I've just got a couple of things to address, then I'm probably bowing out of this thread, because I don't think Sheepdog and I are really trying to address the same point. I'm not certain exactly what he's going for, and I don't know that I'm even sure what I'm going for or want to try to make a full effort to explain it. Just for example, I have no idea why he keeps going back to our 2004 Southern Miss game. It's not any part of what I'm talking about. If we had played Boise State the last 8 years, we'd have been very lucky to have broken even with them. But I'll tell you what, you toss out their UC Davis game for Nebraska, and their season changes quite a bit, I think.
1971 Colorado, he asked where I got #3 from. That was their final ranking, exactly as I said. Find any final AP poll ranking for 1971.
http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~dwilson/rsf...ory/index.shtml is my starting point for most historical information in college football, with links to polls, scores, standings, etc. We beat the teams that FINISHED 2-3-4. If you want to look at where they were when we played them, they were 8-2-2. It was a pretty easy schedule if you were going for 10-3, or maybe even 11-2, but a ball buster to go 13-0.
As far as why we didn't beat VTech or other singularly tough early season games surrounded by cupcakes, it's more than being fresh for that one game. Mentally you don't get up for that game quite as much when you have Oklahoma down the road, and what looked to be a huge game against Missouri not too far away. Plus, you may not pull out all of the stops in the playbook yet. McBride was famous for running very vanilla defenses early in the year, and then Colorado and even the bowl opponent would face variations they'd never seen. The great teams of the mid 90s could do that because their vanilla defense could hold the other team enough for our offense to outscore them. When we weren't as good, we had to pull more out early, but still we'd try to keep something under wraps. If you're only tough game is early in the season (i.e. Boise St vs Oregon), you don't hold anything at all back, on either side of the ball.
The thread seems to have started about recruiting stars. TCU and Boise State are outliers. Statistically there will always be some that do better than expected, and some that do worse. But randomly pick a school that gets 3-5* players vs. a team with 0-2* players, and I'll take the 3-5* team without knowing anything else. And I'll be right most every time, but not always. Even 4 years later, the NFL can't always evaluate talent correctly, as some top 10 draft picks flame out and some late rounders or free agents go all-pro. Why do you think colleges and recruiting services can nail down high school kids? I don't even know for sure what the point to be made here was. Patterson and Peterson are great coaches who get a lot out of lesser talent, and/or know how to find hidden gems. Osborne was like that too. He had better talent, but also took them to the very top.
