Let’s get right to the point.
- Bob Stoops is overrated as a game-planner and football strategist.
- Pete Carroll has achieved one National Championship, not two.
- The Big Ten Conference is not slow.
- The SEC does not play better football than every other conference.
- TCU, et al, has virtually no chance of ever making the big game
- The BCS is rigged (and it is supposed to be)
The human mind is an amazing instrument. Each and every day our brains process billions of bits of information and send millions of instructions to other parts of our body, in addition to making thousands upon thousands of external decisions. No super-computer in the world can even come close to the raw computational power or complexity of the brain. And today’s society is placing upon us an ever increasing information load: the internet, Blackberry’s and iPhone’s, text messaging, video games, satellite radio, cable television, and, yes, some still read the printed word. From the time that we awaken in the morning (and often even as we sleep) our brains are processing enormous loads of information. We take in data in all these, and many more forms, and we process this data in an effort to glean from it what we need and discard what we do not. And, surprisingly, it works.
Have you ever wondered why television advertising so often includes a jingle? Why do marketers attempt to narrow their entire corporate message down to a single, simple slogan or logo? The answer lies in the way that our wonderful brains operate. Given all the information that must be processed, the human mind, long ago, began to develop ways to organize and sort data input so as to most effectively and efficiently decipher what is important and what is not. Basically, the brain is very, very good at taking shortcuts, focusing on what is seemingly the point and ignoring much of what is not. The brain knows that if some message is often repeated, then there must be some importance attached to it. If this repeated message is in the form of a clear image, a concise slogan or, best of all, a short jingle, then it tends to burn itself into the main file of our internal hard drive where it is very easy to find and recall. These are mnemonic devices; shiny gold stars in the filing cabinets of our minds.
So, what does this have to do with college football or the statements made at the top of the page. Simple; as college football fans, sportswriters, sports reporters and, importantly, poll voters, we have collectively succumbed to the mnemonic tricks of football group think. Our minds are taking short cuts and we haven’t stopped to re-evaluate the consensus.
If ESPN tells us, over and over and over, that USC, under Pete Carroll, is the greatest college football program of all time, then we eventually are prone to believe it. If we are told, over and over and over, that Tim Tebow is the greatest college football player of all time, then we eventually are prone to believe it. Boise State, Cincinnati and TCU are from non-BCS conferences, therefore, they must have played much weaker schedules than the big boys and, thus, don’t deserve a shot at the Championship game. Yeah, that’s believable. The 1980′s and early 1990′s Miami and Florida State teams were unstoppable; they could probably beat today’s Cleveland Browns. Again, our minds tend to make that believable.
The problem with all of this is that our perceptions are generally non-quantifiable and often deviate from reality. Even when we make an effort to look beyond the headline statement, we regularly make the mistake of confusing statistics for empirical evidence. USC, for instance, has in fact been to seven straight BCS Bowls under Pete Carroll, winning six of those. That certainly seems like hard evidence to back up the above claim. However when we take a more open-minded approach towards analysis, we start to see some cracks in the theory. Consider that the PAC-10 champion earns an automatic BCS Bowl berth, that is half way to getting a BCS Bowl win. Now consider that, for much of the last decade, competition in the PAC-10 has been less than stellar. No PAC-10 team, other than USC, has ever been to more than a single BCS Bowl game. In fact, since the 2003 season, no PAC-10 team other than USC has earned a spot in any BCS Bowl game. It starts to become clear that USC, certainly a powerhouse program, has a decided advantage over teams such as Utah, Boise State, etc. in reaching a big bowl game and getting a win.
And we should not limit this criticism to Southern Cal. The aforementioned Miami and Florida State programs had the same advantage, if not to a greater extent. Miami, after all, was an independent during most of their golden years, giving them the flexibility to cherry pick their opponents (see Notre Dame.) And, when they finally decided to join a conference, they aligned with the Big East, not exactly a hotbed of elite football programs. The same can be said for Florida State; independent until 1991 when they recognized where the Bowl Coalition was going and then chose to join the ACC, a basketball conference.
