time to rant

(R) This has no in-depth analysis. Nothing's changed in college football in the last 24 hours.

I just saw something on ESPN that really encapsulates the absurdity of the season. Look at the articles written about the four BCS bowls played so far.


In the Orange Bowl, Virigina Tech, #1 in the computer ranking, is matched up against Kansas, a team with a better record than both USC and Georgia. That apparently warrants three articles, with headlines like, "Kansas Proved it Belonged". Meanwhile, the Fiesta Bowl had the most anticipated game, the only match-up between two conference champions. It is just as worthy of the national championship as Ohio State/LSU. That naturally is worth four articles.

However, the Sugar Bowl, where Georgia played a team whose best victory was against Boise State, somehow warranted seven articles. And the Rose Bowl, the most pathetic excuse of a BCS game in perhaps the history of the BCS, an embarrassment to any claim the Rose Bowl has to national implications, was somehow deserving of nine articles. The top one is titled, "USC looks like nation's best team". Wow, they beat a top 25 team in what was essentially a home game. That's, like, an automatic national title, isn't it? You'd think the coach of the year was at Georgia or USC with this kind of coverage. You'd certainly be forgiven for thinking Georgia and USC have the best records in college football, or that they've beaten the best teams this season, or that they haven't lost to any bad teams. Of course, you'd also be wrong. Georgia, like Kansas, didn't even win its division. USC lost to Stanford, an even worse loss than West Virginia's loss to Pitt.

Sports coverage is usually quite good, at least, in comparison to things like political coverage. But these guys should be embarrassed. Or they should just admit that they're not covering college football. Rather, they're partisans with a particular interest in certain schools. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, fans are what make sports great. Just be honest about whether you're writing as a fan or an analyst. If writing as a fan, then give equal space for fans from other schools to make their case. If writing as an analyst, include all teams in your discussion. It's not like Missouri or Kansas or Oklahoma or West Virginia or Virginia Tech are clearly superior to USC and Georgia. Rather, it's that they're obviously equal to them, deserving mention in any objective analysis about the best teams this season or the best bowl games or anything else.

time to rank 11-25

Since there are about 8 national champions this year, I'll wait until next week to rank the top teams. But for now, this is what my rankings 11 through 25 look like for the end of the 2007-2008 season. Being me, I naturally made a little spreadsheet with some helpful things like records and who I think their best wins and worst losses were against. I really don't know what to do with Hawaii, since I feel like some mention is deserved by a 12-1 record, but they really didn't beat anybody this year. So I gave them #25.

#) Team Record Conference
Best 2 Wins - Worst 2 losses

11) Texas 10-3 Big 12
Texas Tech/Arizona State - K State/Texas A&M

12) Tennessee 10-4 SEC
Georgia/Wisconsin - California/Alabama

13) Arizona State 10-3 Pac 10
Oregon State/Colorado - Oregon/Texas

14) Cincinnati 10-3 Big East
Oregon State/Uconn - Louisville/Pittsburgh

15) Texas Tech 9-4 Big 12
Oklahoma/Virginia - Colorado/Oklahoma State

16) Oregon 9-4 Pac 10
USC/Arizona State - California/Arizona

17) Michigan 9-4 Big Ten
Illinois/Florida - App State/Wisconsin

18) Illinois 9-4 Big Ten
Ohio State/Wisconsin - Iowa/Michigan

19) South Florida 9-4 Big East
West Virginia/Auburn - Rutgers/Uconn

20) Auburn 9-4 SEC
Florida/Clemson - South Florida/Mississippi St

21) Florida 9-4 SEC
Tennessee/Kentucky - Auburn/Michigan

22) Penn State 9-4 Big Ten
Wisconsin/Texas A&M - Michigan/Michigan State

23) Wisconsin 9-4 Big Ten
Michigan/Michigan State - Illinois/Penn State

24) Virginia 9-4 ACC
Uconn/Wake Forest - Wyoming/NC State

25) Hawaii 12-1 WAC
Boise State/Fresno State - Georgia/NONE

what we know so far

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

christmas time is here

Just in time for the holidays, we have snow! It was perfect yesterday, wandering around in the park watching sledders and the snow fall on the fountains. I even have (most) of my presents bought and wrapped. Not only am I a slow eater and slow showerer, but Jodi also says I am a slow wrapper.

