College Football Review - aka Annual BCS Complaint

Everyone is upset with the BCS, again. Instead of posting a rant (thanks Mike!), I wanted to break it down and provide my suggestions for fixing ALL of college football's problems, not just the BCS. First, let's look at why it is ridiculous that Oklahoma is going to the Big 12 Championship.

1. The obvious - Texas beat Oklahoma
2. Texas was ranked ahead of Oklahoma last week - They both won this week, so why is Oklahoma now better than Texas?
3. Oklahoma has choked in BCS Bowls - If the Big 10 is going to be penalized by OSU's back-to-back choke jobs (Penn State only has 1 loss but is not included in any national championship discussion), why isn't Oklahoma? They've lost 4 straight BCS games, including 2 National Championships, by an average score of 42-26.
4. The BCS is not intended to decide conference championship teams - The BCS standings was the final tiebreaker between Texas, Oklahoma, and Texas Tech to represent the Big 12 South in the Big 12 Championship game. However, according to the official BCS website, the 3 purposes of the BCS standings are: 1. Selecting the teams that will participate in the national championship game, 2. Determining any other automatic qualifiers (to the BCS games), 3. Establishing the pool of eligible teams for at-large selection.

What will make things REALLY interesting would be if Oklahoma somehow loses to Missouri. Of course they would send Texas, but how can they justify sending yet another team to the National Championship game that didn't win their own conference??

The BCS is philosophically flawed - last week, MSU was ranked 19th. They didn't play a game and 4 teams ranked higher than us lost. Where are we this week? Two spots lower (19 to 21). How did we get worse? While I recognize the change in ranking is meaningless to us, it is more proof that the rankings don't make sense.

The Big 10 has a competitive disadvantage because we don't have a conference championship game (and therefore end the season earlier). On the flip side, it's not fair that in some stronger conferences, like the SEC and Big 12, have 12 teams fighting for one, possibly two, spots while the very weak Big East has 8 teams fighting for one guaranteed spot. This year, Cincinnati and Boston College/Virginia Tech will have BCS games while Texas Tech won't. Neither will Boise St and Ball St because they play in the wrong conference. So here's what we need to do to solve all of the issues.

1. Missouri is added to the Big 10, which can now have a conference championship game.
Missouri would fit in as a mid-upper tier football team and a mid-lower tier basketball team. I would arrange the two divisions as such:
Big 10 North
Michigan
Michigan State
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Illinois
Northwestern

Big 10 South
Ohio State
Penn State
Purdue
Indiana
Missouri
Iowa

2. Boise St is added to the Big 12 to replace Missouri.
They have demonstrated year after year that they can compete. Instead of listening them whine about not having a chance at a national championship, lets put them in a real conference and see how they perform. Their crazy offenive plays bring a lot of excitement to the Big 12 - remember the Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma?

3. Utah and Hawaii are added to the Pac 10 to make it a 12 team conference so a championship game is created.
4. Notre Dame is forced to join the Big East, like it is in basketball.
5. Temple is moved to the Big East, leaving the MAC East with the proper number of 6 teams.
6. Two other random teams are added to the Big East so they have 12 teams and a conference championship game as well.
7. FBS (Division I-A) teams are no longer allowed to play FCS (Division I-AA) teams.
8. Each team plays the other 5 teams in their division, 3 other teams in their conference, 3 non-conference games, and 1 bye week. If we followed this system this year, conference championships could have taken place the weekend of Nov 22nd.
9. BCS rankings are no longer released until the end of the regular season.
10. An 8 team playoff system, consisting of the top 8 ranked teams at the end of the season, is created. Since each conference would have a Championship game, the conference champions would receive a natural boost in the rankings since they won a game after the regular season ended. They would not be guaranteed a playoff spot, however. Under this plan, Big East Champion Cincinnati would not be in the playoffs and they don't deserve to be. If this was in place this year, the first round would have been Thanksgiving weekend. The second round could either be this weekend or on January 1st. The championship game would remain where it is.

