See If You Can Guess Who I Am Now
Posted by tgirsch

“Hey, Mr. Blank, look at that over there!”

*bolts*

December 12th, 2007 | Sports, NFL, College FB | 2 comments

Can We Just Admit that College Football Sucks?
Posted by Kevin

I am sorry, but it does, and last night’s game just proves it. Somehow, college football fans want to claim that Florida proved they were champions last night. Yeah, right. They had to beat one team — a team that hadn’t played in fifty one days — in one game more than a month after the regular season had ended. Yeah, I can see how that is a good way to determine who the best team in the previous season was! In fact, the college football championship has to be the easiest one to win in sports. It requires just a handful of things:

  1. A “pedigree”. This is because the national champion has to be rated high before the season starts, and be from a “major” conference. Coaches and sports writers, after all, are well known for their objectivity and keen analytical insight, so it makes perfect sense to make their pre-season opinions the first measure of greatness.
  2. Winning three, maybe four real games and not falling asleep during the contests with the cupcakes that make up most of the remainign schedule
  3. Win one game a month or more after the season has ended, which is like having the World Series not being played until the first day of next season’s spring training

All Powerful Florida beat essentially no one to get the number two ranking. And, please, spare me the “they had the toughest schedule” nonsense. They played no one outside of their conference, played their toughest opponents at home, and played in a confernece whose teams fatten their resumes by beating up on cupcakes from smaller, weaker conferences — usually at home. I mean, Florida beat quality opponents like a 1-AA school and, I believe, St. Mary’s Home for Paraplegic and Blind Schoolgirls. How impressive. (The saddest part? Except for the fact that Ohio State went to Texas and won, I could make the same argument about Ohio State’s schedule.) And then they had to play one game and only one game and play that game literally months after the season ended to be declared the National Champion. Whoop-dee-doo. So very, very impressive.

And that doesn’t even get to the quality of the games. Most college games suck. The play is generally of poor quality (the Powerful Gators field goal kicker was 4 for 13 before the bowl game last night. Yeah, that’s quality) with unimaginative play calling and pedestrian plays. Watch a college football game and you will see more dropped passes, missed coverages, and poor tackles than you can count. The officiating is almost uniformly terrible and way, way too susceptible to intimidation by the home crowds. Most games are blow outs because the teams aren’t even close to being physically matched.

Because of that last fact, college coaching generally sucks. Success in college coaching rests on being able to recruit better players than your opponents, scheduling easy games, and occasionally beating your big rival. Do that, and your a nine to eleven win coach with almost lifetime security and no actual reason to try and coach. There is a reason that most college football coaches flame out in the NFL: because the talent disparity largely doesn’t exist in the NFL and it actually matters if the coach can, you know, coach every week. In fact, Florida didn’t really have a better team than Ohio state, they just had one of the handful of actual coaches in college football. If Urban Meyer coached Ohio state and Jim Tressel coached Florida, I would bet anything that Ohio state would have crushed Florida. Tressel made absolutely no adjustments to what Meyers was doing at any point in the game. He is sadly not unique among college coaches in his inability to actually deal with the challenges of playing another team that isn’t half your size and twice as slow.

The whole edifice is a joke. Its regular season is a yawn-fest consisting almost entirely of mis-matched blowouts and pedestrian play whose post season is determined by writers and coaches seeped in conflicts of interest and whose fans and pundits expect us to take seriously the notion that game splayed after a one or two month layoff are somehow meaningful measures of a team.

So Florida won the BCS Championship. Great. Take half a holiday, college football fan. And then, please, sit down, shut up, and let the rest of us enjoy watching teams in competent leagues compete for real championships at the actual end of their seasons on the real field of play against the full range of top competition.

January 9th, 2007 | Sports, Health, College FB | 23 comments

Another Reason to Hate Ohio State
Posted by tgirsch

The first half just ended.  As if I needed another reason to hate Ohio State (I already have many), they embarass the conference by going out there in the first half and getting their asses handed to them by a Florida team that need luck to beat friggin’ South Carolina. And what egregiously awful coaching. When was the last time you saw a team start playing prevent in the first quarter? Half the time, only six or seven Ohio State defenders are on the screen. A three-in-the-box strategy just doesn’t work all that often, Mr. Tressel!

And what horrid officiating! The “roughing the passer” call that led to Ohio State’s only offensive touchdownwas complete bogus. Why not play two-handed touch, or make them wear skirts back there? And on at least three occasions, I’ve seen Florida linemen tackle their defensive counterparts. Apparently, there’s no such thing as holding, nor any such thing as an illegal block in the back. But if you even look at a quarterback funny, fifteen yards, bub.

Full disclosure: As much as I hate Ohio State, it’s against my religion to ever root for a Florida team. Any Florida team. Gators, Seminoles, Hurricanes, Golden Knights; doesn’t matter. I hate ‘em all. So this game sucks for me: Team I hate versus team I hate even more.
OK, now that that little rant is out of the way, a question for the readership. Set aside conference and team loyalties, and ask yourself this: which is more embarrassing for the B(C)S? Ohio State getting its ass kicked and having one Division I team undefeated (and not the national champion)? Or Ohio State pulling it out, and the season ending with two undefeateds?

January 8th, 2007 | Sports, College FB | 16 comments