Getting Back to Being a Person (Contains BCS Dissatisfaction: Part I)
(Note: I decided to leave this post unfinished and instead continue it later. If you don't care about college football, then you likely won't care about the continuations... :-P)
The past weeks have been nuts. Last night, 15 minutes before the deadline, my advisor and I submitted our paper to the IEEE Complexity Conference for 2007. We are both still exhausted from this, I think:-P
Anyways, at some point I will probably talk about the result we had, but right now I am far more interested in talking about the Michigan football team.
BCS Dissatisfaction: Part I. (I added this line after the initial posting.)
You see, something very crazy happened this weekend. Something that had Michigan fans very excited. I don't like working without context, so let's see if we can describe the situation.
American college football is composed of a strange rankings system. Since there are so many teams in the nation, it's hard to determine which of any two teams are better. Neither will necessarily play against each other, so judgement calls have to be made at some point. Thus, across the country, there are several different ways to create a strict (no ties) ranking of all the teams. Rankings exist that are generated by computer algorithms, team coaches, the press and others.
This, obviously, leads to problems. Being a Michigan fan, let's talk about the incident closest to my own heart. In 1997, Michigan had a great team, and had an undefeated regular season. Since they were the Big Ten Champion, they went on to play in and win the Rose Bowl. The finished the year with a perfect record. Nebraska had also had a very solid year, also with an undefeated season. They went on to play in a different bowl (I'm not going to look up the parts of the story I don't remember, sorry) and also won. Both teams claimed to be the best in the nation.
At the time, the National Champion was decided by two major polls. However, this year, the polls decided differently on the champion. Thus, the championship was split, which each team claiming the title.
The following year, the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) was born to become more ensure the two best teams would play each other in a bowl game for the national title.
I don't really want to get into all the politics behind this, except to say that it often causes a problem when 3 teams are all heavy contenders. This has happened in the past, and it has definitely happened this year.
If you're not familiar with what happend this year... well... I don't really want to explain what happened. Let's find a link... Try this one. I haven't actually read it myself... but it doesn't appear to be an opinion piece. Feel free to yell at me if it's at all biased (which it likely is a bit:-P).
Essentially, Ohio State is the only top team with a perfect schedule insofar. Michigan and Florida are the two top tier teams with one loss. The point of the BCS is to pick to the top two teams to pit them against each other in the National Championship game.
Coming in to this past weekend, the official ranking (the BCS uses a prescribed combination of human and computer polling to rank teams) had the following teams in the top 4: 1) Ohio State. 2) USC. 3) Michigan. 4) Florida. Due to the fact that Michigan is located to the north, they end their season earlier (brr! It's cold up there!) than either Florida or USC. Thus, USC and Florida were playing this final week, while Michigan and Ohio State had already finished their regular season schedules.
The beat on the street was that USC was going to be playing for the national title unless they blew their chance by losing their last game to UCLA. In that case, the chance would go to Michigan. Florida, it had been "decided" was out of the running due to their loss to Auburn earlier in the season (a solid team, but a team not ranked in the top ten).
The unlikely happened this Saturday night, however, and UCLA toppled long-time rival USC. UCLA was not an impressive force this year, and this result was not expected by anyone. Michigan fans across the country rejoiced! We watched Florida go back and forth with Arkansas (the USC game ended halfway through the Florida game) before pulling out the win, 38-28.
There was some contention between Michigan and Florida, but Michigan fans felt that their team would retain it's standing. That's the view from my standing, however... here are actual points that are debatable. First I'll list points that I think are valid (I'll make points for both sides, I promise! I want Florida fans to enjoy this post too! I'm not a UF hater at all!) and mention who they support (in case it's not immediately clear). Following this, I'll mention points that I think are invalid, and I may comment about them if time permits.
(It's getting late as I write this, so I'll likely not finish it tonight, but I'll note where I break between the writing for the sake of good documentation.)
I have decided instead to reverse the order and list the invalid points, followed by the valid points. For the invalid points, I'll explain why the point sucks.
Invalid (to me) Points:
"Michigan is in the same conference as Ohio State." The BCS is not designed to pit the top two teams from seperate conferences against each other. It's designed only to pit the top two teams against each other. If all the conferences aside from the ACC sucked, then it would be clear to send the best two teams from the ACC to the national title bowl. This is not what happened this year---there are plenty of dangerous conferences---but there should not be a restriction on which conferences the teams come from.
"Michigan already lost to Ohio State. We don't want a rematch for the BCS title." Again, the sole purpose of the BCS is to pit the top two teams in the nation against each other, regardless of whether they've already done that this season. This argument seems equivalent to saying, if the two teams that make it to the Superbowl (NFL) have already played this season, we'll cancel the game and just announce the winner to be the team that won the regular season game. The BCS rankings should not be determined by making sure certain teams don't happen to pair up at #1 and #2. Simply stated, the two best teams should play in the final game.
(I may add more later... This post is unfinished...)
Valid (to me) Points:
Florida played 13 games. Michigan only played 12. Ron Zook quotes this as one of his reasons for putting Florida ahead of Michigan. In college football there is no standardization of the number of games a team must play every year (as far as I know). Thus, teams like Florida, with longer playable seasons, can play more games. This is definitely a good reason to support Florida.
Michigan lost to one team, currently ranked above them at #1, by 3 points. Florida lost to a team, currently ranked below them at #9.
(more to come...)
