Wednesday, October 18, 2006

BCS Crap

Texas will kill Nebraska.
Texas will kill Texas Tech
Texas will kill Oklahoma State
Texas will kill Kansas State
Texas will kill Texas A&M.

And the best the Longhorns can hope for with the 11-1 season is a trip to the Fiesta Bowl. Thank you very much BCS!

I am so sick and tired on the BCS. But I am one of the rare ones. I don’t want a playoff. I don’t want to return to conference champion tie-ins. I just want the BS taking out of the BCS – and the BS is the computer rankings!

Let me get this straight. Computers are able to rank teams better than humans. According to the human polls, Texas is the 5th ranked team in the football world. According to computers, Texas averages 13! So apparently, humans are now so stupid that they are 8 spots off in ranking football teams.

Did anyone ever see that 80’s movie War Games? You know the one where the computer tries to start WWIII? At the time, the idea was so futuristic that the producers were considered science fiction geniuses. And yet now, in the technology craze of the 21st century, it is only appropriate that computers are in charge of one of our most passionate national pastimes.

Let’s take a minute and look at what the computers have actually accomplished for college football since the inception of the BCS.

In 2004, Auburn sat on the sideline to watch the USC Trojans destroy an obviously overmatched Oklahoma team. To this day, we have debates raging, especially here in the south, about who the real NCAA champion of that season was – Auburn or USC. I mean, they both finished the year undefeated, right???

And let’s look at 2003. We all remember that year right? For the first time EVER, the team who finished #1 in both the AP and Coaches Poll didn’t win the National Title. I’m sorry, what was that? You got it, because of the computer rankings, USC sat by and watched LSU and Oklahoma duke it out for the BCS / National championship.

2001 was no better. Here we have Nebraska, a team who didn’t even PLAY for their own Conference Championship. Both polls finished the year ranking Nebraska #4, and yet somehow the Cornhumpers end up playing in the national championship? What the heck was wrong with putting Oregon, the unanimous #2 team in both polls, into that game against Miami? Hell, even Colorado, the team that BEAT Nebraska to earn a spot in the aforementioned Conference Championship, had a firmer claim on the #2 spot than Nebraska!

The list could continue, but the reality of college football is simple. It isn’t the concept of the BCS which is hurting the sport. Determining the 1 vs 2 game in the country shouldn’t be like discovering electricity or inventing nuclear power. It should be about looking at the two best teams in the country and getting them to face off in the last game of the season.

We don’t need playoffs. Had Florida State pulled off the upset in the mythical first round of the playoffs against USC last year, would you, me, or ESPN had said, “Well, they played it on the field, and FSU won, so they must be the better team.” Hell no. Texas beat USC and the jackasses in Bristol still claimed USC was the best college football team ever.

What we need to do is eliminate computers from the formula. Give me an AP poll, give me a coaches poll, and average them out. If they removed the AP poll from the formula, I’d be OK with that too – I mean, honestly, what does the media know? I just mentioned they claimed USC to be one the best college teams of all time, and they couldn’t even win the national title. And the others which USC claims from 2004 and 2003 are debatable; just ask Auburn (2003) and LSU (2002). But I know the real world, and I can accept the AP voters, because, well, at least they are HUMAN.

We don’t want computers running our lives. No one wants to submit to the hardrive, email, PDA, ipod, cellphones, CPUs, and all the rest. So don’t let these MACHINES run the football world.

(of course, if Texas happens to jump into the Rose Bowl again based on the computers, then we should remove the HUMANS from the voting. What do humans know anyways!?)

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