Fisking Buzz Bissinger

I'm not going to lie; this was a lot of fun. 

It occurred to me while I was writing that Bissinger and John Feinstein occupy the same place in my head.  Both wrote indisputably great sports books in the late 80s.  Both are now grumpy old men, writing screeds against college football from the Acela Corridor.  In both instances, I read their writing and remember the day when my childhood ended: the day that I read the obituary of Roald Dahl (my favorite author as a boy) obituary and learned that he said the following:

There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity ... I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.

Bissinger also reminds me of Don Draper at the end of last week's Mad Men, left behind in a world where he didn't understand The Beatles in their "Hard Day's Night" stage, let alone their new "Tomorrow Never Knows" style, and having a drink while his actual wife is meditating and his office wife is smoking a joint while writing copy.  Buzz sees a world where college football has become a national sport, outpacing baseball in a number of ways.  The barbarians are at his gates.  For a guy already prone to angry outbursts, his WSJ column was entirely predictable. 

Roy Kramer and Radical Change

I wrote a piece yesterday at SB Nation about how Roy Kramer expresses concern about anything more than incremental change when it comes to a college football playoff, but he had no such concerns when he reorganized the SEC in 1992 in a significant, swift fashion:

What's interesting about Kramer's rejection of "big change" (although I am quoting Barnhart here, so this might be more of a poke at Tony) is that he initiated one of the most radical and ultimately successful (as evidenced by how much it has been copied) changes in recent college football history: expanding the SEC to 12 teams, splitting into two divisions, and initiating the first conference championship game. Prior to 1992, the SEC was a ten-team league in which each team played seven conference games and the champion was the team with the best record at the end. As of 1992, the SEC was a 12-team league split into two divisions with protected cross-division rivalries and the champion was the team that won a game between the winners of the East and West divisions. Florida had to win seven conference games in 1991 to win the conference; Alabama had to win nine the next year to do the same, the last of which was a "neutral" site game against the Gators. Bama's highest SEC hurdle was its last, not unlike what it would face in winning its next national title in 2009.

Kramer's change met with resistance from the coaches in the league, but it was ultimately a complete success such that every major conference now either has a conference championship game (Big Ten, Pac Ten, and ACC) or would have one if it could keep 12 stable members (Big XII, Big East). In fact, the solution that Kramer suggests for the college football post-season - a four-team playoff comprised of three conference winners and then the highest-ranked remaining team - is made possible by the conferences moving themselves into a format where the league season progresses to a final game and then produces an ultimate champion. Kramer's solution for the college football postseason is an incremental change in the same way that the Bowl Alliance and then the Bowl Coalition were, but Kramer's career was not marked solely by smaller alterations. His best change was his biggest.

Upon reflection, the salient difference is that Kramer was in charge of the SEC, but not all of college football.  As the SEC Commissioner, he could expand the league and create the division structure, albeit with ultimately approval of the SEC presidents and athletic directors.  He was not in charge of major college football as a whole.  The SEC was merely one voice at the table when the BCS was created, so Kramer would have had a much tougher time implementing a playoff in 1995 and 1998 as opposed to simply creating a bowl structure to guarantee a #1 versus #2 matchup.  If that's the case, then he ought to identify the times where significant change is possible and the times where we have to move slowly because the SEC's interests are not wholly aligned with those of other major conferences.

The post also led to a little Twitter exchange with Blutarsky about Tony Barnhart. I will admit to having the same reservations about Barnhart's writing, a feeling that was crystallized when Barnhart was apparently aware of the SEC inviting Missouri to join the conference and participated in a Q&A about the subject that was packaged to run when the news broke, but did not share this information with his readers.  At this stage, reading Barnhart is like reading Pravda during the Cold War: he is more interesting as a gauge of what newsmakers (in this case, major players in the SEC) are thinking and what they want to disseminate.  If you accept his writing on that principle, it's worthwhile.  In this case, he is disseminating the opinion of Roy Kramer, who doesn't really have a stake anymore and is therefore an interesting analyst of the playoff discussions.

Chemistry is for Laboratories, Urban Meyer Edition

Here's my reaction to Matt Hayes' piece on Urban Meyer.  In short, I thought that the whole thing was overblown, mainly because Hayes was describing a time period in which Florida was remarkably successful.  In fact, the piece serves as an unintentional rejoinder to everything that Kirk Herbstreit says about the emotions and intangibles of college football:

To summarize the article, Florida's players engaged in various forms of bad behavior during the 2008 season. The highlights include Percy Harvin complaining about running stadium stairs and then choking his position coach, Janoris Jenkins getting into various scrapes with the law, Meyer applying laxer discipline to his best performers, and Florida players generally smoking a lot of marijuana.

And here's the punchline: it's an afterthought in the article, but Florida won the national championship in 2008. In fact, there's an argument to be made that 2008 Florida was the best team of the Aughts, as evidenced by the fact that their yards-per-play margin ranked up with those of 2001 Miami and 2005 Texas, despite the fact that the Gators played a tough schedule. The Hats Guys of the world (and there are plenty of analogs in the world of college football) want us to believe that teams win based on senior leadership, authoritative performances from quarterbacks in the huddle, and "everyone coming together as a team." According to this ideology, 2008 Florida should have been terrible, as their players should have been split apart by inconsistent discipline and a star player being permitted to commit a battery on a coach. Instead, they ended the season passing around a crystal football.

The piece then goes on to criticize both John Pennington for using the article as a platform to dump further praise onto Tim Tebow (Tebow being a great college quarterback just isn't enough anymore) and NFL personnel directors for letting the smoke surrounding Florida players cloud their judgment as to just how good those players are.  (Good lord, that was a terrible pun on my part.)

There are additional weaknesses to the piece that I'm sure have been noted by Ohio State fans.  For instance, the bit about Bryan Thomas falls flat for two reasons.  First, it makes it sound as if a football coach can make a unilateral decision to give a player a medical hardship letter without any involvement from a doctor.  Second, Florida wasn't a serial abuser of the hardship rule like their buddies in Tuscaloosa.  In fact, Florida has been one of the paragons in the SEC in refusing to engage in oversigning generally, a fact that refutes Hayes' argument entirely. 

In the end, the article just struck me as a kitchen sink approach.  Hayes took every single negative that he could find about Urban Meyer since Meyer moved from Utah to Florida and then threw them into a piece without providing context.  Some of the allegations are indeed pretty interesting, most notably the story about Percy Harvin choking Billy Gonzalez.  They reflect poorly on Meyer and well on Hayes' ability to obtain information.  However, Hayes then goes haywire when he moves from reporting the stories to claiming that Florida's weaker performances in the last two years are the result of a lack of discipline.  It's a fitting result that a guy named Hayes would write a column about the Ohio State football coach and then he would go nuts.

Is Hank Schrader Working at Butts-Mehre?

Though I generally view the focus on the off-field exploits of Georgia football players as a tired pursuit of sports radio hosts and Jeff Schultz, the suspensions for Bacarri Rambo and Alec Ogletree have caught my attention.  Georgia is now going to be missing at least four defensive starters for the SEC opener at Missouri, at least three because of apparent marijuana use.  The crusade by Georgia's football program against any drug use is going to have significant effects on the field.  The development has put me into rhetorical question mode:

Georgia's football program is in an interesting place right now. The Dawgs' head coach is a well-liked coach who is pretty clearly a B+ head man competing for titles against an A+ coach in the state to the west. The fan base is fiercely loyal and turns out for every game, but one has to wonder whether they will continue to make significant donations for the privilege to buy tickets to increasingly soft home schedules. How much do Georgia fans really want Mark Richt to play the role of Joe Friday when the conference is hyper-competitive? Do they really want to pay hundreds of dollars per ticket to see back-ups because the starters smoked pot on spring break?

