Tag: sports

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thoughts

How the Big 12 should structure their conference championship

With yesterday’s rule change on holding conference championships the Big 12 has an opportunity to get their “13th data point” but they can structure it so that they only hold a championship when they don’t have a clear champion already. The way to do that would be to only hold a championship game when the team with the best conference record doesn’t have at least a two game lead in both their conference record and their overall record. (They might make an exception to the two game rule if the conference leader either lost to the team two games behind them or won on their home field.)

The two game rule means that most years they would be holding a championship game but it allows them to avoid a trap game for their conference champion when they already have a clear winner. (That 13th data point doesn’t mean much when 12-0/9-0 #1 team beats 9-3/7-2 #2 team again but it sure hurts the whole conference if they lose.)

Categories
culture life

Fixing the BCS Title Game


photo credit: avinashkunnath

It’s time to set the record straight on the difference between the best BCS football programs and the best non-BCS football programs in response to the ill-advised and self-serving comments of Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee. TCU did their part responding on the field by beating 11-1 Big Ten co-champion Wisconsin (from Mr. Gee’s own BCS conference) and people have noticed.

Mr. Gee’s claim was that the schedule in a non-BCS conference could not compare to the schedule in a BCS conference. The fact is that conference schedules account for only 2/3 of the season and that strong BCS programs rarely play a decent opponent outside of their conference. They’re too busy playing the “Little Sisters of the Poor”—either weak teams from weak conferences or teams that do not even play at the FBS level. (Of course there are some rivalry exceptions but they are a minority of non-conference contests among BCS programs.) Non-BCS programs spend most of their non-conference games playing the toughest teams that are willing to agree to play from BCS conferences.

Continue reading “Fixing the BCS Title Game”
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Uncategorized

Mountain West Perfection

I noticed after publishing my Split Championship post that the Mountain West Conference managed to get the perfect football season that they fell short of last year with perfect order top to bottom in the conference.

The only blemish being their 4-1 record in bowl games this year and the glitch that Colorado State appears to have played an easier non-conference schedule than UNLV, San Diego State, and New Mexico.

Categories
politics thoughts

Split Championship

With Cincinnati falling hard to Florida we can rest assured that there will be two and only two undefeated FBS football teams this year. Last year Utah failed to convince the AP voters that as the only undefeated team in the FBS they deserved at least a split of the title, despite the fact that they beat Alabama more convincingly than Florida had in the SEC Championship game. Of course that turned out to be a great excuse for Barack Obama, Orrin Hatch, and Mark Shurtleff  (among others) to complain to Congress and the media about the BCS.

This year I have already heard some people who argue out of spite that the winner of the Alabama – Texas game should not be considered the National Champion. Personally I think that’s foolish. Whatever team wins that game will have gone undefeated having played against an undefeated team in their bowl game. What more could we ask of them? The same criteria will apply to the winner of the TCU – Boise State game and thus I argue that while the coaches are obligated to vote for the winner of Alabama-Texas the AP voters should create a split championship by voting for the winner of the TCU-Boise State game (unless Texas-Alabama is compelling while TCU-Boise State turns out to be a really sloppy game on both sides). In fact, Obama should follow his sportsman’s heart by inviting both teams to the White House and honoring them as is traditional for the National Champion. (If he really wants a playoff the President could invite them on the same day and watch them play a friendly scrimmage. 😉 )

I just had to get this out before the Fiesta Bowl began today so that I could be fair to both teams – especially considering I have a favorite in this contest. While I like both TCU and Boise State better than either Texas or Alabama I would definitely prefer to see TCU win.

Categories
culture politics

Challenge vs Competition

I don’t recall what triggered the thought, but over the Thanksgiving break I had a little insight into the vital difference between a challenge and a competition. A competition is something like a sporting event where there can only be one winner (excluding ties). It is an event where the winner is determined as a function of relative position. A challenge is an event where there can be multiple winners because winning is determined as a function of achievement based on static criteria.

A marathon provides a good example of both. Winning a marathon is a competition. The winning time of any one race has no bearing on the outcome of other races. Your time in one race may be too slow to win while the same time in another race would constitute first place. Finishing a marathon is a challenge – any marathon runner will congratulate any other on the accomplishment of running that 26.2 mile race. Finishing a marathon in under 3 hours is a challenge – no matter how many people accomplish the feat, my finishing in under three hours does not diminish your success in finishing in under three hours.

The distinction here might seem trivial, but I believe that we can find valuable benefits from being able to distinguish between a competition and a challenge. For some non-athletic examples: getting elected to a political office is a competition (assuming you are not unapposed) while getting into heaven is a challenge.

Categories
thoughts

Almost Perfect

The BYU Football team motto for this year was “the quest for perfection.” It looks like the Mountain West Conference adopted the same goal. Like the Cougars, the conference fell short of its goal. There was exactly one conference game that did not follow the script this year. Here are the final conference standings for 2008:

The only game that did not follow the script for perfection this year was played on Saturday, November 22nd. Some people might expect that I would suggest that the BYU/Utah game was the one that didn’t go the right way – they would be wrong. The game that failed to follow the script was the UNLV/San Diego St. game. Had that game gone the other way the standings would be:

2008 Standings - perfected
2008 Standings - perfected

The perfection here is not just the order, but the fact that every team would have lost to every team ranked higher and beaten every team ranked lower. There would be no way to argue who was better based on overall standings or individual games.

