Cardinals in the Super Bowl = BCS is awesome

Stewart Mandel, who I normally really like, launches a myopic (and kind of angry) defense of the current BCS system.

Each year, when fans, broadcasters and columnists engage in their annual hand-wringing over the lack of a college football playoff, the lords of the BCS defend their divisive system by noting a playoff would deflate the sport's uniquely gripping regular season.... Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the living embodiment of a devalued regular season: The Arizona Cardinals.

[Basing a broad argument on a sample size of *one* specific instance? Solid.]

Because the sport employs a traditional playoff rather than polls and computers, a Cardinals championship will be deemed far more legitimate than Florida's BCS title this past college season. Four great playoff games will override four months of mediocrity.

["Playing actual games" is an inherently more legitimate "polls and computers" means of determining which is the better team, right?]

"If the NFL has now arrived at a strange point where regular-season performance does nothing to predict playoff performance, and every team has an equal chance to win if they make the tournament, is that bad for the league?" Football Outsiders president Aaron Schatz wrote [Peter] King in an e-mail. It's certainly bad for the Tennessee Titans, whose league-best 13-3 record this season earned them ... bupkis.

[WRONG. Having the league's best record earned them (1) the privilege of playing one fewer game to win the championship (having to win 3 games >>> having to win 4 games); and (2) the opportunity to play at home (the Titans were 7-1 at home this year). Just because the Titans lost that playoff game does not mean that the privileges garnered by having the league's best record were devoid of value.]

[W]hy does the NFL even bother to hold a regular season? (Wait, I know -- for fantasy football and gamblers.) Why not stage one big, 32-team playoff?

[Glib.]

In a story from last week's Sports Illustrated leading up to the NFC title game, Cardinals defensive end Bertrand Berry explained his team's late-season slump thusly: "Mentally we eased up a little bit because we had clinched [the NFC West division] so early." That, my friends, is exactly what college football's powers-that-be fear most. Theirs is the only sport where every single game truly matters, where you can't afford to take your foot off the peddle for even one week.

[Again, not always true. Both Florida and Oklahoma lost a game in the regular season. Did it ultimately matter? No. They still made the title game. Plus, the "every game truly matters" mantra results in embarrassing non-conference scheduling by the perennial powers (e.g., Florida hosting Citadel, Oklahoma hosting Chattanooga, etc.). *Winning* every game truly matters, so let's line-up as many non-conference cupcakes as we can. Now THAT'S a meaningful regular season.]

The Virginia Tech Hokies are a more appropriate college parallel to the Cardinals. The Hokies won the ACC last season with a 9-4 record. They were ranked 19th in the final BCS standings and hadn't entered the national-title discussion since the preseason. However, in a playoff, Virginia Tech would have been guaranteed a berth. (Every other major sport, college and professional, gives first dibs to conference/division champions. College football wouldn't be any different.) Who's to say the Hokies couldn't have gotten hot, pulled off a couple of upsets and won the whole thing?

[I don't understand why a team getting "hot" is dismissed as some completely arbitrary stroke of luck. If a Florida's blow-out win against Citadel is so meaningful, why wouldn't a Virgina Tech win over Florida in a playoff format be viewed the same way?]

A national champion with four losses. There goes your "meaningful" regular season.

[Yes, because in a system wherein the contending teams almost *never* share common opponents, win-loss records should be the sole basis for comparing teams' relative dominance.]

Don't get me wrong, the BCS is far from ideal. Now more than ever, it's an inherently ludicrous task to identify just two teams worthy of a shot at the national championship.

[That's kind of *my* point, right? But yeah, let's just stick with the inherently ludicrious approach.]

With a playoff in place, fans would inevitably lose interest once their teams were eliminated from contention.

[Another off-base blanket statement. Most teams (in the current system) are out of contention once they lose their *first* game. I'm pretty sure most fans continue to follow as the season goes along.]

Even if the bowls stayed in business, they'd become to football what the NIT is to basketball.

[This argument always confuses me. Isn't that what the bowls already are?? We have the National Championship game, and then all other bowls. Am I missing something?]

Meanwhile, the regular season would become just like the NFL's and college basketball's. Instead of revolving around the national-title race, the biggest games at the end of the season would be those involving potential wild-card or at-large teams.

[Which would mean that there would be *more* big games each week, right? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.]

