Good gravy. In less than 24 hours, ASU and LSU were knocked out of the national title picture while Texas suffered the humiliation of losing to a bad A&M team. More will fall tomorrow. Kansas and Mizzou play each other. And West Virginia, Georgia, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma and Oregon all have tough games. All this should set up Ohio State nicely to back into a national championship game. And if West Virginia chokes and Oklahoma wins the Big 12, not only will Ohio State get into the championship game, they will face a 2-loss team.

The bobbleheads on TV were saying we don’t need a playoff since the season is a playoff (at least that’s what i think they said, it was difficult to tell since they were fellating the BCS as the same time).

Fine. But then quit pretending that this is a way of selecting a national champion.

West Virginia is now poised to play for the national championship — at least partially because they are in a weak conference that doesn’t have a championship game. If WVU stumbles or Oklahoma wins the Big 12, Ohio State will have moved into the national championship without playing a game — again benefiting from a down conference and the lack of a conference championship game.

If it’s West Virginia-Ohio State for the national title, I will not regard either as the best team in the nation. Not when the SEC and Pac 10 have spent the season slugging it out. Not when there are half a dozen 2-loss teams I think could beat them.

Tell me. Why will Ohio State be ranked over LSU on Sunday? Is it because people have done a sophisticated analysis? Is it because they’ve considered strength of schedule, home-road balance and other things? Or will it be because Ohio State has one loss and LSU has two?

How many people do you think realize that LSU, Kansas, Georgia, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma and Ohio State have played seven home games against five road games while West Virginia, USC, Oregon and Mizzou were six and six? Does this factor at all into their thinking?

It is a simple fact that college football schedules are neither far nor balanced enough to proclaim that a 1-loss team from Conference A is better than a 2-loss team from Conference B. The selection of the top teams in the country is entirely a matter of opinion, whether that opinion is forged in the mind of an SMT or a computer. Ranking are based entirely on number of losses first and pre-season hype second. It is patently ridiculous to claim that anyone or any system can sort through over 100 teams and over a thousand games and divine the two best teams in the country.

We can play it this way but we can’t pretend this process produces a legitimate national champ. Have a playoff between eight conference champs. Settle it on the field.

The BCS is considering lowering their standards to fill out the quota of big conference teams. We’re headed for a BCS slate of the six major conference winners, the loser of Kansas-Mizzou, Georgia or Florida and the #2 Pac 10 team (ASU, USC or Oregon). Since they can only put in two from each conference, that’s a problem because the ACC, Big 10 and Big East are unlikely to have a non-champion in the top 14.

My solution? Just grant a bid to the Boise State-Hawaii winner. I would much rather see Boise State or Hawaii in the BCS than Illinois or West Virginia (if they choke against UConn) or Virgina Tech (if they choke against UVa). Why lower the threshold to #18 to get a major conference team when you could lower it to #14 and get an exciting mid-major conference champ?

Because that would make too much sense. And the big conferences wouldn’t like it.

What the hell is with the NFL TV rules. it’s fricking ridiculous. Baltimore and Cleveland are in a nail-biting finale. And I’m watching the NFL hosts describe the actions while watching it off-screen. NFL rules forbid them from actually showing the damned game.

Ridiculous.

I missed it last night as I was in post-grant recovery mode. But yet *another* #2 team went down in flames. What kind of a year is this for college ball? We’ve got one major conference undefeated team left (Kansas). But we are also down to *six* 1-loss teams (excluding Boise State). Ohio State isn’t dead yet. At least two of the seven teams with less than two losses will lose in the next few weeks. If LSU, Ohio State, West Virginia or Arizona State — all of whom have tough games — stumble, we may be in a situation where a 2-loss team gets into the BCS.

Here’s the thing that pisses me off the most. There are five teams (LSU, OSU, WV, ASU and whoever wins the Big 12) that have a shot at the BCS right now, assuming we don’t go to the 2-loss tier. Three of them — Arizona State, West Virginia and Ohio State — don’t play a conference title game. That path that SEC winner and the Big 12 winner will take to the BCS is much more difficult because of this. But if LSU honks the SEC championship, then someone from a weaker conference is going to be rewarded for it.

