Now that at least some of the moaning and complaining about the college bowl pairings have abated, let me try to address some of the silly gripes that were floating about out there.
Georgia Coach, Mark Richt, wondered aloud why voters did not elevate his team into the BCS Championship Game saying, “I do think we were unofficially disqualified for not winning our conference.”
Memo to Coach Richt:
1. Then win your conference next time.
2. Oh, and to do that you will also need to win your division of the SEC next time too. You failed to do even that this year.
Here is a flat-out fact for the college football season that was:
Every team that harbors some thought that it ought to have been put into the Championship Game had a real opportunity to put itself there without debate.
No one did that.
So none of the whining is really appropriate here.
Do I think that the LSU/Ohio State pairing matches the two best teams in the country? No, but they are both in the top five or six. Do I think that the other BCS games are compelling events? No, but they rarely are.
The reality is that there is no playoff system for Division 1-A college football and the BCS is what we have. Complaining doesn’t do much of anything except to create a need for BCS apologists to open their yaps in response to the complaining. Mike Bianchi summed up the situation well in the Orlando Sentinel:
“Don’t you love the BCS apologists who continue to say that the system is good for college football because ‘people are talking about it?’ Yeah, well, people are talking about the collapse of the housing industry, too, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing.”
Looking at the “major” bowl games, Hawaii (the only undefeated team in the country albeit with narrow escapes against San Jose State, La Tech and Washington) will travel to New Orleans to take on Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. If the Dawgs take this game for granted and go out there with a half-assed effort, they will lay an egg of gigantic proportion. SEC teams are not supposed to lose to WAC teams – if you believe the dogma of those who live in SEC territory. And Hawaii can score points if you let those receivers run their routes in the secondary.
Va Tech and Kansas play in the Orange Bowl. The Hokies are the team that lost to LSU by 41 points earlier in the season and then coughed up a hairball in the final two minutes of a game against BC to squander a 10-0 lead. Kansas is another team in major BCS bowl game action that didn’t win its division of its conference; Kansas also lost to Missouri who got chased out of the big time bowl game picture; Kansas’ strength of schedule ranked 109th this year out of 119 teams. Tell me why this game is compelling…
Illinois and USC play in the Rose Bowl; these teams combined for five losses this year including the gag job that USC pulled to lose to Stanford when the Cardinal was a 41-point underdog. Why is this game even interesting?
Oklahoma and West Virginia meet in the Fiesta Bowl and this game might be the best of the lot. However, West Virginia will have to find a way to leave behind the pants-wetting performance that they offered up against Pitt. Even after Pitt beat the nominally second-best team in the country, the Panthers did not make it to bowl eligibility. If the Mountaineers pull that kind of rock out of their pocket again, this game will be awful; if they play solidly, this game could be exciting.
Enough college football for now. I will have some remarks to make about a few of the “minor bowl games” when their time draws nigh. Meanwhile, in baseball the winter meetings produced a trade that had the TV analysts in full throat. The Tigers’ acquisition of Dontrelle Willis and Miguel Cabrera caused the analysts to proclaim that the Tigers were now one of the three best teams in baseball. Maybe so, but I think we do need to wait just a bit to see how three things shake out:
1. Will Dontrelle Willis’ record improve because he will have a real major league team behind him such that he will not have to treat each batter as a potential game-breaking experience?
2. Will Miguel Cabrera start the season near 250 lbs or near 310 lbs? If he hits for the cycle one day, will someone be able to point out that he got one hit for each of his chins?
3. Will any Tigers be on the much-anticipated “Mitchell Report” list of steroid users and face suspensions? Gary Sheffield all but admitted he was a user when he talked of his training time with Barry Bonds. Pudge Rodriguez bulked up fast and then slimmed down just as fast and all of that happened as steroids became a really big deal. Coincidence? We shall see…
The Washington Nationals may be trying to secure that niche in baseball that the Portland Trailblazers once occupied in the NBA and that the Cincinnati Bengals occupy in the NFL. Recently the Nats acquired Lastings Milledge from the Mets. Milledge is supposed to be a huge vat of potential but he wore out his welcome in NY awfully quickly. He was involved in a situation related to sexual misconduct with a minor and then put out a rap song that was lewd even by the yardstick of rap songs. In the clubhouse, he reportedly pissed off teammates with his nonchalance sufficiently that someone posted a note on his locker saying “Know your place, Rook.”
Then, obviously, to help keep Milledge on the straight and narrow the Nationals went out and acquired Elijah Dukes who has had more than a couple of incidents involving threats, abuse and a lack of anger management. His estranged wife went to court to get a restraining order to keep Dukes away from her because she alleged that he threatened to kill her and her child. Dukes is also a prodigious young talent at the plate so the Nationals’ offense has gotten a whole lot better in the past six weeks – assuming of course that both of these guys can maintain behavior that is acceptable for your average housebroken hominids.
Finally, Greg Cote had this item in the Miami Herald recently. It sums up the status of men’s tennis very well:
“In tennis, the U.S. defeated Russia for its first Davis Cup title in 12 years. Peculiarly, nobody I’ve asked since has any idea who Davis is or was.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………