Monday, December 5, 2011
LSU/Alabama II: The BCS Lump of Coal
Every January, store shelves are littered with the leftover goods Christmas shoppers did not want. These perfectly good toys and gadgets are available at huge post-holiday discounts, but they are not the cutting edge electronics and talking puppets that were desired enough to make it under someone's tree. Maybe they were not packaged sleekly enough, or perhaps the good little girls and boys had gotten one for a birthday a few months back. For whatever reason, nobody wanted them.
In that vein, this season's BCS championship offers us an early January sale on LSU/Alabama whether we want it or not.
Before going any further, let's make one thing clear: LSU won the 2011 regular season in a landslide. The gulf between the Tigers and whichever team you like second best is wider than a nose tackle after Thanksgiving dinner. While the debate over Alabama or Oklahoma State at No. 2 will dominate the days to come, there is a more pressing question looming over this season's BCS: why even have it?
Many college football fans approach each season with a strange sense of mysticism. To some, the true "best team" can be deduced over the course of the year (often by the nausea-inducingly smug "eyeball test"). Each game is like a new reactive experiment in an alchemist's lab by which he learns more about the true nature of the materials involved. You will see conveniently ambiguous terms like "gritty" and "winner" thrown around in these discussions. But the most aggravating of these discussions come at the end of each season, when revisionist historians look back at the year and pick out the pieces of evidence that prove the newly crowned champs had the mettle all along. We could have identified it, they imply, if only we had searched a little harder and smarter for it.
This, of course, is an affront to science, logic, and anyone with enough intelligence to have it insulted. The truth is each game is a single trial of probabilities, a spin of the roulette wheel or a roll of the dice if you prefer. There is a certain probability each team will win at the start of each game, and those probabilities are reshuffled with each play. The final outcomes are only cemented when the final whistle blows and can never truly be known through any kind of witchcraft.
We can only add new evidence to our profiles of each team as they demonstrate them each week. If LSU loses to Alabama on January 9, does it mean we are wrong at this moment (and most of the moments throughout this season) in feeling strongly that the Tigers are the best team in 2011? Of course not.
This is the great problem with the underlying philosophy of the BCS. The college football season is set up with two filtering mechanisms to determine a champion. The first is the wide swath of the regular season, by which we are charged with narrowing the field all the way down to the top two. This slotting of the BCS top two eliminates 98.3% of the field (118 out of 120 teams). By comparison, the 68-team March Madness field only eliminates 80.1% of Division 1 basketball teams from title contention. If the NCAA tournament were to parallel the reductive scope of the BCS Championship Game, it would be a tournament of fewer than six teams. But it gets worse still.
The college football season, without question, provides the smallest annual sample of data for each team than any other sport, amateur or professional. At the highest extreme, Major League Baseball teams play 162 games that are truly up for grabs upon first pitch. Those teams may ebb and flow through a season, and sometimes they even need a 163rd game to separate themselves, but by early October, nobody can say we are not sure how good the Yankees or Dodgers are.
Even college football's professional big brother offers about 100% more real tests for its teams before the postseason. With the relatively uncommon exception of games where teams have clinched their playoff seeds, NFL games are overwhelmingly competitive and unpredictable. There is a reason the cliché "any given Sunday" uses the seventh day, not the sixth.
College football teams only play 12 games with perhaps a conference title game for a baker's dozen. But look more closely at what those games mean.
LSU played an admirably competitive schedule, including an un-SEC-like two non-league games against BCS-conference foes that were legitimately losable. And yet, of its 13 games, how many taught us anything about the Tigers?
Two of those games were against Northwestern State and Western Kentucky. Even the worst LSU teams would win those games. The Tigers also notched easy wins over Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ole Miss, who combined to go 12-24. That leaves us with eight games against bowl-eligible teams, and even some of those games (Florida, Mississippi State, and Auburn each lost at least five games) do not really separate LSU from anyone in the top 20.
All of this should remind us as college football fans that we really never know much about squads of 18-22-year-olds playing a half-dozen meaningful games a year. If Alabama beats LSU, does that nullify everything that has gone on since early September? What if they played a third time after that in February? Sometimes one game is just a game.
The BCS itself is not flawed — it does exactly what it is supposed to do. We may split hairs over the Alabama/Oklahoma State du jour, but picking the best two teams out of 120 is a very demanding task. Without the BCS, we would not have LSU/Alabama, LSU/Oklahoma State, or nearly any other BCS championship game since 1998, and for that, we are better off now than we were before this system.
But the logic that the college presidents based the BCS on is not only flawed, it is cracked and rotten. We need to give teams a vehicle to establish superiority on the field, not because voters or computers make bad choices, but because the game just does not lend itself to judgment like figure-skating or boxing. Not to mention, it would be a ton of fun.
Until then, we can only dream of holiday seasons to come when we get shiny new interregional matchups and suped-up contrasts of style. Because this January, the shelves of the BCS store will only have the gift nobody wanted to give or receive.