The question that remained after I wrote that column was whether the current stance taken by the Georgia athletic department is the result of media attention paid to off-field issues.  Is Georgia overreacting to criticism from members of the media?  Or has this policy been in effect throughout the Richt era?  Is it just a function of the coach's personality and worldview?  I'm interested to hear from people who know more about the program than I do.

SEC Championship Game on the Brain

A couple posts from last week regarding the SEC Championship Game.  The first was supposed to be a short post about the fight over the site of the Copa del Rey Final and an analogy to the SEC Championship Game, but it ended up running for over 1,000 words.  I was titillated by the idea of SEC teams winning the conference title on the homefields of their rivals, as opposed to the Georgia Dome:

This scenario got me to thinking: wouldn't it be fun if the SEC Championship Game were played on a rotating basis at campus sites instead of the Georgia Dome? The title game is always a tough ticket, so it does not make sense that it is played at a facility that seats 70,000 when Sanford Stadium, Neyland Stadium, Williams-Brice Stadium, Florida Field, Jordan-Hare Stadium, Bryant-Denny Stadium, Tiger Stadium, Reynolds-Razorback Stadium, and now Kyle Field all have bigger capacities?

For instance, when Auburn and South Carolina met in 2010, demand for tickets was through the roof because Auburn was two wins away from their first national title in 53 years and South Carolina was playing in the title game for the first time in their 18th year as a member of the conference. If the game would have been in Baton Rouge, slightly more than 20,000 additional Tiger and Gamecock fans could have seen the game in-person. It seems like a waste for SEC programs to have giant stadia and then to relegate the culmination of the SEC schedule to a smaller venue.

Leaving stadium sizes aside, imagine the fun that would ensue with programs winning titles on their rivals' homefields? Imagine that Auburn is hosting the title game and Alabama wins the West. Imagine that Florida is hosting the title game and Georgia wins the East. Imagine those two fan bases occupying half of their bitterest rivals' sacred home grounds. Imagine 40,000 drunk obnoxious Georgia fans taking over Gainesville's nightlife. Admit it, my stuck record of finding things about European soccer that would make sense for American sports occasionally stumbles onto a good idea.

I realize that it is a little odd to advocate for the Georgia Dome losing the SEC Championship Game shortly after professing my opinion that the facility is perfectly fine and doesn’t need to be replaced, so I’ll just say that the Dome’s adequacy doesn’t make it better than the on-campus facilities in the SEC. 

In the course of writing the article, it also occurred to me that there is a correlation between stadium size and appearances in the conference title game.  There are four SEC programs that have stadia smaller than the Georgia Dome: Vandy, Kentucky, Ole Miss, and Mississippi State.  Those four programs have combined for one appearance in the title game in 20 years.  It turns out that stadium size has been a proxy for success in the conference.  Big stadium is proxy for fan interest, which means revenue, which means higher coaching salaries and better facilities, which means recruiting advantages, which means winning.  Or, viewed a different way, teams that have natural advantages have been historically successful and that success increases fan interest.  Chicken or egg?

I also wrote a shorter post about the opposition of certain SEC coaches to the conference title game when Roy Kramer brought it into existence in 1992:

I finally got around to watching The Play that Changed College Football, the ESPNU documentary on the first SEC Championship Game. In light of the SEC refusing to go to a nine-game schedule (and thus dooming two of the best rivalries in the Conference) ostensibly on the grounds that an extra conference game would be too much of a burden in light of the quality of the league, I was struck by the reaction of SEC coaches to Roy Kramer's decision to split the conference into divisions and stage a championship game.

Just as they are now, the coaches back then were opposed to adding an additional game. Steve Spurrier took the position that it would be unfair for a team that is clearly the best in the conference after the regular season to give a demonstrably lesser opponent an equal chance to win the title. Spurrier also noted that the East champion faced the prospect of playing Alabama on the Tide's quasi-homefield. Pat Dye, Johnny Majors, and Ray Goff all advanced the more basic position that another game against a good opponent is tough and tough is bad.

Upon reflection, it’s interesting that Spurrier’s answer displays more mental ability than those of Dye, Majors, and Goff.  Spurrier recognizes that adding a title game can help some teams and hurt others.  While it is an extra burden for the team that finishes first in the regular season, it is an extra opportunity for the team that finishes second.  Spurrier is able to think on levels, whereas the other three are just saying “more tough games are bad.”  It’s tough to gauge intelligence based on public remarks for a variety of reasons, but in this case, I’m willing to do so.  The fact that Spurrier washed the three out of the conference* with an offense that they had never seen before aids my conclusion.

* – With assistance from Eric Ramsey’s dictaphone and Phil Fulmer’s et tu brute moment.

Scott Loeffler and Creeping Sabanization

I posted a long-ish article yesterday morning about Scott Loeffler's hire at Auburn and what that shows in terms of the direction of the SEC.  Because I goofed in terms of categorizing the post, it only showed up on the sidebar of the page, so you would have to do some hunting to find it ... or you could just click on this link.  Here is the conclusion:

Auburn's transition from the run-based spread to a pro-style attack* brings up a somewhat disturbing trend in the SEC: Creeping Sabanization. When Saban joined the conference, the mix of offenses was fairly diverse. Florida was running the spread. LSU was running something with spread elements. Arkansas was relying healvily on the Wildcat. Within two years, Auburn and Mississippi state were also running the spread. Two national titles for Saban later, everyone is trying to copy him, but not necessarily in good ways. Florida is running a pro-style offense under a Saban disciple. Ditto for Tennessee. LSU is attempting a modern-day imitation of the Bo Schembechler offense. Now, Auburn is eschewing the offense that was a significant factor in the Tigers winning their first national title in 53 years.** Mississippi State is left as the only run-based spread team in the league (and no one is running the Air Raid that played a role in Clemson, West Virginia, and Oklahoma State all making BCS bowls). Chris Brown asks whether the age of the spread is in decline. The answer is clearly "yes" in the SEC.

One point that I meant to make in the column is that the trend away from the spread is not a good development for Georgia in one respect.  When Florida was at its full pomp under Urban Meyer, one argument that Georgia fans made was that the Dawgs would have a recruiting advantage in a spread-crazy conference because Georgia would be somewhat unique and could tout its superior preparation for the NFL.  Matt Stafford going at the top of the Draft provided evidence for this point.  That advantage goes away now that Florida, Auburn, and (to a lesser extent because they were never really a spread team) LSU are all running pro-style offenses.  Style-wise, Georgia is just another team in the SEC.  Yes, they can tout where Stafford, Knowshon Moreno, and AJ Green were drafted, but Auburn can cite to Scot Loeffler's record sending quarterbacks to the NFL. 

On the other hand, if you view the run-based spread as a slightly better way to skin a cat, then Georgia benefits from conference rivals adopting a sub-optimal offensive approach.  After the 2008 and 2009 Florida games and the 2010 Auburn game, Dawg fans will not be sad to see the return of stationary quarterbacks on the offenses of their two biggest conference rivals.

Quick Thoughts on the National Title Game

Braves & Birds Ballot - Week 16

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama Crimson Tide	2
2	LSU Tigers	-1
3	Oklahoma St. Cowboys	-1
4	Oregon Ducks	1
5	USC Trojans	-1
6	Stanford Cardinal	--
7	Boise St. Broncos	--
8	Arkansas Razorbacks	1
9	South Carolina Gamecocks	2
10	Michigan Wolverines	--
11	Wisconsin Badgers	-3
12	TCU Horned Frogs	2
13	West Virginia Mountaineers	9
14	Virginia Tech Hokies	5
15	Michigan St. Spartans	1
16	Baylor Bears	-3
17	Southern Miss. Golden Eagles	3
18	Oklahoma Sooners	-3
19	Houston Cougars	4
20	Georgia Bulldogs	-2
21	Clemson Tigers	-9
22	Nebraska Cornhuskers	-1
23	Kansas St. Wildcats	-6
24	Auburn Tigers	--
25	Florida St. Seminoles	--
Dropouts: Notre Dame Fighting Irish

SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings »

• I said before the game that Bama would need to fin decisively for me to give them my #1 vote.  I’d say they achieved that aim, wouldn’t you?

