{"id":811,"date":"2006-11-12T16:50:19","date_gmt":"2006-11-12T16:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/12\/saturday-football\/"},"modified":"2006-11-12T16:50:19","modified_gmt":"2006-11-12T16:50:19","slug":"saturday-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/12\/saturday-football\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Football"},"content":{"rendered":"

While all right-thinking people know that the important games are played on Sundays, as God intended, there are some people who insist on watching football on Saturday<\/a>. Yesterday was a particularly good day for it, with a bunch of highly rated teams losing <\/a>.<\/p>\n

While there was, of course, only one actually important result yesterday, namely Williams beating amherst as is right and proper<\/a>, I like seeing the chaos in the upper echelons of Division I. Personally, I’m rooting for everybody to lose except for Boise State and the University of Exit 9<\/a>. Not because I particularly like either of those teams, but because continued victories will once again help highlight the way that the current college football system is badly broken.<\/p>\n

Neither Rutgers nor Boise State, though both are undefeated, has any chance of playing for the mythical national championship, because neither is a traditional football power. As a result, they weren’t ranked in the pre-season polls, and if you’re not ranked in the pre-season polls, you’re pretty much done. College football only has one round of post-season play, and the “championship” matches the teams with the top rankings according to an arcane formula that includes both polls and computer rankings. And given the only-drop-when-you-lose nature of sports polls, there’s no realistic way for a team ranked outside the Top 25 to get a shot at the title.<\/p>\n

This is far and away the dumbest method of determining a winner of any major sport– dumber even than penalty-kick shootouts in soccer, and if the people in charge had any sense, they’d replace it with an actual playoff. That won’t happen, though, as the current system is insanely profitable for a small group of traditional football powers, so they have no reason to change it.<\/p>\n

So, every year, I root for chaos and confusion in the BCS. I want to see undefeated teams finish just outside the big-name bowls, and be denied a chance to play for the “championship,” so that every sports program in the nation is consumed with discussions of just how stupid the current system is. It’s only with enough years of embarrassingly unjust “championship” games, and outraged discussion of them, that they’ll actually be forced to change the system, and make college football a sport worth watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While all right-thinking people know that the important games are played on Sundays, as God intended, there are some people who insist on watching football on Saturday. Yesterday was a particularly good day for it, with a bunch of highly rated teams losing . While there was, of course, only one actually important result yesterday,… Continue reading Saturday 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-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","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=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}