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BCS shenanigans
by David Whitney - Monday Dec 03, 2007
Harry Houdini made a living out of performing astonishing, seemingly impossible escapes from certain-death circumstances. As the years have passed, and other practitioners of the art have emerged, we’ve grown to find out that many of Houdini’s most astonishing escapes were one-part sleight of hand, and one-part bodily contortion that would snap most of our bones to kindling were we to try it.
It’s just those contortions that remind me of the evil, nasty old BCS. Because only Houdini-like contortions could cook up the kind of escape the BCS needed to manufacture an Ohio State-LSU final.
Is this saying that an Ohio State-LSU final isn’t a credible national title game? Not necessarily. There are cases, however, darned good cases, to be made for several other pairings in a year of revolving-door #1’s and upsets-du-jour. It does show, however, that in the midst of its polls and its faux veil of computerized legitimacy, that the BCS is a false religion - one not even its practitioners and would-be lawgivers (the voters) truly abide.
Think about it for a second. Going into the previous weekend, Georgia was ranked fourth in the country. Using the simple rules of college football poll physics, teams below those who vacate higher positions rise to occupy those higher positions – until Georgia rolled around and gave the voters a problem. You couldn’t very well give a chance at the national championship to a team that hadn’t even qualified to play in its conference’s championship game, notwithstanding how silly championship games are (see last week’s column). But it was the voters who put Georgia at #4 in the first place.
So, the voters dutifully took LSU, who received a gift-wrapped SEC title from a too-generous Danny Ainge, and broke the laws of poll physics and handed the Tigers the #2 position and an extra home game to play for a national championship. This, however, means one of two things:
1. The voters never really believed Georgia was the fourth-best team in the country.
2. The voters never really believed LSU was the seventh-best team in the country.
3. No one pays much attention to spots numbered higher than two.
Either way, there’s a streak of agnosticism prevalent not merely in the voters’ final decisions, but in their prior selections as well, and the fear of that agnosticism runs so deep into the DNA of the BCS that they had to write a protection against it into the rules.
“You will vote the winner of the final game as your national champion” (paraphrased)
Huh?
If you had no doubt that yours was the process by which a champion were declared, why on earth would you have to write this kind of battery-not-included notice into your How to Vote rules? Why even bother to have a final poll, for that matter? There’s obviously only one reason – doubt. Lawyers call it “jury nullification.” Legislate away the doubt, and the result must have been the correct one, right? And did Houdini ever knot himself it any worse a pretzel of contortion?
For every hack who pens an article that opines how the BCS “got it right,” there’s another hack who has to pervert the system in order to avoid the consequences the system would naturally force on college football if the religion were practiced in a manner consistent with the way it were defended.
This isn’t the first year this BCS doublespeak has hit. Just last year, Michigan had bounced its way back to the near-top of the polling heap, giving pollsters an opportunity to prove their faith in the system by setting up the Buckeyes for a national title rematch against the Wolverines. Not even trying to explain away the contorted logic necessary to explain away yet another violation of Poll Physics, voters simply inserted Florida above Michigan to avoid the issue, and set up Ohio State for an embarrassing, double-digit loss. The only worse result was to realize that surely someone could have given Florida a better game than the Bucks.
This year’s result is just as arbitrary, but for different reasons. Last year, voters dumped Michigan for their head-to-head regular-season loss against the Buckeyes, but this year, the voters just decided they wanted LSU in the title game, current poll results be darned. The perception was that the SEC was the best or next-best conference in the land, even if the same arguments that justified their strength were used to establish the weakness of anyone who dared claim otherwise. With ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit offering his own personal support for LSU, stopping just short of a big, wet kiss directly on Les Miles’ lips, voters followed suit, rolled LSU ahead of Georgia, and left a slew of other two-loss teams wondering what might have been.
There are smaller, sillier, intermediate results that just reinforce just how twisted this system has become. Big 12 champ Oklahoma, twice a double-digit victor over Missouri, is still listed behind the Tigers in at least two computer polls – not to mention some coaches’ ballots. Still another ballot listed Boston College ahead of USC. And the beat goes on, with annual system “tweaking,” contorted results leading to arbitrary, manufactured title competitors, polls not even believed by their voters, supplanted by computers trying to tell us Team A is ahead of Team B, even after losing to them twice. If it weren’t so sadly real, it would be laughable. Remember, too, that all this nonsense is in place merely to avoid playing it off on the field, where in our heart of hearts we all know it should be.
Eventually, a failed escape did not bring an end to the life of Harry Houdini. After taking blows to the stomach in response to a toughman bet, Houdini died of a ruptured appendix, his body, in effect, blowing apart from within.
A few more arbitrary results like those of the last two years, and the BCS own “appendix” may follow suit.
We can only hope.
