The World Series is here and the ALDLAND Podcast is here to talk about it. Boston . . . St. Louis . . . playing baseball. What more could you want? College football, of course, and there’s plenty of that as your favorite cohosts preview all the interesting week 9 matchups.
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ALDLAND 
Congratulations on the 50th episode of the podcast.
Re: Brendan’s discussion of the Cardinals’ cluchiness, http://sidespin.kinja.com/clutchspin-1450988999.
Re: Both of your comments about the SEC –
I agree with Brendan that the Pacific Twelve is coming on strong, and I agree that the networks are involved and interested in developing the perception of conferences. Fox/FS1 looks smart for jumping on board with the ascendent Pac-12. ESPN, we know, is going all-in with the SEC. (E.g., hiring Finebaum, new SEC Network, etc.)
I also agree that media-developed perception feeds actual perception, affecting the preseason rankings and the in-season rankings. (If you look back at Georgia, for example, the BCS actually did a good job of correcting for this sort of perception bias.)
I agree that the SEC is down a little this year, but I’ll push back against you guys a little bit to say that I don’t think the SEC is bad, like some critics are arguing. I think we’ve become very familiar with SEC dominance, and many more of us watch a lot more SEC football than we used to, so we see more of its faults, which really are common to all of college football. Still, look around. What conference is clearly better? (And that’s with about half of the SEC teams down a starting quarterback. Also, what’s up with Missouri? Anyway.)
You guys discussed a scenario in which the season ended with only Oregon and Ohio State undefeated, and asked whether a one-loss SEC team could bump OSU for the national championship game. I think that’s an easy yes, and both answers are in the state of Alabama. Maybe interestingly, Auburn is a case where perception could work against an SEC team. Clearly the Podcast needs another visit from the mentioned Andy Brink to discuss the War Eagles/Tigers/Plainsmen.
Nicely done.
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