College Football is Dead
College football is ancient history. An amusing punch-line from the past. It is now completely dead.
It was only about half-dead in 1998 when the worst idea since “occupy Iraq in 3 weeks” was hatched. It was a supposed panacea to the problem that had plagued college football and no other major American sport: “How do we crown a champion?” After years of voting controversy in an attempt to determine who was the best team, the proposed solution was not to address the fallacious and ridiculous process of subjectively and arbitrarily voting on champions, but instead to amend the voting system itself so only one winner could be produced. Shockingly, neither Dan Quayle nor Mr. Bean created the erroneously titled “Bowl Championship Series.”
The first BCS was hailed as a glorious success, after two undefeated teams squared off at the end of the season and a unanimous “champion” was voted on. Alas, college football was like every other sport in America, except for that minute detail about not having a playoff to coronate a champion.
But problems quickly set in, and after a few years the sport known as college football was mostly dead. In 2000, Florida State played for the national championship even though Miami had defeated them heads up. In 2002 Nebraska lost their final game 62-36, didn’t even qualify for the conference championship, and was elected to play in the title game despite being ranked fourth in the human polls. And low and behold, in 2003, the impossible happened: LSU won the BCS “championship” game but USC was voted as the Associated Press “champion.” Even the most basic function of the system itself - avoid a split vote - failed miserably.
In 2004 college football almost flat-lined. The season ended with three undefeated teams, and ironically one unanimous “champion.” There is no other competition we view as sport where three teams end a campaign undefeated, for the simple reason that it’s impossible. One is the maximum capacity in the undefeated club, because everyone else would have had to lose somewhere along the line.
Finally, after a slow painful battle with stupidity, college football has died. For on this evening, even the ridiculous, aforementioned system has failed to achieve its silly goal; its second best team is being left out.
Theoretically, the purpose of the BCS, in all its flaws, was to pair the two best teams in football against each other at the end of the regular season to determine a champion. The voters of college football have always defined best as “best on paper,” often characterized by gaudy margins of victory, boasting many all-Americans, and defeating other schools who are also perceived as good on paper.
Now this system, is of course, a complete and utter mockery of the competition process. The endless flaws inherent with trying to determine who is “best” in this manner are too long to list here, but the primary reason is we determine champions by actually playing the games, not by who we merely think would win. There is a good reason for this - the three pre-cogs from “Minority Report” don’t actually exist in the real world. Nostradamus is dead, and no one else alive can predict the future - not even Washington Think Tanks. Just because Las Vegas perceives someone as a favorite, or “better” doesn’t necessarily mean they are better. This concept is so rudimentary that it has actually been overlooked by college football voters, who have become conditioned to sheepishly following a set of unofficial guidelines that make no sense:
1. Record is really really important, even though all teams in question play completely different competition
2. Record is only really really important if a team is from a major conference
3. If a team loses, they must be dropped in the rankings, regardless of how they lose or to whom
4. If team A beats team B heads up, and they have the same record, team A is better, except when this conflicts with rules 1-3.
5. “Style” points are important - winning by a lot is better than winning by a little. A win is not a win in college football.
None of those rules are logical. The tricky one for most people is rule number 4, which deals with head-to-head play. If a 10-0 loses to an 0-10, the 0-10 is not better, they were just able to win a game on that day. There are many factors that go into a single game - a mere blip of statistical occurrence - that could cause a weaker team to upset a stronger one: injuries, weather, location, focus, and most importantly, they might match up well (e.g. The Tennessee Titans are clearly not as good as the Indianapolis Colts, but because of their ability to run the football, and Colts inability to stop the run, Tennessee matches up extremely well with Indianapolis).
For years voters (and the BCS) have followed this ridiculous system of voting the “best” teams to the top, and they’ve followed these rules so blindly they’ve managed to brainwash themselves and everyone else involved in the sport. Amidst every controversy, no one even stops to consider that another team with an extra loss could be - gasp! better than the so-called top ranked schools! This year, no one has even mentioned LSU as a team getting “stiffed” out of a title shot. They aren’t in the conversation because they have - stop the presses - two losses. Everyone who has ever been involved in organized sports know that a team with two losses could never be the best team in the sport.
This year, the BCS managed to outdo itself, and completely murder college football. Normally, the BCS hurts the sport by merely existing. However when Florida jumped Michigan in the standings to claim a spot in the national “title” game, there was actually a breakdown within the BCS itself. That’s because the final BCS standings were determined by a new set of arbitrary rules.
