{"id":3234,"date":"2008-12-17T20:54:46","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T20:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/17\/the-stupidest-argument-in-coll\/"},"modified":"2008-12-17T20:54:46","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T20:54:46","slug":"the-stupidest-argument-in-coll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/17\/the-stupidest-argument-in-coll\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stupidest Argument in College Football"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a nice, concise post<\/a> about what’s wrong with college football. He’s responding to a desperately stupid post<\/a> that ends with this: <\/p>\n

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Let’s not ruin college football’s fabulous 13 week do-or-die regular season with a playoff! <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This was posted back in October, so the author can perhaps be forgiven for failing to anticipate the way this very season would completely undermine the “do or die” claim. Specifically, consider the case of the Big 12’s South division. Two teams, Oklahoma and Texas, finished with identical records of one loss each. <\/p>\n

Texas’s one loss was to Texas Tech on a wild game-ending play. Oklahoma’s one loss was to Texas, by ten. And yet, Oklahoma is playing in the “national championship” game, and Texas is not.<\/p>\n

Why is that? Because Texas beat Oklahoma on October 11, but they lost to Texas Tech on November 1. And late losses matter more than early ones.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is because the BCS system includes two polls in its calculations, and voters in those polls are more influenced by recent games. It shouldn’t be that way, but that’s always how it works out, in any poll-based sports ranking: whoever lost most recently gets dropped down, while people who won this week– or, for that matter, didn’t even play– move up. Texas lost later in the season than Oklahoma did, therefore they drop behind Oklahoma, despite having beaten them in their head-to-head meeting.<\/p>\n

And that, right there, is why college football is a complete waste of time. The poll-based system they use to fill the slots in their “championship” game is full of little glitches like that. In addition to the order of operations bug, there’s a systematic bias in favor of “traditional powers,” that leads to the same handful of teams being highly ranked every year.<\/p>\n

And the system even has a corrosive effect on the competition itself– voters are impressed by large margins of victory, which rewards coaches for running up the score on inferior competition. If you lose a game in September, your only shot at the “championship” is to beat everybody else you play by the largest margin possible. Even if that means playing your starters well into the second half in a game that’s well out of reach.<\/p>\n

The college football “championship” system is a crock. The sooner they get rid of it, and put in a playoff, the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a nice, concise post about what’s wrong with college football. He’s responding to a desperately stupid post that ends with this: Let’s not ruin college football’s fabulous 13 week do-or-die regular season with a playoff! This was posted back in October, so the author can perhaps be forgiven for… Continue reading The Stupidest Argument in College Football<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}