MIKE LEACH, ARMY OF DARKNESS, AND HOW TO SET UP A POKEMON TOURNAMENT
The other thing we wanted to say here is how reminiscent Mike Leach’s idea for a college football playoff is of something out of a video game, a multi-tiered Super Smash Brothers game, a kind of mathematical palace of trial and error done with a kind of enlightenment-era procedural logic producing a cold, logical, and perhaps ultimately unsatisfying result: a champion determined by bracket.
When we think about what we don’t like about a playoff, it’s probably this freezing logic. It’s the only rational way to determine a champion, but it kills the romanticism of a single game’s stunning verdict. Nebraska ‘95, the Megalodon of college football teams pre-2000, would have obliterated anyone in a bracket, but the mythmaking’s far more precious and undiluted when all you remember is one colossal crushing noise, a few muffled screams, and then the blood…my god, the blood. The mythos dies a little when you multiply it, and it’s taken us years to figure out exactly that point, but that’s it: one game is simpler to digest semantically than five, and is more epically compelling.
Not fair, no: but for the simpleton heart, the single game playoff means more, which is probably precisely why it’s doomed. The bowl system stripped of its financial sundries right now is a purely romantic structure, a jury prize for the most part. The Darwinian playoff is no such thing at all.
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1
iggy says:
mmmm… crushing noises… that simple admission, coming from a Florida Fan no less… Has made my year. Thank you Mr. Orson, NU ‘95 validation always puts a smile on any Husker fan.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:30 am
2
GamecockTony says:
“The mythos dies a little when you multiply it..”
Ok – Granted that might or might not be true for the eventual champion.
But one reason the Hoops tourney becomes memorable (sometimes epic-like) is the near-title of a Mid-Major – ie: George Mason, Davidson.
I’d be much more apt to remember a two or three game run by an ECU or CMU or Air Force (unlikely, but it would eventually happen) than a curb-stomping I’d turned off at halftime.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:57 am
3
T-Bird says:
Remember when you could select a postseason playoff in NCAA College Football? When was that?
May 12th, 2009 at 11:12 am
4
Brizzle says:
Yeah as a Husker fan it is indeed truly a great day when Swindle gives the ‘95 team the props they deserve. Most dominant team ever.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
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ohiodawg says:
I’ve said it often enough on this site to have disqualified myself as a crank: EVERY D1 TEAM starts the season in a mega-bracket. Fuck conferences, fuck the regular season, fuck bowl games, fuck plus 1. Fuck it all. (I just reminded myself of Bodies by the Pistols.)
Watching ESPN induce college football to sell its tradition for a few more dollars is like listening to Monster and Brutal Youth when you grew up with Chronic Town and This Year’s Model. Adjust for generation, but the point is that you know it’s the same band – more or less – but they just started to suck at some point.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
6
Big Jon says:
The new Pac-10 commish can’t start soon enough. I’m tired of the conference getting lumped in with the other two dinosaurs of cfb, the Big 10 and the Rose Bowl. I’d personally love to see USC whip someone other than the BIg 10 champ/runner-up every year.
/cries knowing nobody other than USC will win the Pac anytime soon
May 12th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
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robert says:
My team will, in all probability, never have some 52-20 or 41-14 “crushing of the souls moment,” so my perspective may be a little colored by that…but the simple fact is this. College football is inherently illogical. App State beats Michigan. Somehow Hawaii-Notre Dame becomes relevant for one night. It snows in Shreveport sometimes, and you’re watching it. And two teams that got fucked out of BCS bowls meet in the Holiday Bowl and it will be entertaining. Just become a good Counter-Reformation Catholic and accept the Baroque madness of it all. It’s illogical. Believe.
May 12th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
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AERose says:
“/cries knowing nobody other than USC will win the Pac anytime soon”
Oh ye of little faith.
Go Bears! Or, if necessary, Ducks!
(Also somebody might tell Coach Leach that the 64 team playoff works a bit better when you’re drawing from a pool of 330 teams instead of 120.)
May 12th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
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North 2 says:
@2
Yeah, but then you are conceding the real desire for a playoff is the same reason people rubberneck a tractor trailer accident, the desire to see something horrific and bloody (George Mason over UConn??).