• If anyone else has any idea what LSU was trying to accomplish on offense, then please let me know.  They kept running screens against a team that was pressing them.  They kept running option with a quarterback who was indecisive in running that play.  (Kudos to Kirk Herbstreit for taking a break from discussing the emotions of college football to explain what a lousy job Jordan Jefferson was doing with that play.)  They waited until the fourth quarter to run the toss play that has been a staple of their offense, and then they didn’t go back to it after it produced one of their only good runs of the game.  Likewise, they started the second half by running a pair of plays seeking to get Odell Backham between the corner and the safety in Bama’s cover two, the first of which almost worked and the second of which did, but then they never went back to that pattern.  They never went to Jarrett Lee despite the fact that Jordan Jefferson was atrocious.  They punted on fourth and short down two scores in the fourth quarter.  In sum, LSU’s coaches seemingly approached this game with the midnset that they were going to minimize a losing margin. 

• In contrast, Bama’s offensive plan made sense.  They gave AJ McCarron simple reads (“more Dick and Jane than War and Peace”), especially using flag routes to the sidelines that he consistently dropped in the bucket.  They were focused on great execution of simple passing plays.  It helped that the Bama receivers, which I viewed as a weakness going into the game, played their best game of the season.  Brent Musberger seemed confused that the Tide were able to have success throwing on Tyrann Mathieu, but Mathieu’s fame this year comes from everything but coverage.  It’s not that he’s a bad cover corner, but he isn’t elite in that department.

• I wrote after the Sugar Bowl that Michigan's ability to avoid Virginia Tech's repeated mistakes was a skill, in and of itself.  Bama showed that same skill last night.  No turnovers, one penalty, and no hare-brained tactical decisions by Saban.  In the realm of stating the obvious, it's preferable for a team to be mistake-free AND outgain the opponent by almost 300 yards.  The score might not reflect it, but Bama turned in one of the all-time dominant title game performances in college football history because they were so superior in terms of yardage and yet were able to do so without sacrificing their ability to avoid mistakes.

• My prevailing feeling at the end of the game was feeling wistful that college football doesn’t have a 4-8 team playoff.  I’m not the biggest playoff fan in the world because there is a tradeoff between the side of a tournament and the value of a regular season.  That said, I’m also a guy who is fascinated by history.  This Bama defense was one of the best defenses in modern college football history.  In an offense-heavy era in college football, they didn’t get to test themselves against a really good offense.  It’s not Bama’s fault.  Normally, you would think that a schedule that included Penn State, Florida, Tennessee, and Auburn would give several good tests for an offense.  This year, all of those programs were down, especially on the offensive side of the ball.  We’ll never get to see how the Tide would have done against Andrew Luck or Oklahoma State’s version of the Air Raid or Oregon’s version of the spread ‘n’ shred.  Imagine Andrew Luck trying to decipher one of Nick Saban’s shifting coverage schemes.  Imagine Dre Kirkpatrick covering Justin Blackmon.  Imagine DeAnthony Thomas in space against Donta Hightower.  One of the benefits of expanding college football’s postseason is that we would get more matchups like that, but we are denied that opportunity.  I hate ending the college football season on a note of frustration, but that’s how I feel this morning after having seen a truly great defense test itself against a mediocre offense.    

No Really, You Go Ahead And Blow Your Own Foot Off. I’ll Be Here In The Corner, Doing A Lot Of Nothing

On May 6, 2009, I sat in this room, in front of this computer, and wondered about the meaning of my team winning a big game when it had been both outplayed and the beneficiary of at least one notable close call.  In that instance, Andres Iniesta hit a 93rd minute winner past Petr Cech to send Barcelona to Rome.  Iniesta’s shot was Barca’s first on target in the match.  The Blaugrana trailed for most of the encounter and had to stave off numerous close encounters, including a pair of one-on-ones between Didier Drogba and Victor Valdes and four penalty appeals of varying quality.  In the end, Barca were the inferior team, but went through anyway. 

In the aftermath, I came to grips with the fact that there are more ways to succeed in a football match than by dominating possession and creating chances.  For one thing, a goalie making big saves is not exactly luck.  You would think that I would grasp this fact given that I have played goalie since age ten, but after the game, I had to remind myself that Valdes performing to keep Barca in the match counted just as much as Messi or Eto’o creating and finishing chances at the other end.  For another, a team keeping its concentration in adverse circumstances is important.  Barca could have gotten frustrated with Chelsea’s defensive approach, with the penalty that they were denied in the first leg, and with the general unfairness that their perfect season was about to end without the most coveted prize available.  Instead, they kept plugging away and then Iniesta foreshadowed his World Cup-winning strike with the goal that made the treble possible.

Tonight, I’m in the same position.  Michigan just won the Sugar Bowl, capping an 11-2 season that, with one notable exception, is as good as any I’ve experienced since enrolling in Ann Arbor in September 1993.  By conventional metrics, Michigan had no business winning the game.  The Wolverines were outgained 375 to 184.  The Hokies ran 24 more plays and were 1.4 yards better on a per play basis.  Michigan’s two touchdowns were both Jeff Bowden specials, with Junior Hemingway playing the role of Greg Carr.  Michigan’s first field goal in regulation came from an insanely lucky deflected pass to a previously-ineligible receiver.  The Michigan defense was stout in a number of respects, especially in the red zone, but they gave up a season’s worth of third and longs to a team without an especially good passing game.  In the end, Michigan benefited from a close reversal of a Hokie touchdown in overtime (the right call, I think, but very close) and then an ignored false start on the winning field goal (although it’s not as if Virginia Tech can claim that Michigan gained any sort of advantage from Brendan Gibbons starting, stopping, and then having to start again).  Notre Dame in the late 80s, Tennessee ‘98, and Ohio State ‘02 all came to mind; this was lucky.

All that said, the ability to avoid blowing off one’s own foot is a skill in college football.  If we have learned anything over the last few days after seeing kickers repeatedly spit the bit, coaches turtle up in end-game situations, and players of all shapes and sizes make mistakes, it’s that avoiding big errors is important.  Michigan had one turnover and 24 yards of penalties.  They didn’t miss a field goal.  They didn’t call a stupid fake punt on fourth and one when their running game was cooking.  Fitzgerald Toussaint didn’t take a 220-yard loss on first and goal.  They neither roughed a punter to prolong a drive, nor watched the drive end by not knocking down a pass on 3rd and 17.  Feel free to shoot me in the face for sounding like a Tressel acolyte, but playing mistake-free football can atone for a lot of sins.

Likewise, just as Barca’s persistence at Stamford Bridge was a skill, so was Michigan’s performance tonight.  They came in with their star left tackle limping around.  They then added an injury to their Rimington-winning senior center who makes all of the calls for the line and who relies on mobility to make up for a lack of size.  A group of players who remember total collapses like Illinois 2009 and Ohio State 2010 showed that they don’t roll over anymore.  Virginia Tech dominated most of the first half, but the defense made stands in the red zone and then the offense had a brief flurry to turn a 6-0 deficit into a 17-6 lead.  When the Hokies pegged them back to 17-17 and then 20-20, Michigan stood up in overtime and won the game.  Add persistence to “didn’t blow our own feet off” to the list of skills that this team used to make up for the fact that they couldn’t block or make a stop on third and long.