Off to do a little more...

head in the sand

Alright, after a week of denial, I think I can finally talk about football. After putting themselves in the incredibly unlikely position of actually being able to win their division earlier in the season, it appears the Chiefs are almost as bad as the 'experts' predicted (however, it is worth noting that they're still clearly not among the very worst teams this year, and will finish much more competitively, and with more wins, than those ESPN folks thought possible).

More emotionally taxing has been the college season. Setting aside the elephant in the room that the NCAA's men's football and basketball leagues are for-profit entities acting as employers, this season has been ridiculous. For one thing, it seems a critical mass of commentators are sick of hearing about how much better the SEC is than every other conference. It's not exactly like Georgia set up a monster non-conference schedule. Their toughest contest was against 6-6 Oklahoma State. At home. If Kansas had set up a home game against, say, 6-6 South Carolina, would people all of a sudden be talking about them as playing the best football in the country? Georgia didn't even play a team making it to the BCS. Tennessee, the SEC East champion, beat Georgia and played two BCS bound teams. Which of course is irrelevant, because Georgia 'is playing great football now', which, by the way, is pretty easy to do when the last two teams you face in the season both have five losses. And at any rate, Tennessee ended up losing to 6-6 Cal (at least that was a road game), and had four losses overall. Those six losses are twice as many as the top two teams had in the Big 12 North. You can't blame losses like Cal on the SEC 'beating each other up' because Tennessee hadn't even played an SEC team when they lost to Cal!

Meanwhile, in the west, LSU is clearly one of the top ten teams in the country. But they lost twice, including one loss at home. And with a non-conference schedule against powerhouses like MTSU and La Tech, man, they should obviously be in the championship game. LSU really only has one impressive win, at home early against Virginia Tech. The rest of their season looks pretty average, barely winning against Florida and Tennessee, losing to Kentucky and Arkansas. The rest of the west had at least three conference losses and at least four losses overall. Auburn, the second place team, nearly lost the first three games of its season (ie, the part of the schedule played outside the SEC).

It's not like the Big 12 or the Big Ten or the Pac 10 had better non-conference schedules. Not at all. The point is that the SEC didn't prove anything special, which suggests looking at the records. And you have to go down to the 5th place team in the Big 12 to find a 4-loss team. It's almost unbelievable, but the top three teams in the Big 12 combined for 33 wins, and three of their five losses came against each other. All three teams went undefeated at home. They played four games against BCS bound teams, and they didn't lose a single game outside the Big 12. LSU, Georgia, and Tennessee, meanwhile, had three fewer wins, and they only played two games against each other, meaning that they lost six games against other teams, more than the entire total losses of the top three in the Big 12. They also played one fewer game against BCS bound teams.

But of course, it's the SEC, not the Big 12, that has two teams near the top of the BCS, one of which is bound for the National Championship. Missouri has more quality wins than LSU, beating both BCS bound Kansas and BCS bound Illinois at neutral sites, and only losing to 11 win, Big 12 Champion Oklahoma. Kansas had only one loss, at a neutral site against 11 win, Big 12 North champion Missouri. And Oklahoma beat Missouri twice and Texas once in winning the Big 12 Championship. All three have cases at least as strong as LSU. Seriously, why even have computers? If the polls are 2/3 the vote, just use the poll and scrap the concept of more objective computer rankings.

