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[V-Adore]

D-I college football is the only sport I can think of, at any level, where you can win every single one of your games and still not be the champion.

This is a bit tangential, but on the subject of "BCS rankings and the bizarro responses they generate": I am extremely pleased that Michigan got blown out of the water. This is not because I am an OSU student; it is because I am an OSU student who is really goddamn sick of the arguments about how Michigan deserved its Championship slot/rematch with OSU, and it was a travesty not to give it to them when they were obviously one of the two best teams in the nation blah blah blah blah blah. I know nothing will shut a dedicated football booster up for that long, but I hope I can point to the Rose Bowl and say "okay, guys, that's two games in which you could have proven to OSU how awesome you were, and you've gone 0 for 2 in them, so can we just move on? Thank you."

[theinevitable]

my school's football team is like a joke. Our conference is known as "the Nerdy Nine."

(Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Emory, New York University, University of Chicago, University of Rochester, Washington University in St. Louis, and formerly Johns Hopkins)


...that is all I know about football.

[AugustWest]

my school's football team is like a joke. Our conference is known as "the Nerdy Nine."

(Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Emory, New York University, University of Chicago, University of Rochester, Washington University in St. Louis, and formerly Johns Hopkins)


...that is all I know about football.

Go Bears!

[littlefallsmets]

I went to Syracuse, where our sporting motto is "since our basketball team is pretty good, we have to pretend that our football team isn't completely terrible, just to be fair"... they were kind of good when Donovan MacNabb was around and that quickly ended upon his pro-ification.

[Gimpson]

Back on the subject of Fantasy Football, my friends are running a Playoff Fantasy Football League.  They did it last year, and it sounded cool but I didn't really have time to put together my entry before the playoffs started.  Basically you select your roster (2QB, 3RB, 3WR, 2TE, K, DEF) such that you have exactly one player from each playoff team.  Winners are paid out each week through the Super Bowl, and we can enter multiple rosters for $10 each. 

This should be a fun exercise.  I think I will have at least one roster which counts on Indy being knocked out in the first round and New Orleans going to the Super Bowl. 

[jaydub]

I went to Syracuse, where our sporting motto is "since our basketball team is pretty good, we have to pretend that our football team isn't completely terrible, just to be fair"... they were kind of good when Donovan MacNabb was around and that quickly ended upon his pro-ification.

Anyone who goes to Syracuse should not give a rat's ass about college football and should instead be a rabid lacrosse booster.  The Gait Brothers, the Powell Dynasty, Roy Colsey, Pat McCabe, Tom Marachek, Jim Brown, 8 or 9 championships since 1980, etc, etc.

[littlefallsmets]

Anyone who goes to Syracuse should not give a rat's ass about college football and should instead be a rabid lacrosse booster.

Oh, I grew up in one of those very small pockets of the world one might call "Lacrosse Country" to begin with and, sorry, never got into it. The local community college was national junior college champions, like, every third year... my brother's best friend when he was a kid, the dad was the coach and...

Yeah, just could not get into it. Soccer + Hockey + (People Only Seem To Even Know What It Is In Northern New York, Long Island and Suburban Maryland) = not really ever able to capture my imagination. I was raised on the idea that low-minors minor league baseball was the purest form of sport and I could never shake that ingrained assumption.

"It's like hockey, played on a soccer field, with butterfly nets and horrible cripplings every five or six minutes."

Ultimate Fighter dudes go to a lacrosse game and leave ten minutes in because the whole thing's so excruciatingly brutal.

I mean, respect for dudes who can do that. I certainly could not sprint around for an hour straight while dudes hit me as hard as they possibly can with sticks and still have the wherewithall to throw and catch a tiny ball with a tiny net. But, man, it has all the "it's basically pong with attempted murder" watchability problems of... soccer and to a lesser extent, hockey... except with fifty times the attempted murder.

Young men being cut down in their prime in the midst of a friendly competition is thrilling and all but... it's still a ball going back and forth, back and forth and then someone tries to shoot a goal and probably doesn't make it and then it goes back and forth again for a while.

[Choop]

Shit my college ain't even had football.

[jaydub]

"it's basically pong with attempted murder"

I like that.  My initial problem with lacrosse was that (to my knowledge then) there was no pro league for me to see how it was played (and no Intarweb with video clips) so it wasn't until I ended up in a long-term relationship with a Women's Lacrosse player that I got familiar with it.  I tried out for the men's team the next year, and well, the rest is history.

It does involve a lot of running though.  Although I prefer to think of it as chasing.  Much less boring than endless loops of jogging around the neighborhood.

And it is painful.  But so is the rest of life.

[Lister]

Lost the championship game, because I'd counted on Philly still having something to play for and thus had three players score a total of 1 point 'cause they didn't.  Oh well, it's still not bad, I guess.  Just wish I hadn't wasted Mare's 15 point day.

I seriously hate the college football method for determining a championship.  I mean, seriously.  This is a billion dollar sport and we figure out who's best by fricking voting.  Why not just have them guess numbers from 1-100 and see who's closest?  One Potato Two?  Ouija boards?

There are 31 bowl games to be played this year.  Guess how many games you'd need to determine a 32-team bracket in a tournament?  You could even expand the field by having the top 8 teams get byes and the first round would be play-in games.  40 teams would get bowl games, and each and every one would mean something.

