It wasn’t pretty, but a win is a win… and our defense came to play. Two forced turn-overs in the red zone? Good shit. Roll Tide.
Also, you might be interested in this… when ‘Bama torched Florida, the ever-classy boys in jorts at EDSBS conceded defeat and made no excuses for their loss, I thanked them and commented that you’d never see anything like that out of a UT or Auburn fan.
In response, Voluminous wrote “Pete Holiday…. yea you have real class….er I mean are a real ass” — another UT commenter concurred.
To that I responded (emphasis supplied):
You two show me a classy loss in three weeks and I’ll take it all back. Honest.Problem is I’ve never even met a UT fan that was anything but a poor sport.1 I’m sure they exist, I’ve just never run across any.
That’s not bias, it’s real life experience. Sad but true.
So the question is this… are the UT Fans going to be classy, or make excuses?
Voluminous? … Volpimp? … Bueller?
1 - Upon further review, this isn’t technically true… but it is true for the most part. I’ve only met a very few who were not classless jackasses.
1. Rival
2. Tennessee
3. Shula Won
4. First win over the pups in Tuscaloosa since 1930
Bama’s held the red zone so well this season. They still haven’t given up any points in the 3rd quarter, and that talks volumes over the old “game’s won before halftime” approach. Tennessee’s HUGE o-line and overall great execution still got only 3 on the scoreboard. Very pretty.
Our next real challenge is LSU… which we should go into 9-0. Chills man…
Pete, I still think you are an ass but aside from that I think Alabama played a great game. I think that they have an incredible defense and were able to shut down our abismal offense. Bama looks to be in the drivers seat in the west.
Close enough, we think, to qualify as a classy response.
I predicted it… even batting .500 with a 3-3 season, tied in the SEC east with Vandy with a conference record of 2-3, Tennessee manages to remain ranked in both the AP (23) and USA Today (25) polls. They are 57th in percent wins.
I’m trying to be nice, I really am, but Alabama has NEVER been afforded such a luxury as to be ranked after the kind of season performance Tennessee has shown.
Brandon… I guarantee you that the last time Alabama played the schedule that UT has this year and was ranked so highly preseason (and has only lost to highly-ranked opponents) that we were ranked. There’s no anti-’bama conspiracy or pro-UT conspiracy.
And I agree with Orson. Had we thumped UT the way we did florida, a little more would’ve been necessary, but sure didn’t earn it.
Preseason shouldn’t count. For the past few years, preseason rankings have proven irrelevant for predicting the outcome of the season. The argument that Tennessee has only lost to highly-ranked opponents is invalid, because current rankings are mostly based on the previous rankings. USC will not be pushed below #1 as long as they win. Alabama will not be pushed ahead of #5 as long as the 4 teams above them don’t lose.
I don’t think there is a conspiracy against Alabama or for UT. Voters don’t change rankings much based on any single game, and many of the computer rankings have a similar algorithm. It’s a result of a bad system from the start.
Ask any Auburn fan if they think there should have been a preseason ranking. They would probably tell you no, because last season they would have played for the title if not for poor rankings at the start. I agree with them (not that I like Auburn)… chunk the guesswork and let winning teams prove themselves on the field.
By the way, I did a two-deep strength-of-schedule check on Tennessee based solely on wins (no previous rankings), and they come in at 32nd. Three- and four-deep give them 34th and 35th. To be fair, Alabama comes in 3rd, 8th, and 11th respectively. And I honestly wouldn’t mind the real rankings being based on one of those… it shows more truth than the current guesswork, even if my team comes out lower.
Brandon: that’s all pretty ridiculous. The logic you’re using here is so screwed up that it hardly even passes for logic at all.
If all you’re going to do is base it on wins, then there’s really no debate to be had, because that’s patently (and statistically ridiculous) and that’s what the final result of your logic comes down to.
Also, the MCS wasn’t substantially different from the AP, Coaches, or Harris… and the MCS waited until week 5 to come out.
What’s wrong with my logic?
The most illogical thing is to base rankings on guesswork; that’s the whole point of what I said. I dare you to show me statistically how the guesswork of preseason rankings has any significant correlation to real standings at the end of the season.
