I'll agree on that. In all honesty - without the La Tech fourth down heave into the end zone, we play Florida St for the national title that year. Samuels then plays and who knows? There's a big cry about how "Va Tech got screwed," but Alabama played a monster schedule that year, and the BCS would have looked past that loss to Tennessee and focused on the two wins over Florida and a bunch of other winning teams.
I watched so little non-SEC ball in 1999, I'll have to defer to your comments on Brady-Henson. I was battling some PTSD depression at the time, so my recall of a lot of stuff is hazy for those months.
I missed the Mich-Ohio St game because I was attending my then sister-in-law's THIRD wedding (she's since divorced and married again and this one, too, is on the rocks - if you've been married four times, well, it's probably YOU as Tim Wilson sang). Coincidentally, Bo died a day or so before that game (since I was talking about him).
What bothered me IMMENSELY about that game was the fact that the ESPN mouth breathers and Northwestern grads who glom onto the good teams in the B1G spent six weeks trying to get us all ready to interpret Michigan-Ohio St as "if it's close, they get to play again." I was not reflexively opposed to the idea of a rematch so long as you could genuinely argue these were still 1-2. But we'd just had Auburn get blocked out two years earlier, LSU shared a title the year before that, and if Alabama had managed to not get Prothro hurt and go unbeaten, we'd have been home undefeated and watching USC vs Texas because of the hype.
A number of them tried to control the narrative of "these are the best two teams." Bomani Jones - based mostly on the fact he's a Georgia-born hater of Florida actually said (you can find it online) - "These are, without question, the two best teams in America." He also said this - and I quote - " The Wolverines are the only team with a chance of even staying close with Ohio State."
Well, he's correct that Florida did NOT "stay close with Ohio State," LOL!!!!
No, what bothered me was a bunch of the Big Ten grads TRYING TO CREATE THE MATCH UP rather than let the system play out. I think that's wrong regardless. Look, I had no qualms BEFORE the 2011 LSU game of a rematch IF that's what the system produced - yes, even if we had to beat them a second time. And yes, Verne and Gary (in particular) began the "well what if" scenario, but there was a major difference: they made the point that EVERYONE ELSE had to lose to set it up. The 2006 scenario wanted to pretend that everyone else was blocked off even though the SEC had two ten-win teams facing each other in a conference championship that never mattered (amazing, eh?) until 2011.