In college football, there's always at least one, if not several, big "national" games each week (like the ones GameDay features). With a playoff, it would be more like basketball, where there are only two truly "big" games unaffiliated fans watch in droves: The two Duke-North Carolina games. Just substitute Ohio State-Michigan and Oklahoma-Texas.

[See the previous point. Opening up a shot to play for a national title to four or eight teams (instead of just two) would inherently create more important regular season match-ups. That *has* to be correct, doesn't it?]

Obviously, the NFL doesn't exactly suffer because of its playoff format. Fans will not be any less interested in next September's games due to the Cardinals' presence in this year's Super Bowl.

[Ugh. I'm glad we just wasted the previous ten minutes reading how much the NFL's system sucks...... just to come to the conclusion that the NFL system is actually fine.]

If the Cardinals played in college, they might have finished their season in the hometown Insight Bowl. Last month, two 7-5 teams -- Minnesota and Kansas -- played in that relatively low-profile game. It's funny. In college, we complain when mediocre teams like the Gophers and Jayhawks are rewarded with bowl berths. In the pros, the system rewards comparable teams with a shot at the championship.

[This is hyperbole. A 7-5 team would *never* qualify for a four or eight team college playoff. And a "shot" at the championship still requires a team to win games (three, for a team like the Cardinals)-- which is not exactly a hand-out.

P.S. Mandel, ask undefeated Utah how truly meaningful the college football regular season is. The BCS will remain in place because it puts the big schools at an obvious and distinct advantage, thereby making the regular season almost completely meaningless for everyone not included in that group.]

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.

Four Problems with the BCS

To make a comment that is completely devoid of freshness or originality, the BCS system for determining the NCAA-sanctioned college football national champion is a complete joke. Except it’s not funny.

Kind of like this blog.

(I made a funny! I made a funny!)

Bill James had, as you would expect, a good column in Slate that outlines some of the key issues with the BCS system:

The problems with the BCS are:
1. That there is a profound lack of conceptual clarity about the goals of the method;

This is reflected in the fact that the rankings are routinely described as "computer" rankings. Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

Until they become self-aware and try to destroy their creators. But at that point I doubt that we will care very much about the college football championship, so I’m willing to take this point at face value.

2. That there is no genuine interest here in using statistical analysis to figure out how the teams compare with one another. The real purpose is to create some gobbledygook math to endorse the coaches' and sportswriters' vote;

Throughout the 11 years of the BCS, whenever the "computer" rankings have diverged markedly from the polls, the consensus reaction has been, we have to do something about those computers. And they have.

I am shocked, shocked that people would disdain statistics that challenged their preconceived notion of thing. If that sort of thing really happened, websites like Fire Joe Morgan would have been wildly successful. What? Eh? Oh.

3. That the ground rules of the calculations are irrational and prevent the statisticians from making any meaningful contribution;

The prohibition against using point differentials to rank teams, of course, dates from the Nebraska-in-2001 experience, when those dirty Cornhuskers beat Troy State, Rice, Missouri, Iowa State, Baylor, and Kansas all by 28 points or more. The BCS reacted to this by requiring the computer rankings to treat a 56-7 victory the same as a 20-17 contest.

I am a rank mathematical amateur. And that’s not false modesty…I mean, I work in advertising. Outside of counting change, which I rarely use because I have a credit card, there is no reason for me to use math. (Except, of course, during baseball season, when I just look at stats in an Excel pivot table rather than watch the games because going to the games requires me to change out of my pajamas and leave my Mom’s basement. But I digress…)

The fact is that even for an amateur like me it is easy to conceive of how statistics could be used to measure the relative strength of sports teams based on competitive results among them, where not all teams play each other…just like college football where USC may not have played Texas, but they both played Ohio State.

To illustrate, imagine a small league with just four teams, in this instance, Holy Cross, Bucknell, Colgate and Lafayette. None has played before so, pre-season polls be damned, they all start with a comparative strength rating of 50 (on a scale of 1 to 100):

Holy Cross: 50
Bucknell: 50
Colgate: 50
Lafayette: 50

Holy Cross opens their season with a two-touchdown win against Bucknell. Colgate also wins by two touchdowns against Lafayette. Let’s assume, as simple math peons, that a two-touchdown win indicates a relative strength ratio of 80-20. The new ratings then become:

Holy Cross: 80
Colgate: 80
Lafayette: 20
Bucknell: 20

The next week the two losing teams play, with Lafayette running out victorious against Bucknell by a touchdown. We now have information about the relative strength of Lafayette and Bucknell. And we also have information about the relative strength of Holy Cross and Colgate, which we didn’t have before (Lafayette now being known as the more difficult opponent, Colgate’s win over them entitles them to a slightly higher ranking than the Mighty Crusaders).