In a way, this is how the 2011 season had to end for Michigan.  At the end of the Rich Rodriguez era, Michigan was a great offfense and then a smoking heap of wreckage.  The defense was unconscionably bad.  The special teams were barely above that level, most notably because the Wolverines could not kick a field goal.  Michigan did dumb things like not knowing that a blocked field goal is a live ball.  The turnover rate was terrible.  This year was a palate cleanser in every way.  In the end, Michigan won a game despite the offense being completely stymied.  The Wolverines won by being good on defense, very good on special teams, and smart enough to avoid the mistakes that killed their otherwise superior opponent.  In 2010, I looked at box scores and said “we have to be better than what the scoreboard says.”  At the end of 2011, I say “according to that gleaming Sugar Bowl trophy headed to Schembechler Hall, we are better than what the box score says.”  

Mark Richt and the Cult of the Field Goal

My column about the import of Richt's colossal mistake against Michigan State is up at SB Nation. The criticism of the decision not to attack in the first overtime is obvious; here is the attempt to contextualize:

Richt's shockingly conservative disposition during the end-game of the Outback Bowl was and remains indefensible, but the passage of time reminds me of one truism: we all overrate the importance of late game decisions when evaluating a coach. When it comes to determining whether a program wins or loses, late game strategery is the easiest factor for fans to judge. We can put percentages on various courses of action, such as the odds of a turnover versus missing a 42-yard field goal. Additionally, because late game play-calling is the last impression that we have of a team for a week (or, in this case, for eight months), it sticks out in the memory and the recency effect takes over. However, this factor isn't nearly as important as the other things that a head coach does.

Recruiting is much more important and Richt has done a very good job in that department such that we can have the sense that Georgia had too much talent to go down the way it did yesterday. Managing a staff is more important and Georgia fans are pretty much united in their affection for Todd Grantham (and well they should be in light of the defense's performance this year). As the demises of Jim Tressel and Joe Paterno have shown this year, the CEO functions performed by a head coach are also critical. Dawg fans should have no concerns about Richt making the right decision if he were confronted with a potentially incriminating e-mail or a (alleged) pedophile assistant coach. Making timid decisions at the end of a close game is annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, it is only a small portion of the pie chart when evaluating a head coach.*

* - Take it from a Michigan fan. We all complained about Lloyd Carr making conservative decisions at the end of games that overvalued kickers, the clock and timeouts while undervaluing the possibility of winning a game with his consistently good quarterbacks. We didn't appreciate the fact that Carr was putting good teams on the field that were in position to blow close games in the first place. Three years of Rich Rodriguez were enough to bring Carr's positive attributes into full focus. For instance, the Big Ten Network had a timely showing of the 2000 Orange Bowl yesterday afternoon. In that game, Carr laid up for a field goal at the end of regulation. He could have put the game in the hands of future Hall of Famer Tom Brady, throwing to future top ten pick David Terrell and protected by four future NFL starters on the offensive line. Instead, he put the game in the hands of the immortal Hayden Epstein and was only bailed out by Alabama kicker Ryan Pflugner one-upping Epstein by missing an extra point. Carr deserves lots of credit for assembling a great team and a smaller amount of criticism for relying on the wrong aspects of that team. College coaches should not rely on their kickers unless all other resources have been exhausted.

If you want a more substantive criticism of Richt, it is this: eleven years at the helm in Athens has shown that he is dependent on Florida having a bad coach in order to be successful. When Richt came to Athens, Steve Spurrier was putting one of his best Gator teams on the field in 2001, a team that should have played Miami for the national title in Pasadena if not for a pair of injuries to Ernest Graham. Spurrier then flew the coop for Dan Snyder's filthy lucre. He was replaced by Ron Zook and Richt enjoyed his heyday: three division and two conference titles. Urban Meyer then came onto the scene*, and Richt did not take another trip to the SEC Championship Game until Meyer had fled the stage. Now, the elite programs in the conference are in Tuscaloosa and Baton Rouge, a point that was drilled home in the second half of the title game against LSU. Is Richt going to require regression from one or both of those programs in order to win a third conference title? Quite possibly? More generally, can we accept that Richt is a good, but not great coach? I certainly can, but it will be easier if days like yesterday become more frequent.

* - It does bear mentioning that Richt's second title came in Meyer's first year in Gainesville when Urban was going through the growing pains of De-Zookification.

The point that I do not address is what part(s) of the pie chart do we use to reach the conclusion that Richt is good, but not great.  In other words, is his quality recruiting what makes him good and his staffing decisions prevent him from being great?  That question will require a lot more consideration.

The Scott-Delany Pact

An agreement between two powers that are separated by flat plains?  I'm in!

My main reaction is that college football needs more agreements like this.  At present, there is a race to the bottom in terms of non-conference schedules.  With: (a) poll voters somewhat unwilling to reward teams for play tough non-conference schedules; (b) a plentiful supply of outmatched opponents as a result of the NCAA allowing wins over FCS teams to count towards bowl eligibility; and (c) major conference athletic programs funded mostly by their football programs, there are a host of incentives for teams to maximize home games and minimize contests against quality opponents.  The way to beat programs out of this mindset is to create formal structures.*  Some teams are constrained by tradition.  I'm sure that Jeremy Foley would play four non-conference games at the Swamp against tomato cans if he could, but the tradition of the game against Florida State prevents him from scratching his worst itch.  Teams that are not constrained by tradition need other rules in place to force them to play watchable games.  Wisconsin won't leave Camp Randall to play a competent opponent?  Jim Delany will just have to force them to behave.

* - The other factor that would force major programs to play quality non-conference opponents would be a softening of ticket demand.  Programs get away with scheduling directional schools right now because they know that they can sell season tickets regardless of the presence of multiple weaklings on the slate.  If athletic departments sense that they are having a hard time selling season tickets because of soft opponents, then they will schedule better.  The Pac Ten is already in this boat because the intensity of their fan support is not equal to that of other conferences.  I can see a future where Stubhub has the same effect on season ticket packages as it is currently having on bowl tickets.  Right now, schools struggle to sell their bowl ticket allotments because fans know that they can get the tickets at much lower prices on Internet ticket sites.  What happens when fans also realize en masse that they don't have to pay to see New Mexico State and they can instead by tickets to the best games on the Internet, thus spending less and still seeing the games that really generate interest?  New Mexico State comes off the schedule. 

Aside from the obvious benefit of giving fans better games to watch, the ancillary benefit of the Big Ten-Pac Ten alliance is that it will make it easier to judge teams at the end of the season.  Part of the problem with college football's current structure is that the BCS has an already difficult task of picking the two best teams from a field of 120 and then its task is made harder by the relatively small sample size of games between BCS conference teams.  It's hard to compare Alabama and Oklahoma State because there are so few connections between teams in the Big XII and SEC.  While an alliance between the Big Ten and Pac Ten doesn't solve that specific problem, it does increase the number of meaningful games and therefore gives us a better sense as to teams' relative strengths.  If the pact is successful, then other conferences will copy it.  The natural dance partner for the SEC would be the ACC, although an alliance with the Big XII (plus four) would also be doable.  Who knows, in ten years, we might be able to use real evidence to back up our claims of SEC superiority before the bowl games.

Brazil Goes to the Map Room

My favorite movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark.  My parents dragged me to it when I was six years old.  I say "dragged" because I wanted to see Clash of the Titans instead.  Based on the picture of Indiana Jones in the newspaper wearing a Middle Eastern headdress,* I feared that the movie was going to be an extension of Sunday School, which I was already mature enough to find boring.  Two hours after being forced against my will to go into one of the theaters on 29 in Charlottesville, I came dancing out, convinced that I had seen the best movie in the history of the world.  Three decades later, I will admit that there might be other movies of superior technical quality, but no movie has surpassed Raiders as my favorite.

