CURIOUS INDEX, 11/12/08

Daaaaa-bo.
Daa-aaa-aa-bo.
No daylight there and CJ wanna go home.
One yard, two yard, three yard, PUNT!
No daylight there and Davis wanna go home.

From the Maryland article:

“Costa, a senior criminology major…”

You’d think that cop-punching and it’s consequenses would have been covered at some point in the curriculum during his four years at Maryland.

Requiem for a Cream Puff.

by the way… who else suddenly thought it might be a good idea to go get a turtle drunk just to see how slow it moves?

Think about it… what would happen? does it slow down to 10 frames per second? does all molecular motion in the turtle cease? does it begin to move backwards in time?

Science demands an answer!!!

Plane will be traveling to Austin, next. Seems that we like visiting our DCs when they have off weeks.

Because, hiring Oklahoma DCs has worked out so well for Arizona…

Cheer up ND fans, help is on the way. ESPN must have scrolled at least 350 times per hour last night that Chollie W is going to call the plays for the remainder of the season.

Your offensive troubles are SOLVED. Little Throw Peep will now throw like a young Casey Clausen.

Coop: and the hiring of Texas DCs is even more awesomer. At least ’Zona is bowl-eligible. Yes? Yes?

How can anyone seriously believe that Ball State should be in a BCS bowl? Really?

And when will the EDSBS minions bid for a total take-over of ESPN ‘Interactive’ Tuesday Night CFB? I have yet to see one familiar commentator scroll across the top of my MAC viewing.

@ 6

‘liitle throw peep’ still gets me. I often find myself on the loosing side of elections, but I still prefer the ‘Ara Parseghian waterfall’. either way he is just another Clausen.

In all of the years of the BCS, I have learned one thing is a constant. Those that hold the TV rights, will kiss the asses of those they pay for those rights. When ABC head the rights, you never heard a peep about playoffs. In fact they debunked the playoff talk at every chance. Now that FOX has the rights, the WWL miraculously spouts how a playoff is the only way to decide a champion. FOX now talks the BCS mantra. I guarantee that when the mouse reaquires the BCS, the playoff talk will cease except to say we don’t need one. Fuck those duplicitous bastards!

I hate how ESPN tries to make the news and create controversy where there is none, instead of report the news. Orson needs another 2000 post thread to reaffirm what we hate about the WWL.

Had to put the Mets in there didn’t he. That kinda hurts my non-football related portions of my heart.

The TiricoSuave video is choice. Between the horror of the Olympic weightlifter clip (which I had assiduously avoided to this point) and the utter sadness the Ass to Ass clip from Requiem conjures in me, I know what it must be like to pull for the gong show that is the Fightin’ Irish these days. Thanks for sharing it.

@8 and Orson…

Say what you will about the MAC and/or Ball State, but having watched this team all year I can say they are indeed worthy of a BCS bowl berth should they go undefeated. BSU would run roughshod over the ACC, and I know because I’m a Maryland season ticket holder. I’ve watched every Pitt game this year, and can say the same about the Big East. Could BSU beat Florida? Texas Tech? Alabama? No. But knock out the top 6 and we’re just as good.

And certainly better than Pitt/Cincy or North Carolina… two teams that will suck up two spots in the BCS.

I’ve never seen someone with Chris Leak’s apparent depth of success and talent be so content to be marginalized. Always been the most bizarre of dynamics.

What is more depressing than lawyering?

Lawyering whilst trying to get images of Charlie Weis and Requiem For A Dream out of your mind. Orson, you truly are evil incarnate.

Great, once The Mouse gets ahold of the BCS, there will be no end of it. No playoff ever. Every other sport on Earth is wrong.

Basketball is wasting their time. They should scrap March Madness and just take the No.1 and No.2 team at the end of the season and only have them play for the title. It works so well for D-1A CFB.