More than half of the humans voting in the Harris and Coaches polls (comprising the majority of the BCS) altered their ballots in the final vote to exclude Michigan for two major reasons:
1. Michigan didn’t win its conference championship
And most importantly,
2. They didn’t want a rematch between Michigan and Ohio State.
In other words, an already broken system failed to produce its typically ridiculous result, and conjured up something so arbitrary monkeys might as well be spinning a wheel to see who goes to Glendale. With Michigan inline to go, voters completely abandoned the system by lying on their ballots because of the two aforementioned reasons.
By their own volition, the Wolverines were better than Florida. In fact, here are the average poll positions of the two teams last week:
Coaches........Harris
Michigan 3.07..Michigan 3.07
Florida 3.70.....Florida 3.82
It was OK for Michigan to be ranked well ahead of the Gators because USC would have played for the title, and the two major conundrums regarding rematch and conference winner would have been avoided. Yet, when USC lost, Michigan didn’t slide into the second spot in the human polls as every other team had before them. Instead, voters who admitted that Michigan was better and more dangerous suddenly voted the squad du jour, Florida, ahead of the Wolverines because Florida won its conference and hadn’t played in Columbus this year. Florida isn’t the second best team, BUT blah blah blah rematch blah blah blah hardest conference blah blah blah.
This week, Michigan didn’t play and Florida defeated a weaker opponent, so logically the new averages looked like this:
Coaches...........Harris
Florida 2.29......Florida 2.37
Michigan 2.71...Michigan 2.71
And this was after a stretch where Florida lost, beat 8-4 Georgia by 7, beat 4-8 Vanderbilt by 6, squeaked out a home win over South Carolina by 1 thanks to two blocked kicks, survived against 6-6 Florida State 21-14, and was unanimously regarded as out of the national title picture.
In an epic embarrassment, someone in the Harris poll voted Florida first (presumably so they would gain extra points over Michigan, not because that person suddenly believes the Gators are better than Ohio State). Florida and Michigan didn’t even receive all of the remaining second and third place votes. Apparently, college football “champions” are determined by this impregnable, Mensa-like logic.
Furthermore, nowhere in the BCS handbook does it say a team must win its conference, and that a title game can’t be a rematch. A decade ago, college football had a championship game that was a rematch between Florida and Florida State - also a rivalry game for those suggesting rivals can’t meet twice in the same year. Nebraska and Oklahoma - also rivals - just played in a rematch for the Big XII title. Perhaps the Big XII should have intervened and voted a different representative in to play Oklahoma because the Huskers already had their shot. Two of the great sports stories of the last 20 years finished with rematches - the New England Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams for their first championship, and Villanova shocked Georgetown in 1985. There are dozens more.
The result of this BCS becomes even more preposterous when the logic behind the vote is carried out. If Florida had lost, would Louisville have passed Michigan and LSU because a team was needed for the “title” game that hadn’t played OSU and won it’s conference? If Rutgers had won the Big East would Boise State have been chosen over Wisconsin, Louisville, USC, LSU, and Michigan to fit the new criteria?
The need for a playoff system is so obvious and has been opined about endlessly in previous years. Thousands have commented on how sports winners aren’t determined by best regular season record, and lists have been compiled of all the champions that would have never been with a “BCS” system (in fact, it is a rarity for the team with the best regular season performance to win the championship, and that is against equal competition in pro sports). By now, everyone knows how easy it would be set up an eight team playoff, keep the BCS people happy by allowing them to select the eight teams, and play a three round tournament at the bowl sites. Someday, somehow, it will happen. And when a playoff resuscitates the sport, it will be a glorious resurrection.
Until then, RIP college football.
P.S. To any fan of college football, the only way to revive the sport is to completely boycott it. Nothing speaks louder than empty stadiums and poor TV ratings. This message payed for by “Boycott for a Playoff ‘07.”
Edit: The Harris poll voter who ranked Florida first is someone named Jim Walden. Whether Mr. Walden has ever seen a college football game or is a real person is questionable, but he is helping to decide the “champion.” His ballot had Oklahoma fourth, Boise State fifth, Wake Forest seventh, and LSU eleventh. Other curious ballots include Rondo Fienberg, Charlie Cavagnaro, Larry Keech, Robert Lawless, Lance Mclhenny, Craig Morton, Tim Neverett, and Gene Ponti.
