Back to the BCS

More BCS madness, this time courtesy of Rick Reilly:

Some gifts people give are pointless: Styling mousse to Dick Vitale. An all-you-can-eat card to Kate Moss. The BCS Championship given to Oklahoma or Florida.

One these things is not like the others, one of these things just isn’t the same…

Dick Vitale doesn’t want styling mousse. Though unfunny, I get the joke that Reilly is making about the very thin Kate Moss not wanting an all-you-can-eat card, whatever that is. Oklahoma and Florida though both very much want(ed) the BCS “national championship.”

Logic fail.

It means nothing because the BCS has no credibility.

Rick Reilly, however, has all the credibility. He’s practically made of credibility. In fact, when he writes his columns, he sits in a little cave on a mountain of credibility, a sportswriter Swami whose turban, incidentally, is woven out of credibility.

Florida? Oklahoma? Who cares? Utah is the national champion.

Because Rick Reilly gets to decide these things.

The End. Roll credits.

And when he makes a decision, goddamn it, it’s final.

Argue with this, please. I beg you.

No need to beg.

Find me anybody else that went undefeated. Thirteen-and-zero.

This is probably the best argument in Utah’s favor…except that the nature of college football means that not all teams can play each other, making an obvious indicator like record less useful than it is in, say, baseball. Also, the vagaries of strength of schedule play a factor, meaning that games like those Utah played against Michigan and Wyoming are more like scrimmages than actual competitive contests. Finally, because there is no playoff, the current system relies on voters going with their gut.

Reilly is going with his gut on this one, decrying a system based on going on the gut of so-called experts because his gut disagrees.

Airtight case, this one.

Beat four ranked teams.

You know who else beat four ranked teams this year?

Florida. They defeated #5 Oklahoma, #6 Alabama, #10 Georgia, and #23 Florida State.

USC. They utterly destroyed #8 Penn State, #9 Oregon, #11 Ohio State, and #25 California.

Texas. They beat #5 Oklahoma, #11 Ohio State, #16 Missouri, and #18 Oklahoma State.

In fact, one team even beat five ranked opponents.

Oklahoma. The Sooners rang up victories against #7 TCU, #12 Texas Tech, #16 Missouri, #17 Cincinnati and #18 Oklahoma State.

Other than that, good point.

Went to the Deep South and seal-clubbed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.

What Rick actually meant was: went to a neutral site where the fans were split evenly between the two teams and seal-clubbed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.

The same Alabama that was ranked No. 1 for five weeks.

As anyone who watched the Tide this season knows, the Utes put the hurt on a team with real quality.

The same Alabama that went undefeated in the regular season.

We get it, Alabama was a good football team.

The same Alabama that Florida beat in order to get INTO the BCS Championship game in the first place.

Florida > Alabama. Utah > Alabama. Though there is an argument, if we consider only these two results and finely weight on the relative margins of victory, that this could equal Utah > Florida, a sensible person clearly can’t consider only those two games.

In fact, a sensible person would likely have to do some pretty sophisticated mathematics, maybe even involving the Perron-Frobenius Theorem, to correctly weigh the relative strength of the teams that have an argument for the national title based on the results of the games that they played this season.

All the games. Not just two.

And not just for Utah and Florida either, but for everybody in Division 1 (especially teams like USC and Texas who negotiated a demanding schedule with some success). After all, the point is to determine the best team in the country. Let’s leave no stone unturned.

Or, instead of trying to use statistics to find out the true relative ability of the Division 1 football teams, you could just say that 13-0 Utah is the best because they lost no games and beat Alabama.

That way does take less math.