* - Showing a similar mentality, my five-year old described our neighbors' nativity scene as "Jews, a camel, and a donkey."

One of Raiders' best aspects is that it is stuffed to the gills with iconic scenes.  Indy running away from the boulder.  Indy's travels being tracked by a red line on a map.  Indy shooting the swordsman in the Cairo market.*  The Ark melting the faces of Toht and Dietrich.  The Ark being buried in a government warehouse along with who knows what.** 

* - If there is a better 30-second metaphor for colonialism, I'd like to see it. OK, maybe the fact that the locals cheer the Westerner who uses technology to defeat the skilled, but outdated native cuts against my conclusion, but leave me my attempt to find meaning in a pulp classic.  Also, it's interesting to me that two of the best scenes in George Lucas-affiliated movies - the swordsman scene in Raiders and the "I love you." "I know." scene in Empire Strikes Back - were both improvised by Harrison Ford.

** - The perfect metaphor for government waste.

For me, the best scene in the entire movie is the Map Room.  Indy takes his right-sized staff into the Map Room at the right time, waits for the sun to hit the right spot, and then looks on with amazement as a brilliant beam of light strikes the location of the Well of the Souls.

Two qualities make the scene.  The first is John Williams' score, as the Ark's theme rises to an inspiring crescendo.  The second is Harrison Ford's expression of wonder at the show of light.  The cynicism of a world-weary archaeologist with the weathered leather jacket and fedora - the guy who said earlier in the movie " I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance, you're talking about the boogie man" - melts away now that he realizes that he is in the presence of the ethereal.  Steven Spielberg's movies are often noted for the moment of realization that his protagonists have.  (Think about Roy Scheider's face in Jaws when he realizes the size of the shark he's hunting, or Liam Neeson's face when he finally realizes the extent of the Final Solution and its effect on children in Schindler's List.)  The definitive moment of realization is Indy in the Map Room as his face changes to a wide-eyed gape.

I had Indy's expression in mind when I read Tim Vickery's pieces about the lesson that Brazilians should take from the hiding that Santos took from Barcelona in Japan.  With the world title on the line, Santos brought in a team that had been strengthened after winning the Copa Libertadores and was led by two burgeoning stars: Neymar and Ganso.  With the Brazilian domestic league in good financial form after signing a lucrative TV deal and the currency doing well against the failing Euro, this seemed like the time for a Brazilian club side to show its strength against a European champion.  Instead, Barca won in embarrassingly comfortable fashion, breaking out to a 3-0 lead at the half and then coasting home.

Vickery, who has been preaching about the failings of modern Brazilian futebol for as long as I have been reading and listening to him, could have viewed the match as a confirmation of his hypothesis that Brazil has given up the ability to produce passing midfielders.  Here is what Vickery wrote for the BBC:

Like watching Muhammad Ali against some outgunned challenger, Barcelona's destruction of Santos was as joyful as it was clinical. Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas and Lionel Messi ran rings round Santos as if the Brazilians were traffic cones in a training exercise.

According to the dominant current of thought in Brazil in recent years, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen. The physical evolution of the game, it was thought, had made it impossible. In this modern football of reduced space, the central midfielders need to be six-footers, big and strong enough to win the 50-50 balls and protect the defence.

And there was no point in possession football - a move with more than seven passes had a reduced chance of ending up in a goal. The way to win was to block the middle and look for quick counter attacks and set-pieces.

And the quality of the play? "If you want to see a spectacle," says Santos coach Muricy Ramalho, "then go to the theatre." Or maybe go to watch his side taken apart in such style by Barcelona.

In football the idea comes first. And the line of thinking helps explain the type of players produced. In Neymar Santos could count on a Messi equivalent. But where is the Xavi or the Iniesta? Brazilian football no longer has them because it is not looking to produce them. They do not fit the mould.

And here is his similar description for ESPN:

Sunday's match was not decided by a financial imbalance. It was the imposition of one footballing philosophy over another, a victory for the skilful little guys with the low centre of gravity, a triumph for the spectacle and self-expression of pass and move - a win like many that South American football has enjoyed in its glorious history.

The value of defeat is always in the lessons that it can teach. Perhaps the big lesson that Barcelona have taught in Yokohama is this: if Brazilian football wants to keep on winning not only titles but also hearts then it would be well advised to get back in touch with elements of its own tradition. There is an argument against the view that possession football is outdated and that the central midfielders should be unimaginative giants. Its case was made loud and clear in Japan this Sunday.

If Spain's triumph and Brazil's failure in South Africa was not evidence enough, Sunday's result in Yokohama should be Brazil's trip to the Map Room.  It should be enough to convince the cynics who have led Brazil astray ever since the beautiful 1982 iteration to the Selecao - led by Zico, Falcao, and the late Socrates - was upset by Italy (ironically enough, in Barcelona at Espanyol's old ground) that technical ability in the central midfield is more important than brawn.*

* - As Jack Lang of Snap Kaka Pop was marveling at Thiago - Barca's latest midfield prodigy and the son of a former Brazil international - and expressing regret that Thiago has declared for Spain instead of Brazil, I was tempted to respond with "maybe he didn't want to become a fullback."

To come back to this blog's favorite topic, the Map Room analogy has me thinking about similar episodes in college football, instances where one striking result caused an epiphany from a team or a conference.  These are the examples that came to mind, but I am all ears for more:

1.  After getting his tail kicked in by Florida State and Miami in a series of Orange and Fiesta Bowls, Tom Osborne decides that he needs defensive players who can run.  He recruits Texas and California more heavily, thus producing the dominant team that won national titles in 1994, 1995, and 1997.

2.  After a favored Ohio State team gets obliterated by Florida in the 2006 national championship game, the Big Ten moves towards the spread offense.  Ohio State shows a run-based spread with Terrelle Pryor, Penn State deploys the "Spread HD," and Michigan hires Rich Rodriguez. 

3.  After Danny Wuerrfel is beaten to a pulp by Florida State at Doak Campbell Stadium in November 1996, Steve Spurrier relents on his long-standing opposition to the shotgun.  The Gators bury the Noles in the rematch and the 'gun is a feature of Spurrier's offense from that point forward.

4. After the SEC was dominated in the 1980s by conservative, run-the-ball-and-play-defense coaches like Vince Dooley and Pat Dye, Spurrier arrives in 1990, destroys a highly-rated Auburn team in 1990 48-7, wins the Gators' first SEC title in 1991, and then sets himself on a path of destruction through the conference.  The rest of the SEC enters the Map Room and emerges with the David Cutcliffe offense at Tennessee, the Air Raid at Kentucky, and the quasi-spread run by Terry Bowden and featuring Dameyune Craig at Auburn.

Others?

Five-Star Temptresses

I like to imagine that Saturday night was a little instance of karma biting the University of Texas in the rear end for playing every card in their hand (to use T. Boone Pickens’ apt phrase) and chasing off one-third of the Big XII.  A week after losing to Baylor by 24 – a loss that was the Horns’ second in a row to the Bears after having beaten Baylor every year since 1997 – Texas fans had to watch Robert Griffin III win the Heisman Trophy.  Griffin, a four-star recruit from Copperas Cove, Texas, was not recruited by Texas as a quarterback.  (Darron Thomas, also from Texas, was in the same class.)  Instead, the Horns put all of their eggs in the basket of Garrett Gilbert, a five-star prospect from Austin who would be in the next class. 