Now here's why they would never agree to this. And I promise the real answer has NOTHING to do with their players' academic schedules.

a. While no fan would miss a game versus the directional schools, the universities would miss out on a lot of revenue.
b. Under any kind of playoff system, they will lose sponsorship revenue. How could FedEx/Citi/AllState/Tostitos sponsor individual playoff games with the same effectiveness as the BCS games? Lost sponsorship revenue equals lost revenue for the universities in those games.
c. Right now they have over a month to sell upwards of 70,000 expensive tickets to fans and alumni for one bowl game. A playoff system makes it more difficult to mobilize fans, unless the playoff games take place at one of the universities. If that's the case, good luck coordinating a game in Columbus or Ann Arbor in December/January. Plus, the cities that host the BCS games would lobby hard to keep the games and the tourism boost that comes with it.
d. There's still the issue of getting the television network that owns the rights to the BCS games to switch to a playoff system. For them, the system isn't broke because the ratings are great. So why would they want to risk changing that?
e. Finally, people who are anti-playoff will always argue that no matter how many teams you include, there will be controversy over who was left out of the playoff.

As you can tell, I believe it's all about the money. The people in charge of the system are making a great deal off of the BCS games, so until someone can convince them that they can make more money from a playoff system, it's not going to change. I just don't want to be around when we're the team that gets shorted.

(Side note: keep in mind, Division 1-A, or FBS, is the only NCAA sport without a playoff system and is the only one, therefore, where an "NCAA Championship" is not awarded. It's the "BCS National Championship" with the ugly, crystal, insert-some-company-name-trophy.)

What?!

Let me be the first to say it: that 24 "movie" was crap. It was boring and it didn't tell us anything. I thought it was supposed to tell us what happened to Jack between last season (which by my recollection was in 1996) and the next. So what did it tell us? Jack hid in a fake African country playing missionary worker. I guarantee you that 90% of what you saw tonight will be ignored and forgotten after the first 20 mins of the next season.

The thing that bothers me is that they are committing the same errors as before by introducing characters, trying to get you to care about them, and then killing them off.

I'm about ready to give up.

FF Analysis Part 1

DISCLAIMER: This post is a compilation of my research based on Mike's Fantasy Football post. Reading some of this information may upset you, especially if you're Mike. This post is not intended to boast about my team's performance this season, so don't call me a dick. This is part one of my two part analysis. The next part will attempt to analyze each person's skill.

Since I had the least amount of "Fantasy Points Against", I assumed that means that I had the easiest "strength of schedule". I wanted to see how every other team would have handled my schedule. Not surprising, Mike's record would have improved the most. I am proud to say, while 4 people would have improved their record, nobody would have had as many wins as I have.

(Side note: Even though I am comparing each person's weekly fantasy score against the score of my opponent for that week, I kept each person's result against me the same. So, for example, I played Canadian Beasters in week 1. He scored 70.98 points and I won. Therefore, week one counts as a loss for him. Wicked Weasels beat me in week 3, so that counts as a win for him. Sorry if that's too confusing.)

Week 1 was the only week where the results would have been the exact same. There were two weeks (2 and 6) that I won, but would have lost had I played anyone else. In week 3, I lost and would have lost to anyone since I was lowest in points that week. I lead the league in scoring in week 7. Below are the rankings in order of how many more wins each person would have gained.

+5 Cumming from Behind 6-4
+2 Wicked Weasels 6-4
+1 Kevinexorable 7-3
+1 WooHoo Still Last 4-6
e I Miss Aaron Rowand 6-4
e Zoo Tycoons 5-5
-1 Canadian Beasters 6-4

Looking at these results, I thought if Dave had fewer wins by playing my schedule, perhaps his schedule was easier than mine. Perhaps I could even be 9-1 with his schedule! So I ran the numbers again with his schedule.

+6 Cumming from Behind 7-3
+2 Zoo Tycoons 7-3
+1 Wicked Weasels 5-5
e I Miss Aaron Rowand 6-4
e WooHoo Still Lost 3-7
-1 Kevinexorable 5-5
-2 Boston Massacre 6-4

Ok, so I was wrong - I had the easiest schedule since it benefitted 4 people compared to 3 and lead to a net gain of 8 wins versus a net gain of 6 with Dave's schedule. Obviously the most interesting thing about this difference is that Mike would have EVEN MORE wins with Dave's schedule and would be in 3rd place right now in our league. I think it is also interesting that Kevin would benefit by my schedule, but would be worse off with Dave's. Finally, while there are 2 teams in each scenario that would not result in a net gain or loss of wins, only Amber's team would have won and lost the exact same games under Dave's schedule.