NCAA College Football BCS Standings Week 14

NCAA College Football BCS Standings Week 14

Auburn and Missouri slipped into the #4 and #5 slots. Clemson would have been #4 if it were entirely up to the human voters, but Clemson gets no love at all from the computers, so they ended up #6 overall. The six computer systems rank Clemson 10th as a consensus, and as low as 14th from the individual systems.

Alabama will therefore presumably have to close out the season against two consecutive #4 teams (since Missouri will likely become #4 the following week if Alabama defeats Auburn). Yeah, I know they're fookin' Alabama, but that is a heavy weight even for their mighty shoulders to bear.

Northern Illinois and Fresno kind of swapped places, mainly because the computers love NIU (the humans prefer Fresno). The computers rank Northern Illinois 7th in the nation! Yeah, right. I mean no disrespect, but let's be realistic. They couldn't finish 7th in the SEC. Since NIU is currently in the top 16 (14th) and ahead of the AAC champ (#18 UCF), they would get an automatic BCS bowl bid if the season ended at this moment. That bid would have gone to Fresno just a few minutes ago, prior to the computer rankings update, so you can expect those teams to contend hard and maybe swap back-and-forth before that one available automatic spot has been finalized. (As I mentioned previously, if those teams both finish the season undefeated, the non-automatic one might still get an at-large bid, but they might not, because the high muckety-mucks prefer big name teams with national name recognition.)

Biggest gain of the week: Arizona State jumped from 17th to 12th (6th in the computer portion!) with a win over UCLA which clinched a spot in the Pac 12 title game; LSU also advanced five places (from #22 to #17) after defeating Texas A&M by frustrating Johnny Football.

Biggest drops of the week: Three teams fell eight places or more. Ol' Johnny Football dropped from #12 to #21; UCLA dropped from #14 to #22; and Oregon plunged from #5 to #13.

Wonder of wonders: Duke is in the top 25, thanks to the human polls!