As far as MCS goes, it is still influenced by other polls. I doubt that if Texas were #1 in AP, Coaches, and Harris at week 5 that the MCS would reflect otherwise. That said, I like it the most… they actually watch videos of the top teams. After enough study, as of last week most of the voters concluded that Texas should be first and USC second. This poll has allowed for a significant change based on results; the others don’t, and they allow preseason to have lasting effects until the end of the season.
Rankings are always guess-work, whether they’re done by humans or computers, because the bottom line is that there are way too many factors (not to mention intangibles) to factor into a computer simulation of a game. People are better at that. Hence why point spreads are not determined by computers.
Anyway… to your logic…
First, as to your “conspiracy” — in ‘95, ‘Bama was ranked 21st with a 4-2 record including a loss to un-ranked Arkansas. I’d say that’s worse than three losses to top 10 teams. Wouldn’t you? (Same basic story at several other points, including ‘76)
Second, you cannot simply dismiss evidence because it is based on the point you’re trying to disprove. Tennessee has lost to teams that have been highly ranked by every conceivable measure. Like it or not, that’s a fact.
Third, just because pre-season rankings are poor at some things does not mean that they’re useless. Preseason rankings are not significantly less accurate at predicting game outcomes in week 1 than week 8 polls are at predicting week 9. Trying to use pre-season polls to predict week 9 scores is pretty silly. That’s not what they’re for.
Also, It doesn’t matter when the polls started last year, Auburn would not have played for the title unless they were ranked ahead of USC and OU to start with… something for which there was no evidence at week 1 or week 10. The only thing that would’ve allowed Auburn a shot at the title game last year was a playoff.
It’s funny that your own home-brewed SOS calculation ranked UT so low. Sagarin has them at #3. The NCAA has them at #11 (and it would be higher if only using teams they’ve already played… probably top 5).
The bottom line is that there aren’t enough data points in the college football season for computers to come out with good rankings. Someone with as much schooling as you’ve had should know that.
119 teams, 12 games each is not enough data. Period.
I agree… 12 games isn’t enough data. It’s not enough data for computers, it’s not enough data for humans, but 12 weeks is alot more data than 0 games. And 4 weeks is more than 0. That’s my point.
And yes, preseason rankings are meant to persist past the first game of the season. If not, then voters would predict the outcome of every game the first week, and rank everybody with a predicted win as #1 and and those with a predicted loss as #60. Or, they would rank those teams with a predicted 2-0 #1, 1-1 at #30, and 0-2 at #90. They could go farther… but why would they go too much farther if they really don’t mean to predict a decent chunk of the season, as you say? After the first 2 or 3 games, should the preseason guesses matter at all?
And this is your problem… FOOTBALL IS MORE THAN WINS AND LOSSES.
Better teams can lose to worse teams. The polls are supposed to rank which teams are better, not necessarily which teams will win.
Further, 12 games is actually enough for humans if they watch all of them. Really. We can take in and process a hell of a lot more information than we can feed to a computer, especially things we can’t neccessarily quantify accurately. Bottom line is that humans have much more potential than computers do.
But if football were more than wins and losses, why does everyone want a playoff? That kind of system is based solely on wins and losses. And if it were more than wins and losses, why does USC, Alabama, and every other squad celebrate barely winning against teams they should have beaten, and why has college football implemented an overtime when there used to be ties?
I don’t deny that humans can factor in much more than a computer. There’s no way to measure surprise, and until they put radio location transmitters on all the players, it would be very difficult to even begin to measure strategy. There’s no way to measure how much a team learns from a tape, how momentum factors into play, how jet lag might affect a team’s ability to play in the morning, how one injured player affects the team as a whole, or how bad calls by the refs can make or break a game.
For every person that claims those factors are important, I can find another person that would say that regardless of those factors, the goal of a game is to win and to lose is to fail to meet that goal. Being able to pull off a win even though the other team dominates in those areas says alot about how you play when it counts.
I asked this on fanblogs, and I don’t think I got a response from anybody… if wins and losses are not the best way to measure a team, what is? What tells you by watching a tape that the losing team is the better team?
Surely you don’t believe all of that mess.