Sir —

Far from muddling through, Ball State would probably be the least well financed school in either the ACC or Big East. The current BCS system (in which the big six conferences pocket 95% of the net bowl payouts) exacerbate competitive disparities to the point where the MAC’s best teams have a hard time matching resources even with Vandy, Syracuse, and Northwestern. Regardless of what you think about their schedule (and the MAC grades out better than most folks realize), it is a minor miracle to go undefeated through that league and a non-conference slate while running a program on a shoestring budget.

I’ve watched way too many talented MAC teams get so much less than they deserved from the bowl system (e.g., Miami’s 10-1 1998 team that didn’t go to any bowl game) to get exercised about the possibility that — just once — a small fry might get a better payday than SEC fans think it has earned.

I only wish the current system had been in place in 2003, It would have been a lot more fun to see the Ben Roethlisberger Miami team play on New Year’s Day than to watch them suffocate Louisville by halftime, and I suspect that game would have had as much or more appeal to casual fans than watching whatever else passed for non-title matchups that year. And — gritting my teeth severely — I still think it would have been better for the competitive landscape in college football to see the Pennington/Moss Marshall team from the late 1990s play in a big bowl game.

wait, Stranko is still alive? I thought Orson ate him after a plane crash or something…

Ball State is Hawaii. Without the fancy dancing girls. Best win? Indiana. We should just stop this conversation right now.

Besides, Central Michigan is going to beat Ball State in a week and end this pointless dribble.

I guess that does it for me watching BCS games. That really sucks. I don’t pay for TV. That’s what advertisers are for. They can ask me to pay for content or they can show me commercials. That’s what was promised when cable was first rolled out and cable/dish providers can go f*** themselves if they think I’m going to take it both ways. I’ve gone about 12 years without any sort of pay TV and I’m not about to start paying now. It’s bad enough that ESPN is getting the mid-tier SEC games. Now they’re getting the BCS, too. At least we still have CBS. I’m just hoping 360 crashes and burns so they can come up with a sane online distribution system (like one where you know what you’re paying for content instead of it being hidden by backroom deals with individual ISPs).

There are 11 D-1A football conferences.

In my 16 team playoff version, there are 11 automatic bids for conference champs plus 5 at-large bids. No independents are allowed. Each side is seeded.

So, if the MAC, C-USA, Sun Belt champs think that they can hang with the big boys, they can prove it in that 1vs8, 2vs7 opening round.

(There are ~119 D-!A programs, so a 16 team playoff sends 13% of the teams to a post-season)

I guess what MAC teams need to do, as cruel as this sounds, is to schedule a gauntlet of road games against BCS foes. If you have wins against both OSUs, both OUs, and UO, then you get BCS love.

If a MAC team does this consistently, eventually they will no longer be a MAC team.

All the Ball State hype will just make it that much more enjoyable when the Chips beat them next Wednesday in Mt P.

While I am no fan of the FOX BCS broadcasts, I don’t like giving this much power to the WWL. They have become the evil empire.

They’ve got the SEC games next year too. I don’t get Raycom in my area, but Raycom showed games online for free on Yahoo. ESPN doesn’t even let you view their website content for free and the biggest cable operator in the world, Comcast, doesn’t have 360. I imagine they are going to try and squeeze consumers to buy a “package” to view SEC games next year too. Bastards.

Completing the thought: I too, like DevilGrad, wish that the bowl system was more flexible. The tie-ins are stale at this point and we need more flexibility for scheduling worthwhile bowl games instead of the same-ole same-ole.

For example, if UGA ever plays Wisconsin or Purdue or Virginia in a bowl again, I’m going on a shooting spree. Period.

I also feel like mid-majors should get cracks at big boys – and quality big boys – when deserved. My beef is that Ball State is no Boise State. Not yet anyway. And another Utah-Pitt game isn’t exactly exciting.

I also agree with meatybob. Schedule up bitches. We’re all looking for 12th games.

Also, in my system, most of the bowls are kept intact and are able to select any team with a winning record that is not in the playoff.

