I didn't see the game since I was out to dinner with Mom and the IG, but as expected (by me, anyway) Florida won the college football "national championship" on Thursday night, largely by shutting down Oklahoma's astroturf-fueled, run-it-up-in-the-4th-quarter, helpless-against-a-real-defense, chuck-and-duck style offensive machine. And that's it for the college football season, and once again, there's
nothing approaching a consensus #1. In a better world (which like all better worlds, will likely never come) we'd have two more games to look forward to next week, with the real championship the week after. The contenders:
Utah and
Florida are instant choices, and
USC too with their one fluky loss all season and a Rose Bowl whumping of Penn State.
Texas was unimpressive in their role as the annual PAC-10/Big 12/SEC school that runs rings around plodding Big 10 champion Ohio State in a disappointing BCS showdown, but we need a 4th seed, and they're the best option. And now we'll have at it. Florida vs. Texas, Utah vs. USC next week, and the two winners go at it next week for the real title. Imagine the TV ratings and ticket sales!
Since imagining is all we can do, and that eventually gets boring even when she's a size 0 with perky boobs, here's
a new, stat-free article by noted baseball statistician Bill James about why the BCS fails. Hint: it's by design. Here's his concluding paragraph:
...until that happens, statisticians, quantitative analysts, and all related professionals should have the dignity, the self-respect, and the common sense to have nothing to do with the BCS. This isn't a national championship—it's a big-money waltz. The only role that the computer rankings play in this is that they're there to take the fall when the system doesn't work—and it doesn't work most of the time. When it doesn't, you can put the blame on the greedy small schools that wanted to milk money from the big football factories, on the greedy big schools that wanted to keep as much money as possible in the fewest possible hands, on the lunk-head football coaches who can't program a computer to play tic-tac-toe but want to make all the rules, or on the Congress that sits idly by and watches it happen. You guys want to make a mess of this, you can make a mess of it without our help.
Labels: football