If you follow college football at all, you know how this decision panned out.  Griffin led Baylor to its most successful period since the days of Grant Teaff and Mike Singletary, culminating in a 9-3 season this year.  Meanwhile, after a promising performance in the national championship game against Alabama, Gilbert was a disaster in Austin, performing poorly as Texas went 5-7 in 2010,  losing his job to a pair of underclassmen in 2011, and then transferring to SMU. 

Texas’s decision to commit to Gilbert is interesting because the Horns’ greatest success was when they were running the run-based spread.  The apex of Mack Brown’s tenure in Austin was 2004-05, when the Horns went 24-1 and won two major bowls and a national championship with Vince Young running the show.  To a lesser extent, Texas then experienced more success in 2008-09 with Colt McCoy at quarterback.  The offense under McCoy wasn’t as run-heavy as it was under Young, but it did feature a quarterback running game (McCoy was the team’s leading rusher in 2008 and second-leading rusher in 2009) and relied on spread formations, albeit with more of a focus on short passing as opposed to the zone read play. 

Given that Texas usually finishes its recruiting classes early, we can’t hold the McCoy experience against Mack Brown when looking at his decision not to recruit RGIII as a quarterback.  The Horns had not had their 2008-09 run when they made that decision.  However, we can criticize them for not learning the lesson of the Vince Young era.  Apparently, the lesson that Brown took was “recruit five-star quarterbacks from Texas,” when he should have concluded “recruit quarterbacks who can run.”  In short, Texas was seduced by the prospect of a local five-star pocket passer and shifted their offense away from what worked for them when they were upsetting USC in the game of the decade.*

* – One defense of Mack Brown: it’s easy to say in retrospect that he should have recruited Griffin, knowing what we know now about the way that Griffin matured as a passer in Waco.  However, Texas produces all sorts of dual-threat quarterbacks who do not turn into players who are on RGIII’s level.  In the recruiting class that produced Gilbert, the State of Texas produced five of the top ten dual threat quarterback prospects in the country.  Only the lowest-rated of the five – Casey Pachall – has been a success as a quarterback on the college level.

One can look at Florida and see the same mistake.  Urban Meyer has always won with mobile quarterbacks.  Josh Harris, Alex Smith, and Tim Tebow can all run the plays that form the basis of Meyer’s offense.  Nevertheless, Meyer was seduced by the same siren that causes Mack Brown to jump off the deck of his ship and swim to his doom.  He had a five-star pocket passer – John Brantley – living one hour from campus, so Meyer committed his post-Tebow Gators to Brantley.  Meanwhile, Meyer did not offer Denard Robinson a chance to play quarterback in Gainesville.  As with Gilbert, RGIII, and Texas, Brantley has been major disappointment at Florida while Robinson has flourished at Michigan, finishing in the top six of the Heisman voting in 2010 and then leading Michigan to its best season in five in 2011.  In retrospect, one wonders what Meyer was thinking when he went with the five-star player who did not fit his style when he had a number of four-star options who would have been a perfect fit in his version of the spread-n-shred.

This parable of mistakes made by Mack Brown and Urban Meyer might offer a cautionary tale for Brady Hoke.  Hoke’s most successful team prior to Michigan was the 2008 Ball State team, led by the mobile Nate Davis.  This year, Michigan has exceeded expectations and earned a Sugar Bowl berth with Robinson.  Like Brown and Meyer before his, Hoke has the siren call of a local five-star pocket passer: Shane Morris, a prospect who might be the top quarterback in the class of 2013.  Is Hoke about to make the same mistake?  It seems unlikely because Hoke’s offensive coordinator is Al Borges, a play-caller whose preferred system works better with pocket passers.  The mistake that Meyer (and Brown, albeit to a lesser degree because he had had pocket passers before Young) made was to get away from his style.*  Morris will be a step towards Hoke’s previous orientation.  Still, as a defensive coach, Hoke will want to think long and hard about the pressure that a player like Denard Robinson puts on a defense by his ability to run and throw before he surrenders that asset. 

* – One corollary from this: maybe Gilbert and Brantley would have been successes in college if they would have gone somewhere other than Texas and Florida.  In the same way that coaches who experience success with mobile quarterbacks should resist the urge to sign the local five-star, the local five-star should resist the urge to play for coaches who aren’t at home with pro-style attacks.  There will always be the Stanfords of the world.

(Senator, did I hit all of your questions?)

Forced Evolution: Pep Guardiola, Mack Brown, and Urban Meyer

If you're interested in the other football, Barcelona, evolution, or just an interesting discussion about how tactical changes occur over time, then I highly recommend Kevin Alexander's new piece at Slide Rule Pass.  His basic thrust is to put Barcelona's style into context, tracing back the major innovations in football from Herbert Chapman's W-M at Arsenal through the Magnificent Magyars, the Brazilian Back Four, and Total Football,* and then to Guardiola's Barcelona. 

* - One common thread occurred to me while reading the piece.  Both the Hungary side of '54 and the Dutch side of '74 lost World Cup Finals to West Germany.  The Germans have never been credited with a major tactical innovation like the sides that they conquered.  Is that a compliment to German teams for overcoming innovators or a criticism that they win without giving anything to the world game, other than stereotypes about efficiency and determination? 

Alexander then gets to his point, which is that Barca have been trying a new 3-4-3 formation this year and that their attempts to take another step in evolving might be the reason why Real Madrid are three points ahead with a game in hand:

Though crowned Champions League winners in 2009 and 2011 Barcelona managed Pep Guardiola has sought to vary Barcelona’s approach this season. On one hand it is understandable that he wants to prevent other sides from figuring out a way to stop his side playing (as Inter Milan famously did in the 2010 Champions League), yet on the other hand one has to wonder whether trying to enforce a change on a fluid and evolving game is ever going to be truly successful.

The move away from the 4-3-3 / 4-2-3-1 that had served them so well to an, at times, 3-4-3 (often with no recognised centre-backs) has met with decidedly mixed success. Though there have been victories, it’s difficult to ascertain whether Barcelona won those matches thanks to their new system, or thanks to the extraordinary individual talents they possess...

Given time, perhaps Guardiola’s new way will take root, and set in motion the next stage in the evolution of Barcelona and, by extension, modern football. However, by trying to force change where no natural pressure exists, Pep may have found himself on a dead branch of the evolutionary tree.

The question of whether there is truly natural pressure is an interesting one.  As Alexander notes, Barca lost its European title to Mourinho's Inter in 2010, so Guardiola might have been thinking one step ahead: "if Mourinho is spending all summer trying to figure out how to deal with out style, then maybe I need to change the style?"  Additionally, trying a new formation is a good way to keep players sharp and interested, which is no small matter when one is trying to motivate a group that has won everything there is to win, both for club and country.  Finally, Guardiola was faced with a dilemma this fall in that both of his starting central defenders - Carles Puyol and Gerard Pique - were injured and he was faced with cobbling together a backline using a left back (Eric Abidal), two defensive midfielders (Sergio Busquets and Javier Mascherano), and a collection of Brazilian attacking fullbacks (Dani Alves, Adriano, and Maxwell).  Change or die, right?  Well, Barca have dropped nine points away from the Camp Nou in La Liga, they have scored only eight goals in their six road matches, and now they head to the Bernabeu in a must-win position, so maybe change wasn't such a good idea.

Alexander's line about forcing change where no natural pressure exists had me thinking about college football.  I remember having a conversation with a friend three years ago about how USC, Texas, and Florida were poised to dominate college football in the coming years.  They had the coaches, the systems, the fertile recruiting bases, and the rivals in turmoil to ensure a series of meetings with crystal balls on the line.  Leaving USC and their NCAA issues aside, as recently as two years ago, Texas and Florida were both coming off of years where they lost only one game: to national champion Alabama.  In the summer of 2010, we read numerous writers opine that both the Horns and Gators were moving away from the spread styles (pass-based for Texas and run-based for Florida) that they had favored in favor of more conventional, power-based attacks.  (I remember Tony Barnhart being especially pronounced in making this point, but I cannot for the life of me find a link to verify my memory.)