The goal of football is to win… as is the goal of most things. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Won and Lost columns are the only things that matter when determining team rankings.
To illustrate just how wrong that whole streak is, your logic would mean that you think a team that’s barely beaten Kentucky, Indiana, Vanderbilt, Wyoming, Miami of Ohio, and Duke is a better team and should be ranked more highly than a team that’s blown out Notre Dame, Texas, Cal, Miami, FSU, but then barely lost to USC.
Clearly those two teams have not performed at the same level, and I don’t think there’s anyone who would try to say that the first team is better than the second.
Change it up a little bit… let’s pretend that the first team beat all the same teams as the second, by all of the same margins… but instead of losing to USC, they squeaked by against Duke.
Are they better now? Computers would probably disagree on this one… depending on what factors are taken into account. People could take into account a lot more info and make a much better decision.
Football is not a deterministic sport. There’s chance, there are ‘bad breaks’, there are a lot of things you can’t take into account… that’s why they play the games.
There are a lot of things that could tell you the better team lost… but it all comes down to opinion because if it could be quantified you could plug it into an equation.
I know you want to make this some sort of computer algorithm, but it’s not going to happen any time soon. On top of it being a game played by people… it’s a game played by teenagers and kids in their early twenties… an age group that makes mistakes at a much higher level than older players.
Again… that’s why they play the games.
OK so what are the flaws of of a play-off system. Here is how I envision it. Each conference would play their games to determine the conference champions in a single elim bracket system. The conference champ would then go into a random generated NCAA championship bracket. The only issue I see here is the few schools that are not in a conference. Put them in a conference and you solve that problem. I think another optional addition would be to recreate conferences based on geography but I don’t think anyone would go for that. It would require LSU, Ole Miss, and MS State to Play Southern Miss and it would hurt their feelings to lose to Southern.
The way I see a playoff working would be that a group of conferences would see their champions get “automatic bids” and the rest of the bracket would be completed by a selection committee a la NCAA Basketball.
Frankly I like the idea of a playoff simply because then you’re letting the teams themselves choose who wins and loses.
Pete… I’ve said several times that computers are not as good as people in determining which teams are better. My whole point is that people are also not completely perfect at determining the best teams, but are much better midway through the season than before a game has been played.
Playoffs… as much as I like them, a single-elim playoff would kill any team that has a bad break. Double-elim has many more games, but only one extra week of play. I’m sure the NCAA won’t support either in the next decade.
The BCS is going to a fifth bowl system that takes the two “best” teams of the four winners of the BCS bowls (who were originally conference champs or highly ranked) and pits them against each other in a final championship game. Not a perfect playoff system… but it would work for the most part. It would have stopped Auburn’s complaints last year.
Yes, you keep saying that, but have no way of backing it up…
…because your “logic” here is based on the faulty premise that pre-season rankings are meant to predict end of season outcome.
They’re not. Never were. They’re an instant view of the current best teams. Using them to predict weeks into the future is a misuse… you might be able to use them to predict the next weeks games but this is college football — trying to predict it is pretty silly anyway.
Regardless, the same logic would lead you to say that forks are horrible eating utensils because they’re bad for soup.
It doesn’t make any difference what week the polls come out, they’re always going to be an instantaneous representation of the state of affairs and there are always going to be upsets.
I agree completely that polls and rankings should only be a current snapshot of team strength. But they aren’t. Most voters view rankings as something that should change subtly from week to week. And it’s evident that many voters don’t consider moving a team significantly unless they lose. And, many of the computer rankings purposely do not change one team’s ranking much from week to week.
If rankings were point snapshots, voters and computers would allow for decently large changes if a “weaker” team proves it can outperform a very strong team. But this doesn’t happen, or else Notre Dame may have jumped up a few spots after (arguably) outperforming USC.
So, what I’m saying is that rankings aren’t necessarily meant to persist longer than a couple of weeks, but because voters refuse to make large changes, they absolutely do.
Ok… so I’ve ranted long enough about what’s wrong with the rankings. IMO, we should probably do away with rankings altogether. Like you said, there is no sure way to determine a team’s strength in comparison to another team.
