Orrin Hatch

I'm looking forward to the followup article on the Senator's thoughts on whether BYU deserves to go to play for the national championship after Saturday's game.

There's a general ridiculousness with this kind of article. After three weeks of games, there are lots and lots of undefeated teams. Plenty of teams *could* run the table, but not many of them will, and not many will be close.

I was also entertained by the last bit, about a possible matchup of two undefeated teams (BYU-Utah) at the end of the season. That sure would be exciting. But BYU wasn't the only Mountain West team to sink it's national championship chances last week.

Right, Senator?

Eastern

Normally I wish the best for former Michigan football coaches. Lloyd Carr is a quality guy, and I want to see his coaching tree prosper.

But not tomorrow. I hope Ron English has a bad day at his new gig. (Actually, I read somewhere that it was Lloyd Carr, acting as an unpaid consultant to Eastern's Athletic Director, who recommended Ron English for the job. Good for him, and it's good to give Ron English a chance. If he can have a .500 record at Eastern, he will deserve to be hired at a school where he has a real chance of success. Eastern is a tough place to win. It's hard enough to be a small D-1 school in a state with two dominant D-1 programs; it's even harder when you're only the second best program in your own county.)

I also wish the best for former Michigan football players. Those best wishes will also be placed on selective hold tomorrow.

Are We Back?

Michigan had a huge win against Notre Dame and for the first time in almost two years, I'm excited about the team.

Jimmy Clausen has been given a hard time in the past by Michigan fans. But in fairness, wow was he good yesterday. Give him a decent offensive line and he becomes Tom Brady, just sits back and picks you apart. Thankfully, Charlie "Schematic Advantage" Weis decided to stop throwing to his outstanding wide receivers in the 3rd quarter and run the ball instead. Good move Charlie--they were dominating Michigan's defense and thanks for shaking things up!

Michigan is not yet a national power, of course, but we're ranked this week for the first time in a loooooong time. That feels pretty good.

College Football, 1999-2008

As I did the last two years, it's easy to look at the most dominant teams of the last ten years as well. It's the same scoring as yesterday's post, but no seasons before 1999 count:


Surprising no one, USC is the top program of the last ten years. Because recent results matter more, Florida State is hit a lot harder by this measure than by yesterday's rankings over the last 25 years. Michigan is hanging on at #10, but we'll drop further before we start improving again.

College Football

Actual college football is starting. Before the season starts, I should update my own rankings of teams over the last 25 years, as I did after the 2006 and 2007 seasons.

To review, last year's #1 team, Florida, gets 25 points and so on down to last year's #25 team, BYU, which gets one point. Every year you lose one point, so the #1 team in 2007 gets 24 points, the #1 team in 2006 gets 23, etc. This chart takes the 2008 season into account:


East Carolina and Fresno State are eliminated from last year; it looks like Minnesota and Pitt (who may be decent) will be next. Oklahoma State is new this year.

In terms of patterns, Michigan continues its fall. Sigh. We were in the top 5 just two years ago, this year we should be passed by Georgia and LSU. USC continues to move up. The big fall is Florida State, which was #1 the first two years and surely would also have been #1 had I done this earlier, but that program has been fading for years as Bobby Bowden refuses to give up. USC and Oklahoma will probably pass them this year. Miami is matching Florida State in terms of the rate of its decay. I don't know that either one of them will turn it around anytime soon.

Nebraska and Colorado have also dropped, which is reflected both in their reduced score and the inclusion of Kansas and Missouri chasing after them.

We. Are. So. Screwed.

Michigan's defense last year was awful.

And we've just hired a man named Gerg. Gerg? Yes, Gerg. Gerg was just fired after going 10-37 at Syracuse, a worse winning percentage than even Michigan last year.

The reviews? Notsogood. Yes, now is the time to commence panic. When the Syracuse football blog's title is He's Your Problem Now, Michigan, it looks like we've chosen poorly:





Wha, was there something else important going on today?

College Football Playoffs, Again

As with previous years, I still say that if you support a playoff in college football, you need to decide how many teams to invite. 4? 6? 8? 12? 16?

The problem is that every year the "right" number of teams is different. So in keeping with previous years, lets look at how many teams you would put in a playoff this year (for instance, last year, Ohio State deserved to play the final game against one of 8 other teams that had a case).

This year, how many teams? Eight teams indisputably deserve to be in a playoff, which is to say there's no way to choose between them. Boise State, which went undefeated, would at least have an argument. Here's the updated chart:


This year doesn't help those who advocate for a playoff. If you're going to have a playoff to be "fair", you must invite at least eight teams. The whole idea just doesn't work.

Michigan football is in terrible shape, but things may be looking up.

This is perhaps the only bit of good news in the last couple of years.

Bravo for Bowls!

Finally there's a college football column I can agree with. He's too professional to say that Wetzel's an idiot (but I know he's thinking it). His bigger point is maybe the best argument of all for the bowls:

Bowls are fun.

It's not complicated. They're fun. A bowl game is fun to go, fun to be a fan at the game, fun to watch on TV. I can't wait tomorrow to roll out of bed and catch Michigan in th--wha? Wait, you're joking, right? Seriously? No, that's can't be correct. Really? Whew. That blows.

It's that time of the year again

Earlier I criticized Yahoo Sports columnist Dan Wetzel for blasting the BCS without proposing an alternative.

In fairness, he's now proposed something. Unfortunately, his proposed playoff is flat out impossible. It has zero possibility of being implemented.

Sixteen teams, four rounds of games. No chance. Why? Let us count the ways:

-The last two teams would play 17 games. There's no way college teams could play that many games.

-When would they schedule the games? College students have exams in December, to which he says: "college athletics has never allowed academics to stand in its way before." Actually, yes it has. That's one reason teams don't play in December.

