Tuesday, December 09, 2003

BCS & First Ever Mariotti Award Winner

Well there has been absolutely too much whining about the BCS. I’m not sure what the problem is. There are three teams with one loss. Instead of relying on subjective human analysis, the major conferences thought it would be better to use a mix of human and computer analysis. And voila, you get a result that makes complete sense.

People try to make the BCS formula sound like some crazy number crunching that has nothing to do with football. But strength of schedule is really about the only way you can judge the difference between these teams. And even if you don’t buy into all the different factors the BCS uses, the results still make intuitive sense. Oklahoma has one loss to a very good Kansas State team. LSU has one loss to a pretty good Florida team. USC lost to a mediocre Cal team. So Oklahoma is 1, LSU 2, USC 3. Makes sense to me.

So this is the way it is as long as there is not a playoff system and that’s fine by me. I don’t care what idiot sportswriters have to say. Speaking of which, the very first Mariotti Award, given to the author of the dumbest line in a sports column, goes to Jay Mariotti for this little nugget:

“The reason we have sports, from Little League to the big leagues, is for the premier teams to play off and determine a victor.”

Wow, I now see that I wasted a childhood playing pick up sports and never having a championship to determine the ultimate victor. Now I know why I feel so incomplete!

I would go on to explain how stupid this statement is but I respect my audience enough to believe they already know.

Anyway, I also still think Oklahoma is the best team in the nation. Like the 1985 Bears loss to the Dophins, Saturday’s game was a fluke. They will take care of business against LSU, while Michigan handles USC, and will be the undisputed National Champs.