Quote:
Originally Posted by JonathanXC
I sure hope that USC can start pulling away in this one. Not good to give ASU a shot in the 4th quarter. I never thought I would find myself pulling for USC, but Ohio State can't afford Arizona State to win, it would take critical BCS % points away from us, whereas if they lose, we will probably gain some from voters and computers who had ASU ahead of us but behind West Virgina. It's interesting that every individual vote matters so much, but if things unfold a certain way, it may come down to only a handful of voters deciding if it's WV or OSU. |
I was looking at this stuff earlier to see just what the effects might be of this game. If you look at the percentage scores for the human polls, you'll notice that the gap between Ohio State and Arizona State is as large or larger than the gap between any other two adjacently ranked contenders. That says to me that Arizona State is likely not stealing any votes from Ohio State at this point. Additionally, it's such a relatively large gap that it would take a conscious effort on the part of voters to move Arizona State past Ohio State. I don't see that happening, even if ASU pulls off the comeback and gets the win over USC. However, a comeback win over USC - which is looking more unlikely by the moment - would mean that ASU might start to steal the votes that they're not stealing now. Not enough to leap
OSU, but enough to hurt the Buckeyes' position relative to West Virginia.
Arizona State is currently stealing points from Ohio State with the computers, but they're doing the same to West Virginia. I think the relative boost that Ohio State would receive from Arizona State dropping would be minimal. Missouri would be the ones who stand to gain the most from the computers from an Arizona State loss, but it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the boost the could get from beating Kansas.