close is the wrong way to go about it.  

(Also, the straight wins part is kinda silly, but creative in a fun way)