Nov. 8, 2006
Commodore Notebook Archive – click here
POLL WATCHING
Let’s talk for a minute about polls, not those pesky political polls that drove us nuts for months but the college football polls that apparently keep some folks up at night. How and who to crown the national champion has been the source of barber shop arguments for decades and since the existence of the B.C.S. title game, the debate about which team is No. 2 is now an equally important element.
Today people get worked up and many demand a play-off, as though that would solve the debate. No way. This news just in…no matter what system we employ there will be disagreement. That has been a constant in the fabric of sport because try as we might, we have never been able to develop an empirical tool to measure athletic prowess.
We can now pinpoint the winning time in a 100-meter dash or a 200 meter freestyle to the thousandth of a second. But we still can’t measure if the 85-guys in Austin, Texas are better than the 85-guys in Los Angeles or Lincoln. It is very hard to pick the best two out of a litter of 117.
Where I get confused is when pundits become outraged, as though this is something new. The young media may not know better but the veterans should recall what used to happen. Before the B.C.S., we used two simple polls to determine our national champ – the Associated Press and the USA Today (Coaches) polls. Sometimes those two groups disagreed – as in 1990 when Colorado and Georgia Tech shared the coveted national championship.
Those of us who can recall 1969 remember when President Richard Nixon called the winning Texas Coach, Darrell Royal, after the Longhorns had topped Arkansas to congratulate him on winning the national championship. That was a nice touch, unless you lived in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania and had watched Joe Paterno guide Penn State to an undefeated season, too. Talk about feeling left out.
It was thought if only we could get the No. 1 and No. 2 teams from the final poll on the same field for a bowl game (that rarely used to occur), that would stop the bickering. It did, as long as there were just two unbeatens from the so-called power conferences at season’s end. But when we had THREE unbeatens and SEC kingpin Auburn was odd-man out, all heck broke loose.
We’ve heard ideas for four teams to be chosen for a play-off, others suggest eight and I’ve heard somebody who forgets that these are college students, not professionals, say we need 16 teams in the play-off.
To all of these suggestions I have a one word rebuttal: basketball.
At one time college basketball had a 16 team national championship field. That was deemed inadequate and March Madness became a 32-team deal. That didn’t seem enough, apparently, and we expanded to 48 teams. That would solve all problems – 48. Right.
The great minds met again and we went to a 64 team bracket. Now we have it right and ALL the deserving teams have a chance to play for glory. Well, not quite. Now we have a “play-in” game with a 65th team. And if that is not enough, once the hoops bracket is revealed the first stories are which six or seven teams got robbed.
Obviously, my contention is that if we have a four-team gridiron play-off we will argue about the fifth and sixth place teams. If we have eight, we’ll think the No. 9 team was robbed. And if we have 16 institutions in the mix, those poor teams from No. 17 to 20 will feel slighted.
For my money, college football already has a “play-off system”. It’s called the season. You lose a game along the line, you probably lose your chance to play for the title. That makes college football different from college basketball, where a team could finish as a pronounced also-ran in its conference and still cut the nets at the Final Four.
Bobby Johnson saw play-offs up close and personal at Furman and made a run to the NCAA I-AA championship game. Surprisingly to me, he is now on record as being opposed to the play-off system.
This column doesn’t have an answer, in fact it doubts one exists. Just keep in mind the next time you hear someone whining about our inadequate current system that your grandfather read a similar complaint and it’s our bet that your grandchildren will, too.
COMING UP FAST
Do you have our men’s basketball game with Georgetown on your calendar? It is November 15 – just a week from today’s posting. It’s bound to be a terrific game so don’t let it slip past you as we near the end of the football season and the Thanksgiving holiday.