-College presidents don't want a playoff. To which he says "Presidents are notoriously weak-spined and revenue desperate. Pressure and cash can change opinions in a hurry. They follow the herd." Really? If they're weak spined, why haven't they caved and had a playoff already?


A sixteen team playoff might be possible if we could redo everything about college football, i.e. create a different sport. I consider that unlikely, though, and there's absolutely no chance that this idea has any possibility of ever happening.

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.

No We Can't!

Well I like Obama but I wasn't happy to see that he supports a playoff in college football.

As I've said before (and before), the problem with a playoff is figuring out how many teams to invite. Playoff proponents gloss over this question, but it's actually enormously important. Just check out the comments here. People argue for six teams, eight teams, twelve teams, sixteen teams, etc.

Until playoff proponents can give a rational argument for a certain number of teams, there's no reason to discuss a playoff.

Case in point: 2005. Texas and USC were undefeated and they met for a (fantastic) national championship game. Should they have been forced to play Penn State and Oregon, each of which lost a game earlier, before playing each other? No!

Michigan. Sigh.

Incidentally, I went to Ann Arbor last weekend for my ten year law school reunion. Aside from the other festivities, there was a football game against Illinois.

Michigan looked awful. That's not true. After the first quarter, Michigan was ahead 14-3. The vibe was positive, happy, relaxed. Life was good.

Then it all went awry, and Michigan played three quarters of truly awful football. Everything went wrong. The offensive line couldn't block, Threet couldn't throw, and the defensive secondary thought it would be a good idea to soak in gasoline and light themselves on fire.

Michigan's defense, the "strength" of the team before the season, gave up 402 yards in the final three quarters (yes, I am enough of a loser to add it up).

We Michigan fans are in unchartered territory. Michigan presently has the longest bowl streak in NCAA history, 33 years. The last time Michigan did NOT go to a bowl game was after the 1974 season. It's worth noting that before 1975, only one Big Ten team was allowed to go to a bowl--the champion went to the Rose Bowl. If more than one team from the conference had been allowed to go to a bowl, Michigan's bowl streak would date to the 1968 season, or 40 years.

I think this is the year it ends, which would be jarring. I have no living memory of Michigan not going to a bowl, and I distinctly remember Michigan losing the 1978 Rose Bowl to Washington, because we were terrible in the first half and dominated the second half (this is why I never liked Warren Moon growing up).

So this whole situation is bizarre. Michigan has had its ups and downs, but the concept of completely throwing a season away is foreign to us. I certainly hope it's only for one year.


As a sidenote, it seems someone was dropping a whole lot of acid in Pasadena in the fall of 1977.

More College Football

The column I mentioned on Thursday looks a little more silly today. Georgia and Florida join USC as one loss teams. Note that this will soon lead to a variety of columns saying that "The BCS got lucky" because all these teams lost.

No. It isn't luck. It's very rare for more than two teams from power conferences to go undefeated. It happened once since the old conference tie-ins were eliminated: in 2004 (USC, Oklahoma, Auburn). While possible, it's unlikely that more than two teams will go undefeated this year, at least more than two teams from power conferences. It's certainly premature to start complaining about it.

USC Out

And sometimes criticizing sportswriters works out perfectly.

Of the six contributors to the premature BCS bashing, five assumed that USC would go undefeated (kudos to David Fox, who pointed out that USC loses a conference game or two every year).


As a sidenote, Oregon State? Huh? They were clobberedby Penn State three weeks ago.

Dumb Sportswriting of the Day

Writing about college football is easy. Whenever you need a quick story, just bring up the BCS and complain about it.

But this is a good one. It's September and they are already hyping the possibility of too many undefeated teams! Guys, can we at least wait until conference play starts?

Michigan-Notre Dame

I watched the first half of the game and some of the third quarter, before I (fortunately) had to leave to go to a wedding.

It was not, shall we say, a great game. Michigan fumbled the opening *TWO* kickoffs and was down 21-0 after about ten minutes.

However. I saw plenty of good things and I'm with mgoblog on feeling encouraged. Everyone knew this year was going to be ugly, but we made some progress. We found a quarterback and a tailback. Threet made some good throws and played well. Sam McGuffie looks like our tailback for the next several years, unless he gets hurt (he's a little guy, which makes me nervous).

On the other hand, our defense, supposed to be the strength of the team, was bad. And it's very, very important for our receivers to catch the ball on kickoffs.

Now Michigan has a bye week, which is what they need. Threet should spend it working with the first team offense and hopefully the team will also work on not fumbling.

Notre Dame

I don't like Notre Dame. Not at all. They were terrible last year and I laughed. Unfortunately, Michigan might just be that bad this year. I'm not sure this columnist was joking when he predicted a 3-0 Michigan win in five overtimes.

In the meantime, my fellow Michigan comrades posted an instructive interview with Charlie Weis.

Ron English

Ron English was Michigan's defensive coordinator the last two years. He was there for the Very Good (2006) and The Not So Good (2007). I always liked him; I thought the brilliance of 2006 mostly outweighed 2007.

He was fired by Rich Rodriguez and landed at the University of Louisville, where things look good:

Was there anything to like? Yes. The Cardinal defense was spectacular. Listen to me -- it was spectacular. It held UK to 73 yards on the ground. Dixon's jaunt at the end was a gift, and not preventable given the degree to which the game had slipped at that moment. Ron English deserves a lot of credit for turning an unsure group into a physical unit that gave Hartline no good looks down the field, harassed him incessantly, and bottled up the Dixon/Locke combo before it could get started.

I'm happy he landed. He'll be a head coach some day. Maybe some day soon.

Good Work, Gentlemen

Nice