LSU is a feel good choice, especially with the game in New Orleans. And this leaves Missouri hungry for building on future seasons, with a shot this season of embarrassing the team that beat LSU at home with a national TV game against Arkansas. And Kansas gets a BCS bowl, which really, is pretty fair, all things considered. If Kansas somehow manages to win that game against Virginia Tech, I think you might have some people vote for them as the national champion (after all, Virginia Tech is ranked number one by the computers). [Did I mention that Missouri played four games, four games!, against BCS bound teams, none of them, zero, zippo, nada, at home!?! Their worst loss of the season was in the conference championship! They won their division! They beat two different BCS bound teams, from two different conferences!] And I can't be too upset, once you step back and analyze everything, because the rules are clear that you can't have more than two teams from a conference, even if the computer ranks you 4th in the country. Plus, it gives Missouri the dubious distinction of probably having the most wins ever by a major conference team excluded from the BCS. That will be a winning trivia answer for years to come. Virginia Tech, after all, is really the team that got screwed, being locked out of the national championship by those mysterious human experts, and getting matched up against Kansas. If they win, the 'experts' will just say they should have won anyway because Kansas wasn't really that good because their schedule was so soft, with Kansas' whole season being ridiculed all along the way. If they lose, they will point to the loss and say if you can't beat Kansas, how can you claim to deserve a rematch against LSU or be better than one loss Ohio State?

Don't even get me started on Ohio State. At least the SEC won some good games, and they have a crop of teams that are very competitive this year. All Ohio State did was beat a conference rival, a 4 loss rival at that. In their only game against a BCS bound team, they lost. At home! Even the 'granddaddy of 'em all' suffers. What could have been USC-Ohio State (arguably the best bowl match-up anyway), is now USC-Illinois. Bleh. If Illinois somehow wins, it shows that the Missouri win is even bigger than people think and that the Pac 10 really sucked this year (and really will make the MU/IL game exciting next year). If USC wins, uh, well, we won't know anything at all. This is practically a home game for them against a three loss team that's not even ranked in the top ten from a conference that is noticeably weak in the football arena this year.

I (generally) like Columbus and all. I'm just saying that Buckeye fans better enjoy their gift this holiday season.

So how do you solve this? Well, there's no easy way, since we have an undefeated midmajor, a Rose Bowl that wants Pac 10/Big Ten, and three Big 12 teams that should make the BCS. But this would be better:

Rematch LSU and Virginia Tech in the national championship (they are, after all, #1 and #2 in the computers).
Let Hawaii have a shot at Oklahoma, the best conference champ not in the national championship, in the Fiesta Bowl, which is also a little closer to their time zone.

The winners of those two games would then have legitimate cases of their national championship worthiness.

Then let the Rose Bowl have Pac 10 champ USC and Big Ten champ Ohio State. They can play for the 'historic big name program that didn't play any big games this year' championship.
Send Arizona State to play Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. They have, after all, had nearly identical seasons, with 2 losses and both reaching as at large bids. Except, uh, Georgia is 'playing really good football right now'.
Let Missouri and West Virginia have their match-up in the Orange Bowl. It's like the national championship, but less important.

I think those matchups would be more intriguing, would better reflect the quality of the conferences this season, and would better emphasize the importance of doing well in your conference. Instead of a weak national championship game, no shot for Hawaii against a major conference champion, and two games that have teams which are 'supposed' to win (USC and Virginia Tech) and 'supposed' to lose (Illinois and Kansas), these games would be competitive and would give the winners of these games a chance to argue that their win means something. Virginia Tech, Oklahoma, and Hawaii deserve a chance to at least argue they deserve the national championship. You do that by putting one in the Championship game and having the other two hit each other, not by pitting two of them against teams that didn't even make it to their conference championship game.