The results of this forced evolution (maybe devolution is a better term) have been disastrous.  Here is Florida's national rank in yards per play from 2008 forward: 3, 2, 78, 67.  And here is Texas's: 13, 57, 78, 67.  Both Florida and Texas had a style that worked for them and then have gone away from that style, whether by recruiting decisions or scheme.  They had evolved into approaches that moved the ball and then chose to eschew those approaches for something new.  Two years later, they are both picking up the pieces from those decisions to force change.

The Best Team Wins the Championship? What Kind of Communist Notion is That?

It’s too bad that this article resides behind ESPN’s paywall and is full of untrustworthy notions like “computer rankings,” because Brian Fremeau makes a very good, basic point about college football’s structure: it is more likely to crown the most deserving team.  Fremeau notes that according to the Massey Rating composite, the BCS has consistently crowned the team that the computer consensus has placed as the best team in the country (or at least the team with the best resume, if those two concepts are distinct).  In fact, the Massey composite goes back to 1996 and reflects that the BCS (and the Bowl Alliance before it) is a perfect 15 for 15 in awarding the national title to the most deserving team.  The BCS is not as good at matching the best team against the second-best, but as Fremeau notes, playoff systems don’t really achieve that aim, either:

According to the Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings, the Green Bay Packers were only the third-best team in the NFL last year and didn't face the best team, the New England Patriots, in the playoffs. (Note: They did lose head-to-head to the Patriots in the regular season). In college basketball, the Connecticut Huskies played the best in the month of March and claimed the championship, but they finished only 10th in Ken Pomeroy's opponent-adjusted ratings. The Huskies didn't face any of the tournament's No. 1 seeds and faced only two teams in March Madness ranked in Pomeroy's end-of-year top 10.

Fremeau then notes the drawback of a playoff system: as the playoff increases in size, the odds that the best team will win goes down:

What is accommodated in a playoff system is the opportunity for weaker teams to have a shot at winning the championship. Opening up the field certainly has its rewards, potentially assuring every possible championship-caliber team a chance. But it changes the nature of what the championship means, as well. The Packers and Huskies were terrific teams down the stretch in those seasons, but advanced metrics and many fans would agree that the tournament title didn't suddenly mean they were the best team over the course of the whole year. A smaller playoff field, even as small as two teams, allows the best overall season to be rewarded with a championship.

Our college football FEI ratings project the Tigers with a 68 percent chance of beating the Crimson Tide in the BCS title game rematch. Certainly not a guarantee, but it presents a better than 50 percent likelihood that the clear No. 1 team in the nation will claim the crown. If we had a four-team playoff and LSU was required to beat both Stanford and Alabama on a neutral field, that likelihood drops below 50 percent. With an eight-team playoff built from the final BCS standings, LSU's likelihood of defeating Kansas State, Stanford and Alabama drops to 41 percent.

This is a great way of framing the playoff discussion and it helps me tighten my own beliefs.  There is a happy medium between the playoff structures of American professional sports,* which strike me as too big and not slanted enough in favor of the most deserving teams, and college football’s current structure, which is too small to accommodate teams like 2004 Auburn.  Brian Cook does a nice job of finding that medium with his annual description of a six-team playoff system that incorporates byes and homefield advantage to reward the best teams and is also small enough that any team that wins the tournament will end up with the best resume.  That said, Fremeau’s point about the advantage of the current two-team playoff cuts against Cook’s (and my) complaints about the BCS.  We all love to complain about the impossible task of picking the right #2, but the advantage of the BCS is that it is more likely to pick the right #1.

* – The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is just a complete abomination to me.  If you need additional evidence that the Big Dance has killed college basketball, look at Saturday’s sports coverage.  Were you aware that North Carolina and Kentucky played?  Two top five teams, loaded with NBA prospects wearing the jerseys of the two winningest programs in college basketball history, played a one-point game that was decided in the final seconds and the game was a total afterthought on the day of the college football conference championship games.  That’s what happens when a sport becomes a four-month lead-in for a three-week tournament.

The Original Title Comparing Gary Danielson to a Famous Propagandist Violated Godwin’s Law and was Deleted

Braves & Birds Ballot - Week 15

Rank	Team	Delta
1	LSU Tigers	--
2	Oklahoma St. Cowboys	1
3	Alabama Crimson Tide	-1
4	USC Trojans	--
5	Oregon Ducks	--
6	Stanford Cardinal	1
7	Boise St. Broncos	4
8	Wisconsin Badgers	2
9	Arkansas Razorbacks	6
10	Michigan Wolverines	4
11	South Carolina Gamecocks	5
12	Clemson Tigers	11
13	Baylor Bears	7
14	TCU Horned Frogs	3
15	Oklahoma Sooners	-7
16	Michigan St. Spartans	-3
17	Kansas St. Wildcats	1
18	Georgia Bulldogs	-6
19	Virginia Tech Hokies	-13
20	Southern Miss. Golden Eagles	--
21	Nebraska Cornhuskers	-2
22	West Virginia Mountaineers	2
23	Houston Cougars	-14
24	Notre Dame Fighting Irish	-3
25	Florida St. Seminoles	--
Dropouts: Texas Longhorns

SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings »

OK, let’s talk about the latest illustration of the futile task that college football’s movers and shakers demand: picking two teams out of 120 to play for the national title.  I voted for Oklahoma State on resume grounds.  They have played a tougher slate than Alabama.  The Tide are getting by on the reputation of the SEC, despite the fact that it pretty clearly takes a back seat to the Big XII this year.  The SEC was a top-heavy league with five quality teams, two of which Bama missed.  Moreover, Oklahoma State looked good against their tough schedule, as only two of their wins were by single digits. 

In addition, I have philosophical issues with Alabama having a chance to win the national title against LSU.  One of the unique and positive aspects of college football is that it is the only American sport that doesn’t hit the reset button at the end of the regular season.  It is possible for a team other than the BCS Championship Game to be the national champion, at least as declared by the AP.  We had that result in 2003 when USC won a share of the national title despite the fact that they didn’t play in the title game.*  When declaring a national champion, we should be looking at the whole body of work, rather than arbitrarily anointing the winner of the last game as the champion.**  It’s with that framework in mind that I agree 100% with Clay Travis that LSU should win the AP poll as long as they aren't blown out by the Tide.  What does Alabama prove with close win at the Superdome, other than that they split a home game and a neutral site game with LSU and otherwise played a significantly easier schedule?  This isn’t just a matter of what I want to see as a viewer; it’s a matter that I don’t want an inconclusive national title game, which is exactly what the Bama-LSU rematch is going to be. 

* – Yes, the coaches have agreed to give the crystal ball to the winner of the national title game automatically.  I view that decision as an abdication of responsibility, a desire to tie everything in a neat little bow when life doesn’t work like that.

** – I will argue to the death that for all the complaints about the notion of a two-team playoff voted on by a mismatch of distracted coaches and minimally-qualified Harris Poll voters, I’ll take that over a system that can declare the 83-78 Cardinals World Champions or can decide that the 14-6 Giants are more deserving of eternal glory than the 18-1 Patriots who ended their regular season beating the Giants on the road.