Maybe instead of rankings, there need to be “boxes” that hold a certain number of teams. The top 8 go in one box, the next 8 in another, etc. Except for the end of the season, after the bowls and the BCS is played, there would never be a distinction between #1 and #8… it would be determined completely on the field.
There’s a whole lot of speculation in that last post that can be dispatched with by looking only at this year.
Witness: Alabama jumping almost 8 spots in one week after beating Florida. Also, Notre Dame losing an average of 1.5 spots after their USC loss. You might also note that Louisville almost disappeared from the rankings after their loss.
The bottom line is that large changes happen all the time.
And your personal opinion of what voters might possibly think is certainly nothing to base an entire argument on. You’ll notice that polls run by the exact “perfect” methodology that we’re talking about don’t come out much different than the ones you say the voters are trying to predict long-term outcomes.
In fact, your own argument doesn’t make a lick of sense here.
If voters were trying to predict end-of-season performance they would move ND up after the USC loss, not down, because a) It’s clear they can play with anyone and b) They’re schedule has very few remaining bumps.
It’s not a matter of what the polls are “supposed to be” it’s a matter of what they “are.” The polls are a snapshot. Which is why the BCS factors the current ranking of teams for quality wins not the rank at the time of the win… because the rankings are not fixed projections, they’re tentative snapshots.
Also: your “box” idea requires us to rank the teams. The only thing it changes is the argument now becomes “Who is #8″ versus “Who is #1″… and the “Who is #8″ argument is a hell of a lot more subject to argument and speculation.
Just like in college basketball, these things can’t all be settled on the field, but a playoff comes the closest.
Well, the box idea is not saying who is #8 or who is #1. It isn’t really even saying “here are the top 8 teams”. It is saying “here are the eight most likely teams to become the national champion” (yes, I am making a distinction between those two sentences).
How the elimination is executed, I’m not sure. It could be standard single or double elim, in a playoff among the 8 teams. Or… (idea just popped in my head) add an an early “box bowl” week, say at the 3rd or 4th week in October, that pits every team with another team in its box (matched with the purpose of weeding out the pretenders and advancing good teams in lower boxes). And, after the season is finished, either playing a playoff based on the final boxes or issuing a ranking and going with the current BCS system from there.
it doesn’t matter what you call it, you still have to pick 8 teams.
And doing so will require a ranking. Whether it’s ranked by who’s most likely to be the NC or who’s the best doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if the ranking is public or just on a personal level…
But that all goes back to the point that it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to differentiate between the ‘last team in’ and the ‘first team left out’ than it is to differentiate between #1 and #2 if only because there are many fewer teams that can claim to be #1 versus #8.
Also: double elimination is a really, really bad idea. Win or go home. That’s football. In fact, it’s also Basketball. And baseball. And hockey. And pretty much every other sport except for, say, girls softball. It adds nothing.
Would it be better if it were a top-16 box? If you barely miss out on the top 16… you don’t deserve the trophy. Period.
A single championship game between #1 and #2 is the same thing as a top-2 box, and excluding a strong #3 or #4 team from that box is alot more damaging than excluding #9 from the top 8.
The only good argument I’ve heard for double-elim are times that the refs make bad game-changing calls. Maybe replay will get rid of that factor.
Forgot this… about the boxes, like I said previously, they would probably only be used during the season. In the season, it doesn’t matter who is #8 or #9. Postseason, rankings could come out that aren’t influenced by rankings of previous weeks.
Oh, and with a 16 team “box” you don’t have to choose?
The bottom line is that you always have to rank unless you’re going to have a 119 team play-off or a play-off with all of the teams that are above a certain win percentage.
If a team barely misses out on the top 16, it’s your assertion that they don’t deserve the championship. Really? Not even if they beat every team ahead of them?
And if the boxes are just for the regular season, WTF is the point of them?
Bottom line is that there’s no evidence to show that the rankings would be any different if they started pre-season, mid-season, or post-season… in fact, the only evidence we have, the MCS (which started at week 5) was functionally identical to the AP, Harris, and Coaches.
So it might be your opinion that things would be totally different, but it’s an unsubstantiated opinion.
Ok, so it is just an opinion. That doesn’t mean it is invalid. It’s an idea.