Importantly, the perceptions, or misperceptions, translate into reality in a very quick way. After all, we don’t have a playoff system in FBS College Football, we have a beauty contest. And, if the consensus believes that the handful of elite programs are, indeed, better than everyone else, then these handful will populate the tops of the pre-season polls and, then, the prize will be theirs to lose. Starting in the poll position is an advantage that cannot be over-emphasized. One needs only to take a look at the 2009 pre-season polls. Most had Oklahoma, USC, LSU and Georgia in the Top-Ten, if not in the Top-Five. Very wrong. However, most also had Florida, Alabama and Texas somewhere in there too. The point being that, although the polls were very wrong, at least three of the picks have managed to stay undefeated and have garnered a road to the Championship Game in effect, by default. That is not to take away from the programs or their on-field accomplishments, those left standing are, no doubt, on a very, very short list of the nation’s best teams. What this says is that this system of polling places a mostly insurmountable obstacle in the way of the would be, could be champions who are out of the elite circle.
Review this list of BCS Champions since 1992 (includes Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance:)
Alabama, Florida State, Nebraska, Nebraska, Florida, Nebraska, Tennessee, Florida State, Oklahoma, Miami, Ohio State, LSU, USC, Texas, Florida, LSU, Florida.
Notice any pattern here? Think about who is playing in this year’s Championship game. It is clear, the rich are getting richer.
And, this head start brings us to the other chink in the BCS armor, the computers. The computers were added, ostensibly, to provide some sort of scientific approach, some hard data, to counter-balance the emotional and bias driven polls voted on by coaches and others. Seems like a good idea. After all, if we are going to have a beauty contest rather than determine our champions on the field, then we should at least have some sort of subjective criteria by which to determine who is Miss America and who is the Runner-up. Not so fast. Simply adding mathematical formulas, high-powered computers and teams of PhD’s does not a science make. The computer models are flawed at best and harmful to the process at worst.
If there are any two things that we, as Americans, have grown to believe in they are that every problem can be fixed with a pill and that propeller heads with computers can figure out anything. While computer modeling no doubt provides enormous benefits to many complex situations, it is important to recognize its limitations. Computer generated mathematical models do provide a valuable framework for predictive problem solving but, unfortunately, they encounter significant difficulties when confronted with a) too many variables and, especially, b) variables which are influenced by human emotion or error. The model is only as good as the data.
We don’t have to look very far for a striking example of overdependence upon models, the fallibility of the models, and the disastrous effects of both. No industry has allocated more resources to mathematical geniuses with black-box computer models than Wall Street. Not NASA, not the CIA, not ExxonMobil. And yet, no matter how many mathematicians they had on hand, and no matter how elaborate their models, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went down the tube and the rest of the Street was forced to become a branch of the Government. The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression hit the Investment Banks, it hit the Commercial Banks, it hit our businesses on Main Street, and it hit each and every one of our pocket books. All of the models in the world, literally, failed to prevent this from happening and failed even to put out fair warning. We can rest assured that Bear and Lehman spent a lot more money on their models than has Sagarin, Wolfe or Anderson/Hester. If, after all, any of the computer models that we accept as science in the BCS debate were worth their salt, they would be picking winners against the spread and they wouldn’t be telling us about it.
High rankings and big bowl games lead to lots of media which leads to high team profiles which leads to great recruiting classes which leads to very, very good teams which leads to big bowl wins which leads to lots of money which leads to legendary coaching status which leads to enormous salaries. The “have’s” have this and the “have not’s” don’t, nor are they going to get it anytime soon. In the mean time, we can, at least, endeavor to shed light on the biases that are so often overlooked and strive for some honest, quantifiable analysis. Let’s try and look past hyperbole and start calling an ace an ace. The BCS, in lieu of a playoff platform, is discriminatory, plain and simple. This is not likely to change until something breaks down so drastically that a MAC and C-USA team face off in a BCS Championship game.