All that said, I also agree with Matt Hinton that there is no way to be confident that Bama or Oklahoma State has a better resume than the other.  This is a great summary:

You like Alabama? Sorry. Oklahoma State has twice as many wins against teams ranked in the current BCS standings. It has seven wins against teams that finished with winning records; Alabama has three. OSU is second nationally in scoring, first in defensive takeaways and usually spent the fourth quarter throttling down in garbage time. Two of its three wins against top-20 opponents came by five touchdowns. Robert Griffin III, soon to be awarded as the best quarterback in the nation? Oklahoma State picked him off twice and led Baylor 49-3 after three quarters. Need I mention what happened Saturday night against the Sooners?

The Cowboys are outright conference champions against a round-robin conference schedule. The Crimson Tide missed two ranked teams in their conference and didn't even win their own division.

Oh, so you like Oklahoma State now, huh? Wrong again. Alabama bludgeoned its opponents by the widest margin of victory in the nation. Its seven SEC wins came by an average of 30 points apiece. Its closest win all season was 16 points, at Penn State, and it wasn't that close. 'Bama leads the nation in total defense, scoring defense, rushing defense, passing defense, pass efficiency defense and third down defense. At 8.8 points per game, the Tide are the least scored-upon team in Division I in more than a decade.

The only thing standing between Alabama and a perfect season is a three-point overtime loss to the undisputed No. 1 team that came down to field goals. Oklahoma State blew a 17-point lead to Iowa State. In late November.

You say Oklahoma State succeeded against a tougher schedule, I say Alabama has been more dominant on a more consistent basis. Let's call the whole thing off.

As someone who touts yards per play as a good baseline statistic with which to measure teams, the only argument that I would add is that the Tide are better on a per-play basis than Oklahoma State.  The Pokes are good, outgaining their opponents by 1.86 yards per play, but the Tide are off the charts with a 3.14 YPP margin.  That is a number reflecting the fact that Bama has been utterly dominant in its wins this year.  Too bad so few of those wins were over teams with winning records.

Hinton ends with this perfect description of the fundamental problem with college football’s postseason:

The only thing more ridiculous than using the BCS to determine a champion is pretending that it isn't ridiculous. After 14 years and a dozen legitimate, unresolved controversies, we are all fully aware that the emperor has no clothes. It never has. As the evolutionary link between the old, pell mell bowl system and a full-fledged playoff that actually determines a football champion by playing football, it's run its course. Stop the madness. Bring on a bracket. Or just point to LSU a mile ahead of the rest of the pack and declare the Tigers the champions right now. But stop splitting hairs.

I started and ended a post on the Florida-Michigan debate five years ago making the same points:

The first and most important is that it requires a serious splitting of hairs to pick between the teams. Both teams have one loss against fairly tough schedules. Florida has more quality wins, as they went 5-1 against Sagarin's top 30, whereas Michigan was 3-1, so it's fair to say that Florida played a slightly tougher schedule, although for a national title contender, there are tough games and then there's playing the #1 team on the road, which Michigan did and Florida didn't. On the other hand, Florida didn't blow anyone out all season. Compare the team's performances in their biggest games. Michigan beat Notre Dame by 26 on the road and Wisconsin by 17 at home before losing on the road to the wire-to-wire #1 by three points, the one result that can legitimately justify a rematch. Florida lost to an Auburn team that twice got blown out at home, benefitted from LSU's "shoot yourself in the foot, the Les Miles Way!" exhibition, and they eked past Tennessee, Georgia, Florida State, Vandy, and South Carolina. In fact, they were outgained by both South Carolina and Vandy. In contrast, Michigan beat Vandy by 20 and outgained them by 210 yards. It's Michigan's dominance in its wins that's the basis of Vegas having the Wolverines as a six-point favorite on a neutral field, per Chris Fowler. In any event, it's legitimate to say that Florida is #2 because of a better resume and it's equally legitimate to say that Michigan is #2 because they have looked like a better team this year…

Of course, all of this would be irrelevant if we had a plus-one system. The whole unseemly process of announcers and coaches blathering on like Carville and Novak would be less important if we didn't have a system that required impossible tasks such as differentiating between two one-loss teams with very similar credentials. With a plus-one system, we would have Ohio State vs. LSU, Michigan vs. Florida, and the debate would be a far less important one over who is #4, rather than who is #2. In the end, Florida is going to get the nod over Michigan because of the short memory of simple-minded voters, which seems a wee bit inferior to the two teams meeting in Pasadena or New Orleans to settle the matter like men.

I made these points as a Michigan socio who desperately wanted to see the Wolverines get a second shot at Ohio State in Glendale.  (As it turns out, Buckeye fans should have been hoping for the same so they would be spared Jim Tressel turning into Unfrozen Caveman Coach: “your spread formations and running plays frighten and confuse me.”) 

I mention this concept of trying to present rational arguments in a consistent way because the villains of the weekend - more than the BCS, Roy Kramer, Bill Hancock, Jim Delany, Nick Saban, or the person who convinced Herman Cain to expose himself to the scrutiny of a Presidential bid - is Gary Danielson and the people behind CBS’s production of the SEC Championship Game.  At this point, Craig James is credible when compared to Danielson.  Gary is quite good when he is discussing x’s and o’s, but when he steps away from the game that he is covering into bigger picture discussions, he embarrasses himself. 

In 2006, Danielson and the SEC on CBS team spent the fourth quarter of Florida’s win over Arkansas lobbying for the Gators to play for the national title over Michigan.  Their argument was based on the fact that Florida had played a tougher schedule, which they demonstrated with a graphic comparing the teams that the Gators and Wolverines had beaten.  Guess what metric CBS did not use yesterday?  You guessed it, the one that favored the SEC team in 2006, but cut against the SEC team in 2011.  Moreover, consider the fact that CBS was ready to go with graphics to begin with.  I have plenty of criticisms of the way that ESPN/ABC do games (I was bitching in this space last week about discussing Urban Meyer potentially taking the Ohio State job during the fourth quarter of a very close Michigan-Ohio State game), but I never get the sense that they are presenting a legal case for the teams that they cover over the teams that they don’t.  At times during the fourth quarter yesterday, I felt like I was at a mediation, watching one side make a PowerPoint presentation as to their strengths of their case and the weaknesses of mine. 

And leaving aside the fact that CBS apparently has the sports equivalent of Roger Ailes doing its SEC games and they think that no one remembers their convention speech in 2006, the remainder of the argument was shoddy in two more ways.  First, Danielson never bothered to acknowledge that he said before and during the LSU-Alabama game that he was against the idea of a rematch.  When it was in the network’s interest to bill the November game as an end-all, be-all, Danielson said that there shouldn’t be a second edition.  When it was in the network’s interest to go to bat for one of its teams in December, they did so without acknowledging the massive inconsistency.  Second, Danielson cited the fact that Oklahoma State is 106th in total defense and that disqualified them from consideration as a potential national champion.  One of the main reasons why the Pokes give up a lot of yards is that they have a no-huddle offense that scores quickly, so their defense is on the field for a lot of plays.  If you look at their defense on a per-play basis, they allow 5.31 yards per play, good for 52nd in the country.  In case you’re wondering, Auburn allowed 5.4 yards per play in 2010, good for 55th nationally.  Can someone refresh my recollection as to whether Danielson had an issue with the Tigers playing for the national title?   

I could be tilting at windmills here, but it is not good for the SEC that Danielson and CBS are filling the role of Baghdad Bob for the league.  There is already something of a backlash against the SEC, partially as a result of jealousy regarding the conference’s success, and partially for more legitimate reasons, such as oversigning (a topic that will surely get some attention in the lead-up to an Alabama-LSU title game).  The facts that the league is getting both spots in the BCS Championship Game and that its network broadcast partner is openly shilling for its teams will be another reason for people outside the South to look for chances to get even.  SEC football can succeed on its own merits.  It doesn’t need the unsubtle assistance of a former Purdue quarterback to prosper.