Ok, say we have a simple 32 team playoff. Sure, we have to determine who those 32 teams are. But there is no reason to determine who is #1, #2, #3, #4, and so on. They determine it on the field. Take basketball… it doesn’t matter after the championship who was #1 going into the bracket. So why make that distinction in the first place? That’s all I’m saying.
And… if the #16 team today can beat every other team ahead of them, they still don’t go to the title game. In fact, if they can do that, they will have done it (proving them to be top 15 quality), or they will be undefeated, putting them in the top 16 automatically, or they will have lost to a couple of weaker teams, meaning that they aren’t top 15 quality.
I know you’re not as dense as you’re acting here Brandon.
a) It’s an idea with no backing whatsoever that you like to pass off as a factual assertion.
b) You still have to determine who the top 32 teams are. You don’t have to rank them explicitly, but you still have to rank them. Sure, a certain number are no-brainers. Nobody is going to argue that USC is not in the top 8. On the other hand, many people would argue that ‘Bama and Georgia aren’t in the top 8. Essentially what ends up happening is that you have a ranking going on near the cutoff mark… and the farther down that mark is, the harder it is to rank the teams.
c) Are we going to talk about today or a playoff system? Today the #3 team doesn’t get a chance to play for the title… so I really don’t think we should use “Today” as a standard for judging the idea ssytem.
d) “In fact, if they can do that, they will have done it (proving them to be top 15 quality), or they will be undefeated” — Not so. I can kill a man with a kitchen knife. That doesn’t mean that I did. Besides, you’re not niave enough to think that teams don’t improve and degrade over the course of the season, are you? Surely you don’t want to punish a team for a Week 1 loss when, at the end of the year, they can beat all challengers… that’d be a lot like keeping a team out based on their pre-season ranking… it’s all in the past.
e) “or they will have lost to a couple of weaker teams, meaning that they aren’t top 15 quality.” — On top of the arguments in (d), this is nonsense. Losing to a lower ranked team does not necessarily mean that you aren’t as good as that team. In order to believe that, you also have to believe that the same outcome would happen no matter how many times the game was played, which is clearly nonsense.
Then how is a playoff fair? Couldn’t a team improve or get worse over the course of the 5 weeks it would take to finish a playoff? Maybe a team that lost in round one would win in rounds 2 through 5.
You said yourself, “Win or go home.” Why is that only valid in a playoff, while by your standards, totally invalid during the regular season?
You can’t be serious. Do you even think about these things before you post them?
How are the differences fair? Oh, I don’t know… maybe because there’s a difference between the pre-season, regular season, and post-season?
Taking your reasoning to its logical conclusion simply means that you want to throw out the regular season and skip straight to the playoffs.
Hell, why not make it a four-year, triple elimination playoff to find out who the best team REALLY is?
Teams get better and worse during the post-season as well… but that’s THE POST-SEASON. The rules are different. In sports with playoffs the regular season exists solely to populate the playoff bracket.
This is getting ridiculous.
You said yourself, “you cannot simply dismiss evidence because it is based on the point you’re trying to disprove.” That’s what you’re doing by saying that preseason, regular season, and postseason are different because they’re different.
And really, I thought most sports started with a regular season of simple games, adding a playoff when it was decided that a champion was important, and a ranking solely to populate the playoff bracket. Thus… while you claim that the preseason, regular season, and postseason are altogether different, there is a ranking during both regular season and preseason. If a ranking is used solely for determining postseason, then by your claim, there is no need for a ranking in any other part of the season.
That they’re different is not an assertion I’m trying to prove, it’s a cold hard fact. My point is that the standards are different because the purpose is different. And that applying the standards of the post season to the regular season would mean that, most years, no teams would win the national championship. Wouldn’t that be fun?
And further now you’re misstating my opinion.
I did not say that the pre and regular season rankings existed only to populate a playoff bracket. I said that the pre-season and regular seasons themselves were for that purpose. The rankings are something entirely different.
And if the only purpose ranking served was to populate a bracket (hint: it’s not) then ranking only after the regular season would be acceptable. And, further, all evidence points to the fact that it would turn out much the way it currently does.
Perhaps it would turn out identically. But there really is no evidence it would… it doesn’t exist because nothing like that has been attempted in college football.