Just listen to techie. Bowls and playoffs can coexist. Just ask the NFL. They still play the Playoff Bowl, right? They didn’t abandon it almost 40 years ago due to lack of interest. Lombardi even called it the Shit Bowl. So it must be the shit (I think that’s how he meant it).

Does anyone really think WWL really improved Monday Night Football – to me, I can’t stand to listen to the drivel that spews forth?
Even their Saturday football telecasts are nothing noteworthy, yet ABC from the same mouse house does a good enough job.

Not a bad system techie, the problem is still an argument at whose left out after five. If 1-A, FBS, or “big boy football” as Gary Danielson calls it, ever goes to a playoff, I think you have to go with the 8(or whatever number divisible by 4)-division superconference model that forces you to play your way into the post-season by record alone like the NFL does.

Mark @#29, I really think after 11 conference champs and 5 at-large teams, you’ve picked up all the legit contenders. The only way someone deserving may get left out is if you keep the BCS two-school-per-conference limit (or modified it to a three school per conference maximum).

Right now, if you assume the current top-ranked team wins their conference, techie’s playoff (and mine), includes BCS champs Texas Tech, Alabama, USC, Utah, Penn State, Boise State, Ball State, North Carolina, Pitt, Tulsa, and Troy out of the Sun Belt (as the only unranked team). And if you used the BCS rankings to grab the at-large teams, you get Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Ohio State. I don’t see any potential national champion from outside that group.

chris leak doesnt play for DA BEARS anymore?

Weis & Fulmer, Ass-to-Ass.

Coming on DVD soon. Charlie will be calling the positions.

Techine @ 16 Actually the most watched sports league on Earth, the English Premier League, does not have play-offs, but chooses a champion the same way the Pac 10 does, everybody plays everybody else and the one who wins the most games is the winner.

Dante @20: The very common mistake you make is that you assume that when you are watching the WWL, or CBS, or ABC that you are the customer. You are NOT their customer. You are the product that they sell to advertisers. The advertisers pay the money and they are the ones whose opinions matter.

“I guess what MAC teams need to do, as cruel as this sounds, is to schedule a gauntlet of road games against BCS foes. If you have wins against both OSUs, both OUs, and UO, then you get BCS love.

If a MAC team does this consistently, eventually they will no longer be a MAC team."

And eventually, those big conference ADs will stop picking up the phone when you call. As evidenced by the fact that Purdue postponed a scheduled game with us this year until 2010 last winter. And that at least three top-tier BCS teams reportedly told our AD “thanks, but no thanks” when we offered to play a guarantee game at their house this season.

Our non-conference schedule since 2002: 2-for-1 with Missouri, @ Clemson, @UConn, @Pitt, @ Purdue @ Iowa, 2-for-1 with Boston College, @ Auburn, @Purdue (again), @Michigan, 2-for-1 with Indiana, @Nebraska, @Illinois, home-and-home with Navy. We go back to Auburn next year. What the hell, do you expect us to play eight road games every year?

You guys act like Ball State sets their schedule unilaterally. The fact is, most non-BCS teams find it very difficult to schedule good opponents anywhere when they are dangerous and at the top of their games. In our case, returing the entire team that scared the living daylights out of #2 Michigan in the Big House in ‘06, was a dropped TD pass from beating Nebraska in front of 84,000 in Lincoln, and took a Rose Bowl-bound Illinois team deep into the fourth quarter last year was enough to put us on the "Don’t Call Until 2011 or So" list on every BCS AD’s desk.

We still have a long way to go (at CMU will be brutal, and WMU the following week is equally tough, as will the MAC title game), but should Ball State (or any other MAC team, for that matter) run the gauntlet and end up at 13-0, they’ll have more claim to a BCS game than the three-or-four loss ACC or Big East team that they’d likely end up playing. As long as that creaky, rusty old back door is open for the big boys, you BCS-team fans have no right to gripe about a non-BCS team coming in the front door the hard way.