If the goal is to have a “fair” system to get the most deserving team the trophy as many playoff proponents claim, I can’t think of a better system than using a full regular season and letting people and computers take a stab at matching the two best.
The BCS isn’t immaculate, but 1 and done playoffs are a crapshot at best and don’t pass the smell test with regards to “fairness”. Only once in a generation teams like the aforementioned Tommy Fraziers would be unscathed by a tournament, most others would just be in the Russian Roulette of a playoff with Obama yelling MAO!
May 12th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
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SpartanDan says:
It could be even stranger than that – England’s FA Cup is about the equivalent of taking all of Div 1-A, 1-AA, 2, 3, the NAIA, and maybe the Texas high school league and throwing them into a single-elimination bracket. And as GamecockTony mentioned, the side stories are nearly as compelling as the championship itself (two fifth-level clubs made it as far as the round of 32 this year).
May 12th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
11
SpartanDan says:
North 2: “I can’t think of a better system than using a full regular season and letting people and computers take a stab at matching the two best.”
One obvious flaw: Auburn 2004. (Or Utah 2008, for that matter.) Picking two is guaranteed to leave out a deserving team most years. 64 is assuredly too many, but two isn’t anywhere near enough. Eight is probably the right number, although 16 (or 12 if you’re willing to give the top teams a bye) could work.
May 13th, 2009 at 12:56 am
12
North 2 says:
SpartanDan,
I have a very long pseudo-anaylsis (which I may whip out at some point) that comes up with a magic number that the BCS only crowns the “correct” champ about 49% of the time. Sounds crappy right? But I come out with an even lower number for a 8, 12, 16 team playoff.
Fact is, no system can get the right champ all the time (not to mention we have no definitive way to know who the right champ is anyway). So, instead of giving a chance to some clearly inferior teams via a playoff, I’m content to let the polls and computers and regular season do their best and realize some years will be more controversial than others.
Luckily, the teams most cited for not even deserving to be in the BCS championship game (FSU 2000, Nebraska 01, OU 03, tOSU 07) all lost. Did the two best teams end up in the BCS championship game those years? Probably not, but the ultimate champ was at least reasonable and a playoff would have still resulted in only 1 champion.
Yeah, Auburn and Utah and USC in 07 & 08 may have been able to win a playoff, but the Raiders and Rams probably were better than the Patriots in 02 and the Pats may very well have been better than the Giants in 08, and the Packers over the Broncos in 97. So should the NFL chuck the playoffs because upsets happen from time to time?
I’ve tried to make this point before, but people seem to miss it. It isn’t that the BCS is God’s gift to determining a champ and is infallible, it’s just that I like the emphasis it puts on the regular season. If I want a playoff sport, I can choose to watch the NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA B-Ball, WNBA (really, you want to have anything in common with the WNBA???).
However, the fact we all frequent this site seems to be indirect evidence that college football as we know it is somehow preferable to the other sporting choices. Sure, the alumni attachment factor helps give an edge in interest over pro sports, but even College B-Ball is less interesting to me and it has a playoff.
I’m hoping things stay basically the same, but I fear we’re heading for a playoff before 2020.
Yea homogeneity.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:08 am
13
North 2 says:
One last thing, I don’t even need $625,000 to stump for the BCS, although if anyone is offering, I’m very amenable to said arrangements.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:38 am
14
SpartanDan says:
I’m fine with emphasizing the regular season. But I don’t think an 8-out-of-120 playoff devalues the season to any significant degree, and given the tiny sample size for the regular season (you play 10% of the other teams, nearly all within your conference such that comparisons across conferences are based on a tiny subset of non-conference games) there is absolutely no way to pick out two and only two deserving teams. And the bit about the undeserving teams all losing seems more of an indictment of the BCS than a good thing; we’ll never know if the teams that got left out in their place would have beaten the “deserving” team.
I’m not arguing for conference auto-bids (which means that this is unlikely to fly in practice), although I think reserving, say, six spots for the highest-ranked conference champions regardless of which conferences they come from is reasonable. I don’t want Random 8-4 ACC Team Who Wins Tiebreaker Roulette in the playoffs, but I do think it’s ridiculous that Utah and Boise both won all of their regular season games last year and not only did both get passed over for a pair of one-loss teams, one didn’t even make a BCS game. Do I think Utah or Boise should have been ranked higher than Florida or OU going into the bowls? No. But I do find it utterly indefensible that both of those teams did everything that could possibly be asked of them and still had no chance of winning the title. Until you lose, arguments about other teams being better than you are merely theoretical – no one has proven it yet.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:40 am
15
HudiBlitz says:
@ SpartanDan and North 2, amen.