I was saying that I believe rankings really only have the purpose of populating a bracket. You believe otherwise… so what do you feel a ranking is made to do during the season?
(I believe rankings do alot during the regular season… I don’t believe they were intended to do so. For instance, the ranking system gave Notre Dame many fans across the nation when they played USC… had there been no visible difference in their ranking, USC would have had many of those same fans… the ones who hate Notre Dame but would rather see the #1 team dethroned… in particular, many Alabama fans. Would the game have played differently had there been a different aura over the game? Perhaps… and perhaps not.)
There is evidence that it would. the MCS this year started at week five and the rankings were functionally identical. There’s no reason to believe that it would be any different any later in the season. This is especially true because of the vastly different methodology of the Harris, AP, Coaches, and MCS… that they came out so similar five weeks in suggests that it doesn’t take long for the differences to shake out. Part of that is because of how new communication has helped solve the problem of unfamiliarity with teams outside a voter’s region.
Sure, you’re going to try to argue that the MCS was still based on the other polls, but that’s pretty much a ridiculous argument if you know anything about the MCS’s methodology.
It’s not a matter of believing this or not, Brandon, brackets MUST have a purpose aside from populating a bracket because there is no bracket. Further, they MUST have a purpose other than just crowning a champion or they’d just come out at the end of the year.
One of the purposes is to satisfy curiosity. It’s market-driven. Fans want to know what their teams are ranked, and the market is going to provide it. There’s also the ‘purpose’ of providing a little history to the season. It also adds ot the allure of the games. I could go on.
Your ND/USC argument is pretty silly. YOu can cheer for a team w/o being a fan of that team. Further, even if you could force all rankings to stay under-wraps until mid-season or season-end that doesn’t mean that individuals won’t rank the teams themselves. They will, both consciously and unconsciously.
Ranking is not something that we invented for football, it’s something we are constantly doing with everything, college football teams included.
I like the MCS… alot. It’s voted by people who know what they’re doing and have the time to do it. And they tend to care nothing about the week before. If they were an “official” BCS ranking, I’d buy it. I just don’t feel the others are adequate, since many voters for USA Today, Harris, and AP look at stats as much as the computers do. And argue all you want, they reference the previous rankings because they don’t want to screw a team over just because they don’t have the time to watch a video.
And I’ll buy the argument that rankings are market-driven. But the teams are also the “consumers” of the market… they are the consumers that actually “pay” for the product (as opposed to you and I). They deserve more than to have the NCAA officially support the BCS, which officially supports a particular national championship game, which officially uses what I call mediocre polls and computer algorithms to determine the top 2.
Imagine what will happen if USC, Texas, VA Tech, Alabama, and UCLA were to go into the BCS undefeated, where Alabama beats previously undefeated Georgia in the SEC championship, and USC and Texas play for the championship. And imagine what happens if the MCS pulls USC or Texas out of the top 2. Or even if the AP poll moves one of those out of the top 2.
Bring a poncho to postseason, the fan is on and the BCS has trucked in a massive load of manure.
So let’s talk about the MCS methodology.
The MCS watches video from all of the top teams. They divide the video amongst the 16 coaches and then have a conference call to hash out the details. If you assume that there’s an overlap (so each game is watched by two coaches) and that each coach watches 4 games you’re looking at a total of 16 different games being watched… or 32 teams. They’re not leaving anyone out from week to week. And those are conservative estimates on numbers, I think.
The fact that there’s so little difference between the MCS, the Harris, and the Coaches suggests that there wouldn’t be any difference in the AP or Coaches ballots in any given week regardless of when it started…
you have a theory that that’s not true, but there’s no evidence to support it at all.
Markets aren’t about desert, they’re about supply and demand. What you think we “deserve” has nothing to do with what we’ve earned in the market… and the teams are not the ones paying, we are the ones paying by virtue of the fact that we buy newspapers (etc) that carry the rankings.
So, honestly, unless you’ve got some sort of justification for your theories, let’s just go ahead and call this discussion over. If you want to theorize, it’d probably be better on your LJ than in my comment box.
PS: UCLA and USC cannot both go undefeated, they play each other.