bawitdaball said:
Bear3 said:
I agree that OSU is not a great team but I think they are a very good team. I am not sure if the Big 12 has any great teams this year. Time will tell.
You might be right on that. I've watched several teams play and there has been an overall BIG fall off.
Is it really a "fall off" or that parity has caused, outside of a relatively very few GREAT teams, most everyone else (not really everyone, but a vast number of teams) to just not look really good because they are not dominating as was the case just a few years ago when there were only about 10 - 15 or so teams that could "beat up" on most others? Their opponent is no longer a push over and someone to just look past.
Two good teams, even very good teams can make the other look not so good on any given day because things are going right for one and not the other and the losing team gets out of its normal mode and tries to do too much resulting in turnovers and generally sloppy play.
I feel confident to say from what I have seen over the last few years of how so many teams have upgraded talent, that our Baylor teams of old would not have been so much better than more of the others to get out of the conference schedule without at least 2 or 3 more losses than what we had in any given season and certainly many more close games that what fans had become accustomed. Then it was only Texas or OU. Now you have more than can certainly trip you up.
I guess others can argue differently but I think the number of very good, but not elite coaches, has increased, the talent pool has raised itself to a higher level in both quality and numbers, talent has not pooled in just a few locations and that has caused much more competitive games and thereby has only allowed a much lower number of teams to really just run over others as they have in the past. And in the process made it much harder to separate from the pack. And because that separation is not there the games end up much closer and gives the appearance of teams not being as good as they might have appeared in years past.