The BCS Bowl Selections came out yesterday, and like almost every other year, many people are unhappy. I’ve got lots of random thoughts, so I figured I’d just start collecting them here.

• No one got a bad deal here. Yes, if you root for Georgia, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma or USC (we’ll get to Hawaii later), you are understandably disappointed today. On Sunday morning you thought your team might luck into the BCS Championship Game, and in the end LSU and OSU took those two spots. But all four schools lost two games each, and had multiple blemishes on their resumes. This is *not* 1998 Tulane, 2000 Florida State or Washington, 2001 Oregon or Colorado, 2003 USC, 2004 Auburn, Boise State or Utah, 2006 Michigan or Boise State. The ‘04 Tigers probably have the biggest complaint in BCS history, and no one this year has much to complain about. The argument boils down to “we weren’t lucky enough to be selected”, hardly a sympathetic complaint. Each team had more than enough chances to make the title game.

 

• The BCS has increased my interest in college football. Maybe it’s because I’m a math geek or maybe it’s because I like controversy, but discussing who the top two teams are is pretty fascinating. It’s probably not as fair as a playoff, but if it wasn’t for the BCS, we wouldn’t be talking college football this morning. Further, …

 

• If the BCS never came about, here’s what we’d be looking at:
  Rose Bowl: USC vs. OSU
  Sugar Bowl: LSU vs ???
  Orange Bowl: Oklahoma vs. ???
  Fiesta Bowl: ??? vs. ???
  Those ???s would be filled by at large teams, of course. Maybe we’d get Oklahoma against Georgia, LSU against Virginia Tech, and Hawaii facing Kansas. Who knows. But we wouldn’t be any closer to crowning a college football champion before the BCS came about.

After showing my pro-BCS stance, let me now get to my biggest pet peeve with the BCS and the polls. No one really knows how teams are supposed to be ranked. This bothers me and perplexes me more than just about anything in sports. How can we have polls where there’s no guidance on how to rank the teams? While most rankings are easy, on the edges you really need some guidance. The big question is the retrodictive vs. predictive distinction: we don’t know what the rankings are supposed to be. Are the polls supposed to be designed so that the team ranked X is always a favorite in a neutral site over the team ranked X+1? Should the polls reflect who has accomplished the most to date? Should they reflect who has looked the best to date? Should they reflect which team we subjectively think is the best team in the nation? I’ve got no idea, and frankly, it’s impossible to rank the teams in a meaningful way until you know what you’re ranking them on.

I read this article, you can go to  www.pro-footballreference.com to read the rest. 

Posted by Chase Stuart on Sunday, December 2, 2007