From this point on, every result between any two teams must adjust, however slightly, the ratings of all other teams. The math to figure out how was beyond me. Luckily, it was not beyond Google…which took 0.00025 seconds to come back with results to my query, including the Perron-Frobenius Theorem, that may hold the answer.

I don’t claim to understand the Perron-Frobenius Theorem beyond knowing that it is different than the Infinite Sportswriter Theorem, but if a little bit of research can get me on the scent of a statistical system that could possibly determine relative strength of teams that don’t play each other, it is clear that someone who knows about these things could, too.

Except, if we used statistics to determine the best teams, what would it matter what sportswriters thought?

4. That the existence of this system has the purpose of justifying a few rich conferences in hijacking the search for a national title, avoiding a postseason tournament that would be preferred by the overwhelming majority of fans.
In the 1990s there was a strong movement, within the NCAA, to organize a national postseason football tournament. The problem was, had the NCAA in fact organized such a championship, two other events would almost certainly have followed:

1. The smaller schools, which outnumber the big football powerhouses about 5-to-1, would have voted to send a lot of the money to the smaller schools that in fact had not participated in the national championship contest in any meaningful way.
2. The big football schools would have bolted and revolted. They'd have walked out of the NCAA and formed their own organization. The two-tiered system of NCAA and NAIA schools would have been replaced by a three-tiered system with the NCAA occupying the middle tier.

It is sad that the result is neither a sixteen team playoff nor a statistical method of determining the relative strengths of teams nor even the old system that let the teams play their whole schedule and allowed coaches and journalists to vote on their relative strength based on the results of that whole schedule, but instead an arbitrary method that determines who will play for the “title game,” the winner of which MUST BE CHOSEN as the national champion.

Because that is the way these things work.

And if they don’t work, we can just adjust the computers, right?

Let the BCS Absurdity Begin!

With the BCS title game only (approximately) 87 days away, David Whitley of the Orlando Sentinel is excited and perfectly lucid!

The early prediction: Florida 107, Oklahoma 94.

[Now's there's a scenario that would get me to actually watch the game.]

These two teams don't like each other.

[Long, bitter rivalry? Hard-fought battles in recent seasons?]

Actually, they hardly know each other. Florida and Oklahoma have never played.

[In a related story, every time that David Whitley bumps into a total stranger on the street, he punches them in the neck.]

So is Oklahoma's offense that good, or are Big 12 defenses that bad? Yes.

[Yes??? What the hell, man? It was an "or" question. And neither of the options on either side of the "or" were "Yes." Solid analysis.]

BCS Problems? Solved!

Chris Dufresne of the Los Angeles Times thinks that we are all overlooking an obvious title-contender.

What if Alabama hands Florida a second loss in Saturday's SEC title game and three-loss Missouri shocks Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game?

[Take a closer look at the BCS bylaws, Dufresne. In this situation, the National Title game is cancelled and Notre Dame is crowned as the National Champion.]

Everyone assumes Alabama would play Texas. Not so fast. Texas didn't even win its conference.

[True. But I'm pretty sure that you don't have to win your conference to play in the title game, right?]

[C]ommissioners considered a rule change that would have required title-game participants to be league champions. The commissioners decided against it, but many still think it's a good idea. Sorry, Texas, for the purposes of this argument you're out.

[Good sequence there. Assume X. See if there is a rule to support X. Admit that there is not a rule to support X. Announce that it'd be awesome if there was, in fact, a rule to support X. Proceed with analysis as if there was a rule to support X. QED.]

Meaning: the school that deserves to play Alabama in this scenario would be the University of . . . Utah. All this talk-radio and Internet chatter about USC somehow slipping in the BCS title-game back door is being done with complete disregard for Utah.

[So you believe that Utah is the better team? OK, I'm listening.]

USC is the better team, OK, we all know that.

[Gotcha. Good talk. Actually, the strange thing is that Dufresne goes on to put forth a host of objective or semi-objective arguments as to why Utah actually IS better than USC.... even though "we all know" that they aren't.]