All votes can be seen here.
It was only about half-dead in 1998 when the worst idea since “occupy Iraq in 3 weeks” was hatched. It was a supposed panacea to the problem that had plagued college football and no other major American sport: “How do we crown a champion?” After years of voting controversy in an attempt to determine who was the best team, the proposed solution was not to address the fallacious and ridiculous process of subjectively and arbitrarily voting on champions, but instead to amend the voting system itself so only one winner could be produced. Shockingly, neither Dan Quayle nor Mr. Bean created the erroneously titled “Bowl Championship Series.”
The first BCS was hailed as a glorious success, after two undefeated teams squared off at the end of the season and a unanimous “champion” was voted on. Alas, college football was like every other sport in America, except for that minute detail about not having a playoff to coronate a champion.
But problems quickly set in, and after a few years the sport known as college football was mostly dead. In 2000, Florida State played for the national championship even though Miami had defeated them heads up. In 2002 Nebraska lost their final game 62-36, didn’t even qualify for the conference championship, and was elected to play in the title game despite being ranked fourth in the human polls. And low and behold, in 2003, the impossible happened: LSU won the BCS “championship” game but USC was voted as the Associated Press “champion.” Even the most basic function of the system itself - avoid a split vote - failed miserably.
In 2004 college football almost flat-lined. The season ended with three undefeated teams, and ironically one unanimous “champion.” There is no other competition we view as sport where three teams end a campaign undefeated, for the simple reason that it’s impossible. One is the maximum capacity in the undefeated club, because everyone else would have had to lose somewhere along the line.
Finally, after a slow painful battle with stupidity, college football has died. For on this evening, even the ridiculous, aforementioned system has failed to achieve its silly goal; its second best team is being left out.
Theoretically, the purpose of the BCS, in all its flaws, was to pair the two best teams in football against each other at the end of the regular season to determine a champion. The voters of college football have always defined best as “best on paper,” often characterized by gaudy margins of victory, boasting many all-Americans, and defeating other schools who are also perceived as good on paper.
Now this system, is of course, a complete and utter mockery of the competition process. The endless flaws inherent with trying to determine who is “best” in this manner are too long to list here, but the primary reason is we determine champions by actually playing the games, not by who we merely think would win. There is a good reason for this - the three pre-cogs from “Minority Report” don’t actually exist in the real world. Nostradamus is dead, and no one else alive can predict the future - not even Washington Think Tanks. Just because Las Vegas perceives someone as a favorite, or “better” doesn’t necessarily mean they are better. This concept is so rudimentary that it has actually been overlooked by college football voters, who have become conditioned to sheepishly following a set of unofficial guidelines that make no sense:
1. Record is really really important, even though all teams in question play completely different competition
2. Record is only really really important if a team is from a major conference
3. If a team loses, they must be dropped in the rankings, regardless of how they lose or to whom
4. If team A beats team B heads up, and they have the same record, team A is better, except when this conflicts with rules 1-3.
5. “Style” points are important - winning by a lot is better than winning by a little. A win is not a win in college football.
None of those rules are logical. The tricky one for most people is rule number 4, which deals with head-to-head play. If a 10-0 loses to an 0-10, the 0-10 is not better, they were just able to win a game on that day. There are many factors that go into a single game - a mere blip of statistical occurrence - that could cause a weaker team to upset a stronger one: injuries, weather, location, focus, and most importantly, they might match up well (e.g. The Tennessee Titans are clearly not as good as the Indianapolis Colts, but because of their ability to run the football, and Colts inability to stop the run, Tennessee matches up extremely well with Indianapolis).
For years voters (and the BCS) have followed this ridiculous system of voting the “best” teams to the top, and they’ve followed these rules so blindly they’ve managed to brainwash themselves and everyone else involved in the sport. Amidst every controversy, no one even stops to consider that another team with an extra loss could be - gasp! better than the so-called top ranked schools! This year, no one has even mentioned LSU as a team getting “stiffed” out of a title shot. They aren’t in the conversation because they have - stop the presses - two losses. Everyone who has ever been involved in organized sports know that a team with two losses could never be the best team in the sport.
This year, the BCS managed to outdo itself, and completely murder college football. Normally, the BCS hurts the sport by merely existing. However when Florida jumped Michigan in the standings to claim a spot in the national “title” game, there was actually a breakdown within the BCS itself. That’s because the final BCS standings were determined by a new set of arbitrary rules.
