Twenty Seven Pete?

Okay, what's the protocol when you see something posted on one blog that refers to another blog? Do you give credit to the blog you first saw it in or just skip to the originator? I'll do both. I saw in Trojan Wire a reference to M-Zone that was talking about some guy's attempt to raise $10,000 to put up a billboard in Southern California to make the point that USC has only won one National Championship, not two. Okay, I guess if i'm going to trace it back to the proper place, it starts with www.onepeat.com (which I grudgingly post the address, because I think it's asinine).

So this guy wants to spend a ton of money so he can make a huge point that it was LSU who won the 2003 national championship, not USC, because LSU is the team that won the BCS Championship game. Reading the guy's site and forums, I think he honestly believes he's going to make some kind of big impact by putting up this billboard, as if somehow everyone will see the wisdom of his thinking and turn from their wicked ways. What the poor schmuck doesn't realize is that 1-most people really won't care, and of the ones that do, the only thing he'll do is encourage more stereotyping of southerners. (Having read the forums, it's already happening).

Seriously, who cares? If you feel that people giving credit to USC for a 2003 national championship takes away from what your team accomplished, (which was a remarkable season) you've got a level of insecurity that's pretty astounding.

So.... we're talking about someone who's a fan of a school in a state that was devastated by hurricanes, filled with people who lost everything, who wants to raise a bunch of money for such a worthy charitable contribution as... a billboard that displays your insecurities for the world to see.

LSU was the National Champion in 2003. USC was the National Champion in 2003. In a system like ours, unfortunately, a split national championship is the reality. I saw people trying to argue that you can't have two champions. Unfortunately, as long as the two teams didn't get a chance to settle it on the field, you can and do have two champions. And is it really worth $10,000 to stick up a poster to say 'nyah nyah nyan na?'

In 1997 I didn't see any billboards around Lincoln paid for by any Michigan fans to say that the Huskers weren't really national champions. I certainly hope there weren't any like that popping up anywhere in Michigan. Ad you certainly didn't see them up in early 2000. There was a lot of arguing about who should really be number one, but in the end, fans from both schools accepted that it was a split and, at least for the most part, respected each other's team for their accomplishment. As a Husker fan I'm not afraid to say that Michigan had a great year, it didn't make Nebraska's accomplishments any less. And I know a lot of Michigan fans that are the same way.

Now for what it's worth, I do think LSU had the stronger schedule that year, and if you have to end up ranking the schools (seeing how they're not allowed to play each other) I would have LSU ranked higher. But that doesn't take away from the tremendous accomplishment of USC's long win streak. That was a tough thing to accomplish 40 years ago, back in the day when the 3rd stringers the powers were generally still far better than the starting teams for the have-nots. The top schools could stockpile talent and have a tremendous edge in recruiting. Nowadays, with limited numbers of scholarships and visits and all of the other restrictions on recruiting, the gap between the upper end and lower end teams is much smaller. There's more parity today than anyone back then would have thought possible. That makes a win streak like USC's that much more remarkable. Those kinds of accomplishments will become fewer and further between as the years go by. No billboard is going to take that fact away.

Maybe this all makes a stronger case for Heavyweight Football Champs. At least here, there's no split National Championship.