There are three Democratic candidates with substantial support in the party. Oh wait, we've known that for months. On to the important stuff...the free labor employed by the 'nonprofit' NCAA.
What we know about college football is that there were two good conferences and a whole bunch of mediocre ones this year. We also know the reason the BCS system doesn't work isn't because it destroys all the old, traditional match-ups or because it's impossible to rank teams nationally. The problem is it tries to do both. So, instead of having set games each year (for example, say, always having the SEC champ play the ACC champ, Big 12/Big East, and Pac 10/Big 10) or instead of matching the top teams against each other (1 vs 2, 3 vs 4, etc), it does this incredibly awkward combo move that really is a just the same old same old. When the pundits decide that Georgia is playing great football, or that it doesn't matter that USC lost to Stanford, well, we're just supposed to accept that.
New Year's Day illustrated the absurdity quite plainly. Missouri, USC, and Georgia are three of the best teams in the country. Exactly where to rank them is a fun task I'll get to later, but the immediate problem the BCS has is none of them played each other! Instead, they all played teams they should beat, and guess what, they all beat them. In the first quarter. 35 to 34, to be exact. That's 35 first quarter points vs 34 total game points. Just process that for a second. All three teams won their games by more than 30 points.
No one wins from that system. It makes the games less exciting and doesn't enable any kind of closure or final ranking for the season. It also puts fans in the compromising position of having to value the spin about a team instead of just settling questions on the field. Finally, the system can't decide whether conferences are important. A system that ranks a weak champion like Ohio State so highly should, commensurately, rank a team like Georgia that couldn't even win its division quite lowly. Guaranteeing a spot for the conference champs makes sense; it's a good way to ensure participation of the major conferences and recognize the importance of winning the conference. It doesn't make sense, though, to force a second team from a weak conference (the effect of preventing three teams from the same conference being in the BCS).
That means, of course, the insanity continues well past New Year's Day. First, you've got the ACC champion Virginia Tech Hokies. The Hokies are ranked number one in the computer system. Now, if we don't trust computers, fine, just rely on the polls. But a BCS where the computers are so impotent that their number one team doesn't even make the championship game is so bizarrely stupid it's difficult to quantify. To add insult to injury, they're not even matched up against another conference champion. Instead, they get the third best team in the Big 12. Or wait, is that the second best team?
See, the problem with not having guidelines for how to rank teams is that you get inconsistency. That's why the NFL has specific rules for how to rank teams (ie, tiebreakers). It may not always decide the 'best' team, but it decides how to decide, then defines the team that won that decision as the best team. Everybody knows the scenarios and who comes out on top before there is controversy. You have to decide these rules because there is no objective way of breaking a tie like Missouri/Kansas. Either the division winner is more important, or the number of losses is more important, or the head to head is more important, or the quality wins is more important, or the teams lost to is more important, etc.
That is important because what we really want to do is compare football teams across conferences. While Virginia Tech really has nothing to win now, the opportunity for Kansas is to show that the Big 12 is having a flabbergastingly dominant season. Essentially, the BCS is saying that the number three team is as good as other conferences' champs. The obvious parallel to Kansas is Georgia. They should be playing each other, and Missouri and Tennessee should be playing each other (or, as I would vote, Missouri vs Georgia and Kansas vs Tennessee). But of course, USC 'must' play a Big Ten team in that all-powerful game, the Rose Bowl. What a beauty that game was! And then by beating a team that is not one of the country's best, that somehow makes them one of the country's best? [hmmm, what team can I think of that beat Illinois and has a better record than USC?] Meanwhile, Oklahoma's prize for winning the (arguably) toughest conference is not a shot at the national championship game, nor an easy(er) game against an at-large bid. They draw the only other match-up against another major conference champion.
It's pretty clear from both the regular season and the bowls that the Big 12 and the SEC stood out from the rest of the conferences. The number 4 Big 12 team (TX) pounded the number 2 Pac 10 team (ASU). The number 5 Big 12 team (TX Tech) knocked off the number 3 ACC squad (Virginia). The number 5 SEC squad (Auburn) knocked off the number 5 ACC team (Clemson). The number 3 SEC team (Georgia) pounded WAC champ Hawaii. Number 2 SEC Tennessee beat the Big 10's number 4 (Wisconsin). During the regular season, the two conferences beat such teams as Wake Forest, Illinois, and Virginia Tech. When you look at the Pac 10, the Big 10, the Big East, and the ACC, there just aren't the teams to compete this year.
So if wins set them apart from the pack, how do I pick a winner between the two, you ask? Well, thanks for asking. It's when you look at the losses that things stand out to me. For example, the difference between Oklahoma losing to Big East champion West Virginia and Florida losing to unranked Michigan is pretty big (and let me say early and often, I thought Michigan was going to knock off Florida). The difference in the two head to head bowl games, of course, is even more enormous. Alabama and Colorado both showed why they were 6-6. Alabama won by six (Ross, I'm sure you are excited about that). Missouri, meanwhile, showed that the 'second tier' in the Big 12 was measurably superior to the second tier in the SEC, both in terms of overall record (3-0 vs 2-1) and in who they beat (Arizona State in particular). Or a different way to say it, the top 5 Big 12 teams finished 54-13, while the top 5 SEC teams finished 50-16 with LSU still left to play. [In contrast, the ACC was 49-18, Big 10 47-17 with Ohio State left to play, Big East 46-18, and the Pac 10 45-20.]
I'm not going to hold my breath, though, for ESPN to be talking about the superiority of the Big 12 this year.
One other thing we know is that I can't count. In my bowl predictions, I counted an SEC team as a Big East team, and just plain can't count the Big Ten. Sorry Mississippi State!
How am I doing? Well, not too shabby, but probably not superbly enough to have cleaned up in Vegas. Here's what I originally predicted a month ago [remember LSU/OSU is still to come]:
Big 12: 5-3
Pac 10: 4-2
SEC: 4-4 [note, this should be 5-4, since I can't count]
ACC: 4-4
Big East: 3-3 [note, this should be 2-3, since I can't count]
Big Ten: 3-4 [note, this should be 4-4, since I can't count]
Basically, I thought the ACC would win a game against the SEC. Well, you know, I thought the ACC would win against somebody, at least. Here's how they actually played out.
SEC: 6-2 (one to play)
Big 12: 5-3
Pac 10: 4-2
Big 10: 3-4 (one to play)
Big East: 2-2 (one to play)
ACC: 2-6
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