More than half of the humans voting in the Harris and Coaches polls (comprising the majority of the BCS) altered their ballots in the final vote to exclude Michigan for two major reasons:
1. Michigan didn’t win its conference championship
And most importantly,
2. They didn’t want a rematch between Michigan and Ohio State.
In other words, an already broken system failed to produce its typically ridiculous result, and conjured up something so arbitrary monkeys might as well be spinning a wheel to see who goes to Glendale. With Michigan inline to go, voters completely abandoned the system by lying on their ballots because of the two aforementioned reasons.
By their own volition, the Wolverines were better than Florida. In fact, here are the average poll positions of the two teams last week:
Coaches........Harris
Michigan 3.07..Michigan 3.07
Florida 3.70.....Florida 3.82
It was OK for Michigan to be ranked well ahead of the Gators because USC would have played for the title, and the two major conundrums regarding rematch and conference winner would have been avoided. Yet, when USC lost, Michigan didn’t slide into the second spot in the human polls as every other team had before them. Instead, voters who admitted that Michigan was better and more dangerous suddenly voted the squad du jour, Florida, ahead of the Wolverines because Florida won its conference and hadn’t played in Columbus this year. Florida isn’t the second best team, BUT blah blah blah rematch blah blah blah hardest conference blah blah blah.
This week, Michigan didn’t play and Florida defeated a weaker opponent, so logically the new averages looked like this:
Coaches...........Harris
Florida 2.29......Florida 2.37
Michigan 2.71...Michigan 2.71
And this was after a stretch where Florida lost, beat 8-4 Georgia by 7, beat 4-8 Vanderbilt by 6, squeaked out a home win over South Carolina by 1 thanks to two blocked kicks, survived against 6-6 Florida State 21-14, and was unanimously regarded as out of the national title picture.
In an epic embarrassment, someone in the Harris poll voted Florida first (presumably so they would gain extra points over Michigan, not because that person suddenly believes the Gators are better than Ohio State). Florida and Michigan didn’t even receive all of the remaining second and third place votes. Apparently, college football “champions” are determined by this impregnable, Mensa-like logic.
Furthermore, nowhere in the BCS handbook does it say a team must win its conference, and that a title game can’t be a rematch. A decade ago, college football had a championship game that was a rematch between Florida and Florida State - also a rivalry game for those suggesting rivals can’t meet twice in the same year. Nebraska and Oklahoma - also rivals - just played in a rematch for the Big XII title. Perhaps the Big XII should have intervened and voted a different representative in to play Oklahoma because the Huskers already had their shot. Two of the great sports stories of the last 20 years finished with rematches - the New England Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams for their first championship, and Villanova shocked Georgetown in 1985. There are dozens more.
The result of this BCS becomes even more preposterous when the logic behind the vote is carried out. If Florida had lost, would Louisville have passed Michigan and LSU because a team was needed for the “title” game that hadn’t played OSU and won it’s conference? If Rutgers had won the Big East would Boise State have been chosen over Wisconsin, Louisville, USC, LSU, and Michigan to fit the new criteria?
The need for a playoff system is so obvious and has been opined about endlessly in previous years. Thousands have commented on how sports winners aren’t determined by best regular season record, and lists have been compiled of all the champions that would have never been with a “BCS” system (in fact, it is a rarity for the team with the best regular season performance to win the championship, and that is against equal competition in pro sports). By now, everyone knows how easy it would be set up an eight team playoff, keep the BCS people happy by allowing them to select the eight teams, and play a three round tournament at the bowl sites. Someday, somehow, it will happen. And when a playoff resuscitates the sport, it will be a glorious resurrection.
Until then, RIP college football.
P.S. To any fan of college football, the only way to revive the sport is to completely boycott it. Nothing speaks louder than empty stadiums and poor TV ratings. This message payed for by “Boycott for a Playoff ‘07.”
Edit: The Harris poll voter who ranked Florida first is someone named Jim Walden. Whether Mr. Walden has ever seen a college football game or is a real person is questionable, but he is helping to decide the “champion.” His ballot had Oklahoma fourth, Boise State fifth, Wake Forest seventh, and LSU eleventh. Other curious ballots include Rondo Fienberg, Charlie Cavagnaro, Larry Keech, Robert Lawless, Lance Mclhenny, Craig Morton, Tim Neverett, and Gene Ponti.
All votes can be seen here.
posted by Ben Taylor | 3:00 AM
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