| | While well wishers continue to express their support for the proposed Georgia-Michigan series, I have a few other issues to address, so I hope you will permit me to veer off the subject temporarily in order to offer a few measured observations on the current hot topic in the college football blogosphere.
"It is my belief," he stated, "that the #1 team in the final AP poll does not have a valid claim to the national championship based solely upon that ranking." The author went on to note that "this is only true for the BCS era," since "the BCS was the first and only system that all the major conferences ever collectively and officially agreed to recognize as a national champion selector." (I don't know how far this L.S.U. law student has gotten in pursuit of his legal education, but, clearly, he has gotten at least far enough into the Legal Research and Writing course to have covered the unit on the sneaky use of adverbs.)
Heismanpundit took this law student to task, but, unfortunately, he (as usual) decided to be crass and vitriolic rather than calm and rational. Heismanpundit's retort consisted chiefly of insults, as he accused the author of "ignor[ing] reality," of being "dumb" and "weird," and of "bleating" like a "sheep."
In his usual offhanded South-bashing manner, Heismanpundit even asked, "Is it just something in the water down there?"---which was a particularly coarse turn of phrase to use when assailing the region that was decimated by hurricanes last fall. (Heismanpundit is a Southern Cal guy, so I would ask him to consider how he would feel if, after the Golden State was decimated by an earthquake, I deemed him blameworthy for some perceived transgression and applied the word "fault" to his conduct.)
The sad fact is that Heismanpundit (for once) made a good point, but he spent too much time being nasty and not enough time making his case, so his reasonable argument was obscured by his obnoxious attitude.
First of all, there is nothing uniquely "official" about the Bowl Championship Series. Before the B.C.S., there was the Bowl Alliance and, before that, there was the Bowl Coalition and, before that, there were automatic conference bids to each of the major bowl games. The B.C.S. is the present stage of an evolutionary process, not the final stage of a revolutionary process.
While the B.C.S. is designed to produce a cleaner and clearer national championship scenario---a purpose it has seldom accomplished satisfactorily---it is "official" in the same sense that the traditional conference bowl tie-ins were, with the champions of particular leagues getting automatic bids to designated games.
As for the conferences sanctioning these results as being inherently more "official" than those of the pre-B.C.S. era, the S.E.C. media guide (as, I suspect, do those of the other major conferences) touts such squads as the 1980 Georgia Bulldogs, the 1992 Alabama Crimson Tide, and the 1996 Florida Gators as national champions, even though those No. 1 rankings all were attained in the pre-B.C.S. era. How much more completely could the conferences sanction the results of pre-B.C.S. poll votes than by bragging about those outcomes in official league publications? The absence of an asterisk denotes the presence of acceptance.
The essential problem underlying the critics of the A.P. poll's legitimacy is the notion that there is an official B.C.S. champion. In actuality, the term "B.C.S. champion" is a bit of a misnomer.
Strictly speaking, the B.C.S. doesn't declare a champion. Rather, the B.C.S. employs a formula that produces a set of rankings that determines the combatants who will square off in a designated national championship game. The final B.C.S. standings determine who plays for the national championship, not who wins it. The outcomes of major bowl games determine the final No. 1 ranking, in the B.C.S. era no more or less so than before.
The national championship produced by the B.C.S. is, in fact, the selfsame coaches' poll national title we have had in college football since 1950. The phrase "B.C.S. championship" is nothing more than the current term for the No. 1 ranking in what previously has been known as the "C.N.N./U.S.A. Today poll" or, before that, as the "U.P.I. poll."
College football recognizes numerous polls, but the two most well known are the sportswriters' and coaches' polls. The A.P. poll operates in the same way today that it has since 1936. The coaches' poll, despite its many monikers, operates in the same way today that it has since 1950, with one crucial difference: nowadays, the voters in the coaches' poll are contractually obligated to award their No. 1 ranking to the winner of the designated national championship game produced by the B.C.S. formula.
The A.P. poll is "unofficial" only in the sense that its voters continue to reserve the right to cast their votes based upon individual judgment and independent thought. As a matter of fact, the A.P. poll was a component of the B.C.S. formula until the sportswriters asked to have their rankings taken out of the formal equation a year or so ago, so what our L.S.U. law student has characterized as "the first and only system that all the major conferences ever collectively and officially agreed to recognize as a national champion selector" actually incorporated the sportswriters' poll he disdains as a component of the "official" formula. If the B.C.S. alone produces a valid national title, how can the sole legitimate whole be the sum of some illegitimate parts?
When, as in 2005, it is clear that the winner of the designated national championship game produced by the B.C.S. formula is the No. 1 team in the nation, the Associated Press poll will produce the same result that the coaches' poll is guaranteed to produce. However, when, as in 2003, there is room for reasonable people to disagree, the A.P. and coaches' polls may differ in precisely the same way that they did in, say, 1990 or 1991.
If you believe the coaches (or, more likely, such designees as their sports information directors) possess an inherent superiority to the sportswriters and, therefore, their poll votes automatically have the better claim to recognition, that is fine. According to that estimation, Georgia Tech in 1990, Washington in 1991, and L.S.U. in 2003 laid claim to more legitimate national championships than those won by Colorado, Miami, and Southern Cal, respectively.
Nothing in the B.C.S. formula magically lends the coaches' poll any extra legitimacy it did not possess previously, though. Given the rather obvious fact that the B.C.S. formula erroneously put undeserving Oklahoma squads into the national title games at the end of the 2003 and 2004 seasons, a much better argument could be mounted that the coaches' ironclad obligation to crown the winner of a prearranged game detracts from the legitimacy of this venerable poll.
The more reasonable view would seem to be that the correctness of a particular poll must be evaluated on a case by case basis. Personally, I believe the sportswriters got it right in 1990 and the coaches got it right in 1991. Had there been a BlogPoll in 2003 and had I been a voter, I would have ranked the Bayou Bengals No. 1 and the Trojans No. 2.
My agreement with the result of the 2003 coaches' poll, however, does not change the fact that the A.P. poll---the oldest and, generally, the most respected of the traditional polls---awarded its No. 1 ranking to Southern Cal that year. In so doing, the sportswriters conferred a national title every bit as legitimate as---and, indeed, a national title utterly undistinguishable from---those bestowed by the Associated Press poll voters from 1936 through 2002.
The B.C.S. barons are not alchemists who devised a means for transforming the leaden lump of the U.P.I. poll into a sparkling nugget of purest precious metal. Any Tiger fan who so allows his passion to cloud his judgment that he convinces himself of the contrary view should remember the warning Thomas Grey offered after another feline showed similarly poor judgment:
From hence, ye Beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.
The crystal football is an impressive artifact, but our friends from Baton Rouge are treating it like pyrite. Bayou Bengal fans shouldn't be so insecure; they legitimately won a national championship in 2003 . . . and that fact is neither altered nor diminished by this fact, which is equally true: Southern Cal legitimately won a national championship in 2003, too.
Go 'Dawgs! |
