Happiness For Blessing

National Championship Game. Texas is in it. So is another undefeated school, a media darling. Texas' quarterback has already had a career that few could dream of, yet he was snubbed for the Heisman again this year. This time, the winner is the running back for the team they're about to play in the title game. The teams have no common opponents, yet most of the populace and even more of the pundits are going with the traditional power. After all, the Big 12 is weak, and Texas struggled against Texas A&M of all teams, only beating them by 10 or 11 points. Don't forget that they can't run the ball.

Listen, I know it's not the 2005 Longhorns that are going to take the field tonight against Alabama, but it sure has that feel. I remember the hype surrounding the Trojans before the game was even played. Mark May, Kirk Herbstreit, and Colin Cowherd were just some ESPN employees who were crowning USC as one of the best college football teams of all time. It turns out that they weren't even the best team that year. This time around, it's not so much Alabama getting the love as it is the SEC. For the past few years, we've heard so much about how great the SEC is that people simply state as fact that they're the best conference, hands down. I don't buy it, and I really don't see how it's relevant. The Big 12 is not playing the SEC tonight. Texas is playing Alabama.

Another reason you can't just assume tonight's game will be a walkover for the Tide: you cannot use the transitive property in sports. People try to do it in college football more than any other sport because when two teams from different conferences get together, there's almost no common opponents. This doesn't happen in real leagues where the league sets the schedule. The problem is, comparing Alabama's win over Florida to Texas' win over Nebraska, for example, is insane. Just the same way, you can't go back in the season and compare Texas' 34-24 win over Texas Tech to Alabama's 34-24 win over Virginia Tech. The reason is that there are way too many variables to consider. People like to use the phrase "comparing apples to oranges" a lot, but I think that analogy was originally used about college football teams. If it wasn't, it should have been.

Finally, the coaching. Alabama folks will tell you that Nick Saban is a great football coach. They may be right. He does a great job of getting his boys ready to play from week to week. The problem is, the National Championship Game is played over a month after the last bit of action. Saban has won a title before, so he can't be terrible at this, but it's not like he's great at it either. In 10 bowl games, his record is 4-6 overall and 1-1 at Alabama, including that embarassment last year against Utah. Mack Brown is 11-5 overall and 8-3 while at Texas. The point is, Mack can coach 'em up when he has a month to prepare for a team, while Saban's ability to do so is questionable at best. Let's not forget that the players in this game are kids. That's the number one thing people overlook when talking about college football, in my opinion. Professionals don't care what the media says; they just line up and play. College kids are affected. When a team is discounted, they tend to play inspired, while teams that have already been crowned tend to play with a sense of entitlement. (By the way, I think that's what happened in the Big 12 Championship Game. Another circumstantial part of the game that people fail to consider when comparing apples and oranges) In 2006, Mack Brown said the following in his press conference the day of the game: "I would like to thank all of the members of the media. I don’t even have to make a pep talk.” He could probably say the same thing today, and I think that's reason enough for Alabama to be scared.

Lots of people love to hate Bono, the lead singer of U2. A lot of it has to do with his perceived vapid self-importance.

I disagree with this viewpoint. I've been paying attention to Bono's guest columns with the New York Times, and they have been intelligent, articulate, and relevant. Here's a list of his Top 10 something or others of the next decade. (I didn't say he could stay on topic.)

There's not a comment page on the NYT website (probably a good thing), so I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, and...Dodge.

Thanks to all who voted.