Since the Rose Bowl is dead set on a Big Ten team, and the Big Ten has been weak, it makes the most sense of Ohio State/LSU for Ohio State to not go to the national championship. Conversely, if you send Kansas to the BCS instead of Missouri, because records are most important, then really, Hawaii should be playing in the national championship, not LSU. Even though they're undefeated, I don't think Hawaii should be in there, and that still leaves the problem of a second Big Ten team making it because the Rose Bowl will pick a Big Ten team (especially since the next best team, arguably, is from the Pac 10). You want your conference to get two teams in the BCS and have a shot at the championship, but at the same time, the Big Ten is running a very real risk of having two teams now lose high profile games, instead of having one game with a better shot of winning it. Michigan, ironically, might actually have the best shot out of the Big Ten now to win an important game. Either that, or the Big Ten's top four squads might go 0-4 against the SEC and Pac-10. Ouch.

My predictions for the next month:

Big 12: 5-3
Pac 10: 4-2
SEC: 4-4
ACC: 4-4
Big East: 3-3
Big Ten: 3-4

redneck woman

I don't have much to say. I don't have the faculties or training to provide any sort of critical response. I don't know if this is a pretty common thing.

I just have to say that you haven't heard Gretchen Wilson until you've heard her covered by a big black woman.

another good stanford reason

Ok, now, granted, Stanford's men's football team isn't quite as excellent as its women's ultimate frisbee team, but who isn't still excited this morning about that 4th and goal against the number one team in the country?

Ah, poor USC. Yet another reason there really should be a playoff system.

human energy

The Chevron ads have to be an instant classic. Amidst the general backdrop of oil wars and global warming and former directors in the Executive Branch, there's the particular fun of the hubbub in Burma (er, Myanmar) where the totalitarian state is basically abducting, assaulting, and killing citizens in rather sizeable numbers. Those ever dangerous monks appear to be especially troublesome.

How does the government stay in power? Why, that little oil pipeline Chevron invests in certainly helps a tad.

fall is here

Yay fall. A season almost as good as summer and spring. It occured to me as tonight was the first night I've driven home from work after the sun has set. Woohoo.

(P) As it's been about five years now since the Bush Administration ramped up their Iraq invasion sales pitch, I've been thinking a lot about where we're headed. The initial justifications are so obviously absurd, that it makes one conclude that the Administration must think eventually public opinion will force Congress to do something. Are they hoping the situation stays under control until they're out of office? Are they making a nice little retirement fund out of the cash that's unaccounted for? Are they planning to stay in office longer than January 2009? Do they have the goods via domestic spying on enough Congressmen to prevent real legislation or accountability?

About the only way this can be beneficial long term is if they convince the Iraqis to privatize their oil and sign sweetheart PSA deals with Western firms. But that seems far from certain, and the trends seem to favor the political forces opposing cooperation with the US.

So it begs the question of what if something catastrophic happens? We are so much more powerful than any other nation that it's hard to express the scale of the superiority of our equipment and offensive capability. Yet, it's worthless against an asymmetric foe; we're basically at an impasse. We're going through our stocks of equipment, we're paying huge sums of money to unaccountable private companies, we're destroying decades of international leadership, we're burning out tens of thousands of highly trained troops, and it's all we can do to hang on to a few bases against a fractured resistance. What happens if nationalistic groups manage to work together and overrun a base? What if they take the embassy compound we're building and a couple major airstrips? You can't airlift a quarter of a million people out of a country overnight. What if a real security concern arises unexpectedly, the whole point for having a standing army in the first place?

bye bye hkd

Exciting news! I got an envelope this weekend. Candace had just called Friday night, so I'm thinking Liberty a little, and then I see a KC postmark. 900 Cambridge, who lives on Cambridge, Candace doesn't live there, right?

Then I flash back to a conversation Stan and I had many years ago about Cambridge. Cambridge? Oh yeah, that's where Hillary lives! Or used to, or her mom does, or something.

I must say, the Liberty memory is two for two this weekend. It was in fact from Hillary.

Congratulations to you and Jason! I will most certainly plan on coming back for your wedding. Yay.