Tell me again why we don’t need a playoff?

Barry Bonds has gotten Martha Stewarted. I’m sure many in the sports media are going to wet their pants over this. I’ve never hated Barry Bonds so I’m not going to jump and down with glee. I’d just like to point out that many of those who are tsk-tsking about Bonds right now arduously supported Pete Rose when he went to prison.

We’ll see what happens.

Driving home, I heard the radio tell me that the Texas Longhorns could still get into the BCS.

Um, yeah. Maybe if a comet hits Dallas when the Big 12 Conference game is being played. But I doubt the BCS will give four bids to a top-heavy conference whose non-conference performance has been so crappy.

We’re in baseball hot stove season, so CNNSI has a list of the worst free agent signings of the last ten years.

The things is that almost all of those deals were praised by the media at the time. And, with the exception of Albert Belle, every single one was blasted by Rob Neyer, Baseball Prospectus and every other “geekboy” analyst out there.

Gee, it’s almost like they knew what they were talking about.

I blogged earlier this year on ESPN’s “experts” spinelessly predicting that every NFL team would do about as well as they did last year. FireJoeMorgan points me to this article, which not only predicts that the league will, in sum, go 262-250 over the second half of he season, but spinelessly predicts that every team will play exactly the same as they have in the first half. Twenty-nine teams are predicted to be within 1-game of their first half performance. Detroit, Jacksonville and San Fran are predicted to be within 2 wins. No team is predicted to collapse or surge.

Fucking hell, what is the sports media’s job? Do they have any insight whatsoever?

Dammit. I was really hoping the Colts would win today. I’m getting a little sick of Tom Brady’s pouting, Belichek’s cheating and score-running-upping and the media’s dick-sucking.

I have no doubt if Marvin Harrison had been healthy, the Colts would have won.

The World Series starts tomorrow. Let’s hope it’s fun. Right now, everyone is saying that the Red Sox will win in four or five games. I think that’s a bit optimistic. The Red Sox are likely to dominate the first two games in Fenway behind Beckett and Schilling. But once the series moves to Colorado, I can just see the slow Sox outfield chasing down balls into the gap while the young Rockies fly around the bases. And are they going to put David Ortiz at first base? Yeah, good luck with that.

Against the back of the rotation, I think the Rockies could take two of three and send the series back to Boston.

So, I’ll take Red Sox in six. But it should be an interesting six.

I love baseball, but this post-season has been one long snooze-fest. Four sweeps, one near-sweep. Boston has forced a sixth game and could come back to take the series after being down 3-1. But even then, the post-season has been dull for those of us who live below an altitude of 5,280 feet.

I wanted to check just how boring 2007 was turning out so I devised a quick and dirty way to rank the post-seasons. It works like this:

It’s arbitary, I know. It gives the same weight to an 18-inning game as a 10-inning game. It weights early rallies as much as late ones. It doesn’t account for runners left on base, which is why Game 7 of the 1991 World Series comes in at only 2.50. It weights an exciting game one as much as an exciting game seven. It doesn’t care if a team has come back from being down 3-0.

In other words, it’s quick and dirty.

I’m not really looking to rank the greatest game in baseball history. What I’m looking for are series — and post-seasons full of series — that go the distance with lots of exciting close games. And I don’t have the computer resources to do a more thorough job. This one can be calculated just by looking at the line score.

Anyway….

Continue reading Most Boring Post-Season? →

For the first time since March, I am not going to be watching Sportscenter tonight. There is no football, no baseball, nothing except boring hockey and NBA.

This just show you how stupid the people who run baseball can be sometimes. The Red Sox and Indians have a completely unneccessary off day today so that baseball will have games 6 and 7 on Saturday and Sunday. I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but those are football days. If they played the games out like sane people, the ALCS would have the stage completely to itself tonight, then again on Friday.

Idiots.