The final list, from 1-64 (ties broken using a combination of voting results and original seeding):

1. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
2. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
3. Zoolander
4. Hot Fuzz
5. The Hangover
6. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
7. Elf
8. The Simpsons Movie
9. Shaun of the Dead
10. The School of Rock
11. Wedding Crashers
12. Napoleon Dynamite
13. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
14. Meet the Parents
15. Knocked Up
16. Kung Fu Panda
17. Stranger Than Fiction
18. Shrek
19. Super Troopers
20. Old School
21. The 40 Year Old Virgin
22. Hitch
23. Thank You for Smoking
24. 50 First Dates
25. Bruce Almighty
26. Little Miss Sunshine
27. The Royal Tenenbaums
28. Juno
29. The Replacements
30. Starsky & Hutch
31. The Emperor's New Groove
32. Shanghai Noon
33. Step Brothers
34. Get Smart
35. Tropic Thunder
36. Role Models
37. Monsters, Inc.
38. Accepted
39. I Love You, Man
40. Anger Management
41. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
42. Superbad
43. Click
44. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
45. Dan in Real Life
46. The Longest Yard
47. Ratatouille
48. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
49. Blades of Glory
50. Meet the Fockers
51. Be Cool
52. You, Me, and Dupree
53. Mr. and Mrs. Smith
54. Fun with Dick and Jane
55. Analyze That
56. Sideways
57. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
58. Finding Nemo
59. Pineapple Express
60. The Benchwarmers
61. Jackass Number Two
62. Orange County
63. Clerks II
64. Shanghai Knights

The Entire Bracket

Round 1

Round 2

Sweet 16

Elite 8

Final 4

Championship Round

It comes down to this: two hyphenated titles that were released three weeks apart in 2004. Your finalists:

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy



The Entire Bracket

Round 1

Round 2

Sweet 16

Elite 8

Final 4

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Final Four:












The Entire Bracket

Round 1

Round 2

Sweet 16

Elite 8

My apologies for waiting so long to get this up. We're in the middle of a longer-than-we-ever-imagined move, so it's been kind of tough to get around to this. If you've missed any of this, here's a quick review:

Round 1

Round 2

Sweet 16

Here are the results from the last round of voting. This is your Elite Eight bracket (click to enlarge):



Finally, the new poll. Deadline is next weekend-ish - unless I'm actually moving stuff into our new house, in which case it will take longer.

8 - Loyalty to conference?

The bizarre ranking system (#3) and lack of a playoff (#2) means that your chosen team looks better if the other teams in the same conference perform better. This sets up some bizarre rooting situations. Fans end up cheering for their hated rivals when they play against teams from neighboring conferences. Last week I observed two fans cheering for Oklahoma State against Georgia. One fan was dressed head to toe in Oklahoma apparel while the other sported Texas A&M gear. They weren't rooting for Oklahoma State so much as against the hated SEC. But in what sport is it okay to cheer for a conference or division rival?

7 - The NCAA's ridiculous rules

Recently my alma mater was forced to vacate its wins from the 2007 season because of recruiting and amateur status violations. The crime? Allowing a student to take an admissions test on a computer in the athletics department. Apparently not going to the library was reason enough to erase a playoff season (this is Division 2). The sad part is, you're probably reading this and saying, "That's nothing. My school wasn't allowed to go to any bowl games for 5 years because our coach spent too much time on the phone with a kid." And that's ridiculous. I understand that the amateur status of student-athletes needs to be protected, but the NCAA ends up picking on small schools and letting others get away with highway robbery. The rules are not enforced evenly because some schools have boosters and money and all kinds of influence. Which leads us to...

6 - Student-athletes at big-time football schools are not really amateurs

This is the biggest open secret in college football. Once in a while, somebody like Rhett Bomar or Reggie Bush gets caught. The NCAA was forced to act on Bomar because he still had time to play, but in Bush's case, they basically left well enough alone. Meanwhile, small schools like mine (#10) are punished for minor violations. Neither USC nor Oklahoma had to vacate wins. The fact is, football factories use boosters like politicians do PACs - funnel the money somewhere else, and if something goes wrong, there's no accountability to the parties that are actually responsible.