I will continue this post in another post. I'll title it... um... "BCS Dissatisfaction (Part II)"
The past weeks have been nuts. Last night, 15 minutes before the deadline, my advisor and I submitted our paper to the IEEE Complexity Conference for 2007. We are both still exhausted from this, I think:-P
Anyways, at some point I will probably talk about the result we had, but right now I am far more interested in talking about the Michigan football team.
BCS Dissatisfaction: Part I. (I added this line after the initial posting.)
You see, something very crazy happened this weekend. Something that had Michigan fans very excited. I don't like working without context, so let's see if we can describe the situation.
American college football is composed of a strange rankings system. Since there are so many teams in the nation, it's hard to determine which of any two teams are better. Neither will necessarily play against each other, so judgement calls have to be made at some point. Thus, across the country, there are several different ways to create a strict (no ties) ranking of all the teams. Rankings exist that are generated by computer algorithms, team coaches, the press and others.
This, obviously, leads to problems. Being a Michigan fan, let's talk about the incident closest to my own heart. In 1997, Michigan had a great team, and had an undefeated regular season. Since they were the Big Ten Champion, they went on to play in and win the Rose Bowl. The finished the year with a perfect record. Nebraska had also had a very solid year, also with an undefeated season. They went on to play in a different bowl (I'm not going to look up the parts of the story I don't remember, sorry) and also won. Both teams claimed to be the best in the nation.
At the time, the National Champion was decided by two major polls. However, this year, the polls decided differently on the champion. Thus, the championship was split, which each team claiming the title.
The following year, the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) was born to become more ensure the two best teams would play each other in a bowl game for the national title.
I don't really want to get into all the politics behind this, except to say that it often causes a problem when 3 teams are all heavy contenders. This has happened in the past, and it has definitely happened this year.
If you're not familiar with what happend this year... well... I don't really want to explain what happened. Let's find a link... Try this one. I haven't actually read it myself... but it doesn't appear to be an opinion piece. Feel free to yell at me if it's at all biased (which it likely is a bit:-P).
Essentially, Ohio State is the only top team with a perfect schedule insofar. Michigan and Florida are the two top tier teams with one loss. The point of the BCS is to pick to the top two teams to pit them against each other in the National Championship game.
Coming in to this past weekend, the official ranking (the BCS uses a prescribed combination of human and computer polling to rank teams) had the following teams in the top 4: 1) Ohio State. 2) USC. 3) Michigan. 4) Florida. Due to the fact that Michigan is located to the north, they end their season earlier (brr! It's cold up there!) than either Florida or USC. Thus, USC and Florida were playing this final week, while Michigan and Ohio State had already finished their regular season schedules.
The beat on the street was that USC was going to be playing for the national title unless they blew their chance by losing their last game to UCLA. In that case, the chance would go to Michigan. Florida, it had been "decided" was out of the running due to their loss to Auburn earlier in the season (a solid team, but a team not ranked in the top ten).
The unlikely happened this Saturday night, however, and UCLA toppled long-time rival USC. UCLA was not an impressive force this year, and this result was not expected by anyone. Michigan fans across the country rejoiced! We watched Florida go back and forth with Arkansas (the USC game ended halfway through the Florida game) before pulling out the win, 38-28.
There was some contention between Michigan and Florida, but Michigan fans felt that their team would retain it's standing. That's the view from my standing, however... here are actual points that are debatable. First I'll list points that I think are valid (I'll make points for both sides, I promise! I want Florida fans to enjoy this post too! I'm not a UF hater at all!) and mention who they support (in case it's not immediately clear). Following this, I'll mention points that I think are invalid, and I may comment about them if time permits.
(It's getting late as I write this, so I'll likely not finish it tonight, but I'll note where I break between the writing for the sake of good documentation.)
I have decided instead to reverse the order and list the invalid points, followed by the valid points. For the invalid points, I'll explain why the point sucks.
Invalid (to me) Points:
"Michigan is in the same conference as Ohio State." The BCS is not designed to pit the top two teams from seperate conferences against each other. It's designed only to pit the top two teams against each other. If all the conferences aside from the ACC sucked, then it would be clear to send the best two teams from the ACC to the national title bowl. This is not what happened this year---there are plenty of dangerous conferences---but there should not be a restriction on which conferences the teams come from.
"Michigan already lost to Ohio State. We don't want a rematch for the BCS title." Again, the sole purpose of the BCS is to pit the top two teams in the nation against each other, regardless of whether they've already done that this season. This argument seems equivalent to saying, if the two teams that make it to the Superbowl (NFL) have already played this season, we'll cancel the game and just announce the winner to be the team that won the regular season game. The BCS rankings should not be determined by making sure certain teams don't happen to pair up at #1 and #2. Simply stated, the two best teams should play in the final game.
(I may add more later... This post is unfinished...)
Valid (to me) Points:
Florida played 13 games. Michigan only played 12. Ron Zook quotes this as one of his reasons for putting Florida ahead of Michigan. In college football there is no standardization of the number of games a team must play every year (as far as I know). Thus, teams like Florida, with longer playable seasons, can play more games. This is definitely a good reason to support Florida.
Michigan lost to one team, currently ranked above them at #1, by 3 points. Florida lost to a team, currently ranked below them at #9.
(more to come...)
I will continue this post in another post. I'll title it... um... "BCS Dissatisfaction (Part II)"
posted by Kyle at 10:45 PM
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