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Conference Championship Games, Cigarettes, and Other Bad Habits
by David Whitney - Monday Nov 26, 2007 There are, as of my last browsing at the local drugstore, somewhere between 200 and 5,000 cigarette smoking abatement products. I never bothered to count the actual number, never having been a smoker, but I strongly suspect the same type of medical intervention may be necessary to stop another equally costly addiction that is sweeping through college football.
Conference Championship Games.
For the oft-bespectacled leaders that stir a sweaty, lusty glance at the athletic dollar, Conference Championship Games start a heart to racing like a Marlboro coupon would to a three-pack-a-day pro. They are a cash cow of astonishing proportions, one where you need only rent a stadium and convince a TV network that more than a dozen people care to watch a made-for-TV event under the guise of determining a conference champion.
Never mind that these contrived cancers carry all the competitive merit of a thumb-wrestling tournament, and render a season’s worth of conference play almost without merit. CCG’s, as they have come to be known, are evidently here to stay, and their supporters push them harder than a North Carolina farmer pushes tobacco.
If only we could call for an intervention, and stop these nightmares where they stand.
As the playoff-versus-non-playoff wars wage on in chat rooms and message boards and smoke-filled rooms, both sides seem to agree that it is presently rather ridiculous that some conferences play a title game, while others don’t. In that narrow vein, they are correct.
And that’s why all conference title games should be abolished, not encouraged.
One need look no further than the venerable Pac 10 to understand why.
Just a few scant years ago, the Pac 10 took the quiet yet bold step of altering their team schedules such that every member school plays every other member school every year. At the end of the season, the team with the best record wins the conference. If there’s a tie, you go to the head-to-head results to determine the winner.
How simple. How elegant. How utterly relevant is the regular season in such a system.
And how simultaneously loathsome is that concept to those who continually push conference title games like a guy sporting a Panama hat and a Technicolor suit at the corner of 5th-and-somewhere. If the CCG pimps had their way, they’d force the Pac 10 to abandon their model and force the top two teams into a conference title game, even if their records and season performance demonstrate a champion. For all the pundits who argue against a playoff for the prospective and inaccurate notion that it would spoil the regular season, we have CCG’s right now that are doing precisely that.
Fortunately, the price of staging CCG’s is dangerously high. Rumors persist that the Big Ten wants to expand to twelve teams, making their moniker even less relevant to their name, so they can split into divisions and manufacture a title game. It would make sense for some in that conference to pursue this notion just as they have pushed (or, more accurately, shoved) the Big Ten Network down some media throats. Here’s hoping the traditionalists in the Big Ten win this battle, and instead follow suit of their west-coast brethren. Expand your conference schedules to full round-robin, eliminate some of the perpetually idiotic out-of-conference games against double-directional schools, and let your conference champion be decided on the field.
Decide your conference champion on the field in the course of a regular season? What a concept. (Oops, I think that guy in the Panama hat just pulled a knife on me.)
Those who have already sniffed too deeply of the CCG-laced cigarettes now stand to reap an ironic benefit from what they’ve sown. Look at the Big 12 conference, with Missouri standing atop the national heap for the first time in over forty years. Rather than declare Missouri’s 7-1 conference record the best in the league and allow the Tigers to walk into a national championship game, the Big 12 will force Missouri to head to San Antonio this week and face South champion Oklahoma – a team who already beat the Tigers by double-digits earlier this season. To that end, the Big 12 will get precisely what it deserves; it would rather risk a member school’s shot at a national championship than turn down the elixir of a CCG. Should Oklahoma repeat its mid-October feat, the Buckeyes of Ohio State, saddled with no CCG requirement, will back happily into New Orleans, snickering at the Big 12 all the way down the French Quarter.
Yes, yes, we all know the Big 12 doesn’t play a full round-robin schedule. And we know that past champions in the Big 10 have had co-titlists in years that certain teams didn’t face each other. But those are problems of scheduling that can be fixed; the Pac 10 has already shown us how. All the other conferences have to do is be willing to follow suit.
The unwitting weapon against this evil CCG narcotic obsession is a curious one indeed – the BCS. It is the BCS that is most likely to cede to pressure from various corners and try to force the CCG issue with conferences like the Big 10 and the Pac 10. What the BCS leaders know, however, is that they wage that fight with an empty hand; if the Pac 10 is told they must play a title game in addition to a round-robin schedule in order to participate in the BCS, there’s no doubt that the Pac 10 will gladly tell the BCS to go away…far, far away, and bring its walls crashing down along with it. The Big 10 surely knows it has precisely the same power.
Part of me almost wishes the BCS would overplay its hand, push the two “granddaddy” conferences out, and blow the computer-laden, champion-by-anointment, revolving-door-#1 rating system to what Yosemite Sam used to call “smithereenies.” And, with luck, the dust from the explosion will settle into a wonderful and unprecedented national collegiate playoff, one that would set the course of college football’s postseason aright for years to come.
Who knows? Maybe we can find out that the guy in the Panama hat doesn’t rule college football, after all...
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