5 - 1 foot vs. 2 foot, down when touched

Let's get to some on-the-field stuff. Some of the rules that make college football "distinctive" from the pros are simply ridiculous. Exhibit A is the rule that once your knee hits the ground, you are down. It doesn't matter if you were tackled or if there's nobody within 20 yards. If this is the case, why not call an incomplete pass if you bobble the ball before securing it? Exhibit B is the one foot inbounds for a completed catch rule. You cannot argue that this makes the college game more exciting. Inaccurate passes and lazy receiving is rewarded in this system.

4 - Parity

As I type this, I have a choice of watching 4 football games. Not one of them holds any interest to me, because the teams are so unevenly matched. I flipped to the Florida-Troy game to see how it was going, and Florida was winning by 32 points in the second quarter. You don't attend or watch that game expecting to see an actual competition. You watch it because (1) You went to one of the two schools, (2) You want to be watching in case Troy pulls off the impossible, or (3) You have money on the game. The gambling line for this game was -37. The biggest line in the NFL this week? -13.5, a game that involves the only winless team in NFL history, the Detroit Lions. The worst team in the NFL has a legit shot at winning every week. You cannot say the same for many teams in college football. Another way to say that is you can turn into any pro game and expect a fairly evenly-matched game. Of the 4 games I mentioned earlier, only 1 is what you might call competitive.

3 - Rankings & Schedule

It's hard to separate this from the lack of a playoff system (#2), but let me try with a hypothetical.

Let's say Prestigious Team A is ranked #8 in the preseason poll. Less Prestigious Team B is ranked #19 in the same poll. In Week 1, Prestigious Team A loses to Very Prestigious Team C (#5) by a small margin while Less Prestigious Team B beats Less Prestigious Team D (unranked) comfortably, but not in a blowout. In the Week 1 poll, Prestigious Team A drops to #13, while Less Prestigious Team B jumps up to #14. Both teams win out, and at the end of the year, Prestigious Team A remains ranked above Less Prestigious Team B, despite Team B having a better record. The reason? The teams never played each other, nor did they have any common opponents, meaning even computer formulas were useless and relied on things like margin of victory, which is code for running up the score. The entire season for both of these teams hinged how they were ranked in the preseason, before anybody settled anything on the field.

2 - Playoffs

I realize this is a contentious subject, but let me say this: I cannot respect college football as a viable competitive sport until it finds a better way to determine its champion. I probably don't need to make the case for a playoff system - that's been done numerous times. If you believe that the BCS is the best system for postseason play, you are either (A) a college president, (B) a retard, or (C) both.

I will say this: Less prestigious schools that continue to be forced out of the national championship discussion should form their own league or division.

1 - Logic

If I had only argument for the superiority of the pro game to the college game, it's this simple point: the pro game features the best athletes playing against the best athletes. Not many people argue that minor league baseball is better than the major leagues, and that's essentially what college football is: a glorified minor league system. At least in minor league baseball, the teams are fairly evenly matched!

4 Reasons I can see the other point of view:

4 - Overtime

Pro overtime is flawed. Each offense should get a shot at scoring. I like college overtime a lot, but there is one change I would make: move the starting position back from the 25 yard line. I think teams ought to have to work to get into field goal territory.

3 - The option

This is one of the most exciting plays in football, in my opinion, and you rarely see it in the pro game. The reason points back to my earlier point (pro players aren't fooled by the option), but I would like to see more innovation in the pro game like we see in college.

2 - Greed of the Shield

It is well documented that the NFL is a greedy league. Proponents of college football can point to NFL blackout restrictions, and I have no answer for that.

1 - Fans/Atmosphere at games

This is the number 1 argument I hear from people who "don't know anything about the NFL because I don't watch it." Seriously, is there anything more annoying than that? Except for Apple fanboys, of course.

Anyway, it's hard to argue against a college atmosphere, especially when some NFL teams have lame, gimmicky fanbases. I'm looking at you, Oakland, Washington, and New York (Jets). I suppose my response is that the product on the field is inferior.