Another thing I dislike is how the media somehow get away with presenting this false choice of BCS (bad!) vs playoffs (good!), as if college football didn’t exist for a century prior to the Bowl Alliance. For my money, the bowls were more fun when the big games were on January 1st and there weren’t all the crazy bilateral tie-ins. I love the idea of a New Year’s Day bowl as a reward for a conference champion; I’m not so keen on the idea of Big Ten #4 vs SEC #5, etc.
And that’s not to say I don’t approve of any changes in the sport:
- I like scholarship limits. Far better to have talent starting for 2nd and 3rd-tier powers than rotting on the bench for the inner-circle programs. Unfortunately, less scrupulous coaches are learning to get around this by using jucos as de facto farm teams.
- I like the increased TV coverage. I love watching game after game every Saturday.
- While I don’t necessarily like bilateral tie-ins, I do enjoy the large number of bowl games. Don’t want to watch the Depends Undergarments Bowl? Watch MMA, NASCAR, or one of the jillion other options on TV instead. I for one would far rather watch two third-tier teams battle in the Depends Bowl than watch another meaningless NBA, NFL or NHL game. IMO, the existence (or failure) of a lower-tier bowl is one realm where the invisible hand really does work. And if you’re a sportswriter who doesn’t like covering minor bowls? Tough sh_t. Find another line of work already.
“Yea homogeneity.” Exactly. I must’ve been out of the room at the time, but someone decreed that playoffs (especially single-elimination playoffs) are the end-all-be-all. Who decides these things, and why is the herd so accepting of them? Can’t we keep one sport where the regular season matters and more than one team can finish its season on a high note?
May 13th, 2009 at 11:00 am
16
North 2 says:
Considering the eclectic political, historical, and literature references made by our benevolent overlord (Orson, not our Steampunk Emperor), I’m surprised he hasn’t mentioned that the BCS/Playoff debate is essentially the Lilliputian debate over which end to break an egg.
Both sides have their pros and cons, but unlike the folly of the Catholic/Protestant schism which Swift was mocking, we’re talking about something that matters much more than the eternal damnation of your soul, we’re talking about College Football!
I’m not sure which end of the egg he BCS equates to (small or large, though I guess large since Catholics were the Big-Endians and older sect) , but the reason I can’t embrace the other side is that a playoff based system and its purported “fairness” exists for me to consume year round in other sports. Both with smaller leagues (professional) and with a larger league (NCAA B-Ball), and I’d forfeit all of them to keep college football as is.
I don’t think the BCS is fair in the sense that every team with any remote claim to being championship caliber will get a shot (Utah, Boise St, etc.). I do in fact believe it is fair over the LONG HAUL in that the champions crowned are every bit as legitimate and accurate as would be produced by a playoff system. The difference being I get a hell of a regular season to boot with the BCS but essentially only one meaningful post season game.
As far as the idea a playoff wouldn’t dilute the regular season in part because so few of the powerhouse teams play each other OOC, tough to say. I am a very conservative in my thinking and don’t see the risk/reward of switching as being worthwhile, especially since the limited data (admittedly imperfect because of the difference in league size and balance in scheduling) from other sports seems to show that playoffs make the regular season games feel like a compulsory element to be “gotten through” as opposed to the main course they are in College Football.
I genuinely wish there was a way we could magically run 5-10 seasons with a playoff and see how the entire experience is changed for the better or worse. My fear is that once such a change is made, even if it becomes clear that a playoff makes things less intriguing, people will be reluctant to switch back because humans aren’t great about admitting something didn’t work. Particularly when the only real side effect is the diminished joy people like me would be suffering from, a rather inconsequential thing in the grand scheme.
With that, I’m done. If the Lilliputian analogy doesn’t expose this argument for what it really is, a matter of taste, nothing will. That being said, you little-endians are all going to burn in Hell
May 13th, 2009 at 11:59 am