For the college football minded it is Boise State versus TCU in the upcoming Bowl Championship Series’s Fiesta Bowl. A dream match-up of two football programs that were not suppose to be at the big dance. Here is the problem in my mind. You are taking two programs that are eyed suspiciously as lacking football pedigree or even inferior by the college football elite and pitting them against each other. They played against each other last year to little fanfare. Part Deux is taking place on a larger stage with a much larger financial payout but none the less it appears to corral these two teams to being benchmarked against each other. The danger of this arrangement is that it makes it easy to dismiss the outcome. These are the outliers and many media and football fans do not know whether to extend them full access to the club or consider them party crashers to be tolerate so the BCS meets a quota and help keep the system out of litigation (our Congressional hearings). The media has already begun to dub this game the Out-of-Sight Bowl or the Mid-Major Super Bowl.

The danger with always competing with teams or enterprises that look like you is that you do not get the benefit of being seen for all your talents. You are boxed into the perception that if you have seen one mid-major football team then you have seen them all. Had the BCS allowed both Boise State and TCU to play teams from major conferences then the opportunity to validate the assumption about mid-major conferences would have been more relevant.

Who do you compete against? Is your organization being enhanced by its level of competition or held-back? Do you occasionally breakout of the comfort zone and attempt to rank yourself against the best? How do your customers rank your organization and what benchmarks do they use?