Sunday, November 23, 2008

Dan Wetzel

As sportswriters go, I think Dan Wetzel is unusually bad, which is saying something. His most recent column exemplifies why.

He complains about the Big 12's selection method for choosing which team to put in its championship game. Three teams have one loss: Texas beat Oklahoma, which beat Texas Tech, which beat Texas. The conference decides who goes to the championship game by virtue of which team is ranker more highly.

Wetzel says this is bad, "jokes" about whether a team's color scheme should come into play (HA! good one!), and includes the following paragraph:

Maybe Texas should hire Barack Obama’s advisor David Axelrod for the rest of the season because it might be in trouble due to a scheduling quirk. Next week Oklahoma will have another big nationally televised opportunity to impress voters against highly ranked Oklahoma State. The Longhorns, meanwhile, seem like the team everyone forgot.

What does this mean? I have no idea. (Axelrod? Scheduling quirk? Wha?)

But what he never bothers doing is making any kind of suggestion about what they should do about it. If it's so bad, one would think he would have a better idea.

As for me, I think it seems pretty reasonable. Years ago the Big 10 would only let one team go to a bowl game and if two teams were tied, the athletic directors would vote to determine who went to the Rose Bowl. The Big 12 could have their athletic directors vote, but that's obviously prone to politicing as well. So all in all, seems to me that using a poll is as good a method as any other.

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