Categories
culture politics

A Universal Dream

Is there anyone who could not support the dream shared by Jess:

it’s my dream that the citizens of our country renew their interest in politics half as much as they love the olympic games. . .

to preserve the posterity of politics in our country, the greatest country in the world, we need to start caring about the leadership of our country like we care about the olympics. that surge of patriotism we feel when a united states athlete wins a medal in the olympics – i wish we’d experience some of that same feeling when we are in the process of selecting our next mayor, governor or president.

in turn, the leadership of our country must train like athletes – they need to be inspirational. they need to be focused. they need to be uniting. they must never give up. they must aspire for greatness . . . if they could accomplish those things, we would offer our support . . . because they are AMERICAN, not because they are a democrat or a republican. we’d stand with them because we’re proud of their accomplishment . . .

(spelling and punctuation original)

If anyone can’t get behind that kind of a dream they probably should not be a citizen of this country. Unfortunately, even if Michael Phelps has political interest he can’t run for President until 2020 – we can’t afford to wait that long.

Categories
life

Since I’ve Been Gone

I finally got to really look at the news tonight as I was waiting for some laundry to finish packing to return home tomorrow and I started to wonder what planet I was on as I saw two of today’s headlines in sports news:

Who knew a week could last that long.

Categories
National politics

Charting Government Fiscal Irresponsibility

While trying to find out how Tiger Woods did in the playoff round of the U.S. Open today (he birdied the last hole to force sudden death and then won on the first sudden death playoff hole) I stumbled upon news of the launching of PerotCharts.com. This website is a project of Ross Perot which provides important information that every person in the U.S. needs to understand (and every member of Congress needs to accept). Helping Ross Perot is David Walker who was the Comptroller General of the United States until recently – he was the person responsible for creating government fiscal projections and he seems to be tired of having his numbers spun by politicians for their own gain at our national peril.

Using data from the government itself, Perot Charts shows the fiscal cliff that we are facing and on “chart” 34 of a 35 chart Fiscal Challenges presentation there are four suggestions for how to begin correcting our dire situation:

    • Restructure existing entitlement programs
    • Raise payroll taxes and/or income taxes
    • Borrow more money each year to make up the shortfall
    • Cut discretionary spending even further

Of those four suggestions, we should be implementing at least 2 if not 3 of them (restructuring entitlement programs, cutting discretionary spending, and finding ways to raise revenue as well). What we don’t need is to borrow more – that only exacerbates the problem.

Categories
culture

Playoffs vs Bowl Games

Before the BCS pairings were even announced yesterday I heard people talking about how this year should be conclusive evidence that we need to have a playoff for the National Championship in NCAA Football. I disagree. I think that Mike Lopresti got it right (again):

So ends an entirely captivating, wildly absorbing, deliciously unpredictable college football regular season. And now at the finish, what do we see?

Controversy. Mayhem. Protests.

Ain’t it great?

Here comes the BCS bashing, clanging like cymbals in a band, guaranteeing peace in our time — if only there could be a playoff.

Yeah, right. Put eight teams in a playoff. One would have to be Georgia, of course. Hottest team at the end, and all that.

Now go tell that to Tennessee, who won the division that Georgia could not, and beat the Bulldogs head-to-head by three touchdowns. And what about Hawaii? You going to have eight teams in a playoff and leave out the only team in the land with a 12-0 record? Or 11-1 Kansas? Or Missouri, which somehow fell from No. 1 to the Cotton Bowl in 24 hours? Just a few of many dilemmas.

The howls can be heard, though, now that the bowl pairings are out.

THE SYSTEM DIDN’T GET IT RIGHT!

No it didn’t, because there is no right answer. Not for the BCS. Not for a playoff. Someone will always feel shafted. Someone will always have another case to make. There will always be politicking, because if you need two teams, you can’t pick three. And if you need eight, you can’t choose nine.

He missed one thing there – college athletes are not professionals. I know, they work as hard as the professionals (perhaps harder) but thankfully they are still expected to be students and do more than take the field for our entertainment. The fact that we have an imperfect BCS system means that we as fans get to participate in a much more animated discussion surrounding what is happening, right or wrong, in college football. The fact that we don’t have a fool-proof way to declare a champion every year might serve to remind us that there is more to life than sports – no matter how entertaining those sports may be.

Let’s not ruin that by throwing together an imperfect playoff system that would concentrate more money in the big name leagues than we already have and give us the false sense that we really were getting the right champion every time. We’ll never be able to get a football playoff large enough (like the 65-team March Madness) so that the schools at the bottom of the pool will prove each year that while they might surprise us they still never win it all. Each time the lowest seeded team wins we have to wonder why not number 9, or 17, or 66?

Let’s just admit that the system is imperfect but the goal is entertainment, not clarity.