How can you possibly say they were “on the precipice of becoming one of the new powers in college football”, that’s insane. They had one good year in a horrible time for the big east.

That’s just not true. Louisville had 3 top 25 years in a row, including 2004 when they went 11-1 (lost 41-38 @ Miami, and beat undefeated Boise St in the Liberty Bowl) and 2006 when they went 12-1 (lost 31-28 @ Rutgers and won the Orange Bowl). The 2006 year, the Big East had 3 top 12 teams (WVU and Rutgers) and went 5-0 in bowls. If Louisville had won the Rutgers game (and everything else went the same), they would have been in the BCS championship game without question.

The reason Louisville looked real, rather than just a flash Utah or Tulane or whatever, is that the entire athletic program upgraded bigtime at the same time. Big East, new stadium, basketball came back from the dead to elite, baseball went from nowhere to College World Series, and the improvements across the board (volleyball, soccer, golf, etc.) took them from nowhere to top 25 in the AD’s Cup. The football collapse is a genuine mystery — it’s hard to figure out whether it’s Petrino or Kragthorpe’s fault, but it should be a consistently good program now and it looks like they’re back to mid-90s mediocrity.

Of course, backsliding in football across the Big East doesn’t help counter those that refused to acknowledge when it was genuinely good for a few years.

I disagree. Louisville was going to be a good program with Petrino…the only problem being he was never going to stay.

Big difference b/n good program and power of college football. Good teams are capable of making a run every 3-6 years and sniffing the top 10. College powers have the talent and depth to compete for titles and win 10 games every year (doesn’t mean they actually do). Petrino took them as far as they were ever going to go, they weren’t/aren’t winning a title.

Now if like last year, they are the only major conference team with 1 loss, SOS will not matter. However, if USC doesn’t lose their last game, they are going and OSU is staying home, largely based on the weakness of the Big Ten.

/LSU

Conference strength does not mean as much in college basketball, assuming an average season

Debateable, as a team’s RPI depends a lot on who they play, and playing in a strong conference helps.
Hawaii and Ohio St. were huge beneficiaries of weak conferences last year. The selection committee always looks at SOS when determining at larges, whereas the BCS can’t really do that so much.

Every year I root for Ohio State and Michigan to both be undefeated when they meet. It has happened only twice in my lifetime, although I was 3 the first time in 1972. Ohio State is 1-0-1.

Even though my head tells me it is good for OSU to have a Michigan team with a good win-loss record to beat, when they are losing to someone else, my heart is happy.