I see two problems: First is it would have to mean eliminating conference championship games, which I'm in favor of anyway.  It just hinders the conferences that have them, frankly.  Second, it would add up to five games for the eventual winner.  That's a lot to add, but to me it just means the best team proved it's the best unequivocably.  No amount of tricks, favorable matchups, or catching teams on a bad day will get you five consecutive wins on neutral fields.

Also: I hate the college overtime system, but that's a further digression and it is late/early.

[Gimpson]

I seriously hate the college football method for determining a championship.  I mean, seriously.  This is a billion dollar sport and we figure out who's best by fricking voting.  Why not just have them guess numbers from 1-100 and see who's closest?  One Potato Two?  Ouija boards?

This is the reason I can't ever pay attention to the college game, other than checking in on my schools (UH and Arkansas) occasionally.

There are 31 bowl games to be played this year.  Guess how many games you'd need to determine a 32-team bracket in a tournament?  You could even expand the field by having the top 8 teams get byes and the first round would be play-in games.  40 teams would get bowl games, and each and every one would mean something.

Hell, I'd be happy with a two round playoff with just the top four, but even then you'd probably get some #5's and #6's whining.  I think a three round playoff with the top eight teams is pretty much bulletproof, and is only adding a maximum of two games to the season.

Also: I hate the college overtime system, but that's a further digression and it is late/early.

Ho ho, I must disagree with you here, though.  The college overtime system is brutal and sometime ponderous, but one thing you cannot knock it for is fairness.  That game is going to be settled on the field if it kills us all.  The pro system drives me nuts; I think at a minimum each team should be guaranteed one possession. 

[CortJstr]

Ho ho, I must disagree with you here, though.  The college overtime system is brutal and sometime ponderous, but one thing you cannot knock it for is fairness.  That game is going to be settled on the field if it kills us all.  The pro system drives me nuts; I think at a minimum each team should be guaranteed one possession. 

This is how it worked in high school and I never understood why they don't scale it up. One possession each followed by sudden-death if necessary.

[littlefallsmets]

I mean, even just an eight-team playoff. Any more than three rounds and you're probably radically altering season-length, any less and you're still gonna deal with the occasional year a legit team doesn't get into the mix.

None of "the four big bowls" get screwed, you rotate a championship into one every four years, the semi-finals into two and whoever had the championship last year gets one of the quarter finals the last year and then...

Three other bowls get quarter-finals? Make up new ones if you want or... take the three most tradition laden second-tier bowls if you like? Like... I dunno... the Cotton and the Peach and the Gator Bowl? Whatever you like.

Then, not ONLY do those seven bowls all gain varying degrees of "significance" but... every other bowl is suddenly a bit more viable because they're all pretty much on equal footing as opposed to, like, twenty-eight bowls that mean NOTHING, two that kinda sorta mean a little and one that SHOULD mean everything but doesn't.

Unless you have a more-than-two-team playoff, you've got the worst of both worlds... you've not ONLY lost the old ways of "a lot of bowls potentially matter because the system of bowl match-ups is so goddamn byzantine" but you're also still lacking an actual unified championship like in any other sport.

So, today, the championship game can still be undermined by one or two other "BCS" bowls making the number 3 or 4 team look so good...  or by making an undefeated mid-major team look good by giving them one tantilizing high-profile win at the end of the year... that the "BCS Championship" is functionally meaningless.

I mean, you could even still throw the major conferences a bone insofar as the top eight tournament would be... like... the conference champions from conferences with championship games and then fill it out with the highest ranked teams after that or... all the major conference champions and then fill it out with the highest ranked teams after that or... all the major conference champions and all otherwise undefeated teams and then the highest ranked or...

There's a lot of ways to do it, clearly.

At ANY rate, there'd still be arguements, of course, but at least at that point, you're almost assured that you're not going to go into a championship playoff without the very best three or four teams all in the running and... that's what really matters.

People wanna argue over whether Such and Such U is #8 or #9 in the country, it'll still happen but... it'll harm the legitimacy of a championship volumes less than whether one of the best two or three teams is left out of the equation.

It'd be one of those "healthy debates" as opposed to a bad one.

This is why I love the long haul of the baseball season... you've got 162 games to sift out the good and the bad and... why there should really only be the LCSes and the WS in baseball. The weekly nature of football demands a lengthy playoff system and... the enormity of college basketball does as well.

But you've got 30 teams, you've got 162 games, most questions should be answered.

In basketball or hockey, they've got 82 games, that's more than enough, too.

[Nabubrush]

The college overtime system is brutal and sometime ponderous, but one thing you cannot knock it for is fairness.  That game is going to be settled on the field if it kills us all.

You know the law: Two teams enter, one team leaves.

[robot_god]

Before these NFL playoffs start in a few minutes, I'd like to take this time to present the award for the Touamb Pick 'Em Championship to The Mayor, Mr. Carlos Delvaca.

There was one week where I forgot to finalize my picks, and after that I stopped picking, but even if picks continued, he likely would have won.  Congrats.




In other news, my preseason Superbowl pick was a Manning Bowl, and I still stand by it.  However, I went through the games one by one and decided the most likely outcome will be Ravens vs. Seahawks.