Note that this post is not called The Schottenheimer Effect. If you have been reading this blog on a regular basis, then you know what I’m talking about. If not then… shame on you.
I do apologize, however, for my recent lack of posts. I swear I have a valid alibi, but if I told you about it, you wouldn’t believe me. There’s no way one person can be so technologically unlucky. Let’s just say I’m tempted to take a sledgehammer to this accursed laptop.
I know this will come as a shock to you, but I have never had a girlfriend. In fact, I’ve never really been close. No dates, no phone numbers, nothing. At 23 years old, I’m still so clueless when it comes to the beautiful denizens of that exotic land known as Women that when I come into contact with one of reasonably corresponding age I lock up like a manual transmission accidently thrust into reverse instead of fourth gear while driving at 50 miles an hour.1 I stutter, I laugh nervously, but most of all, I just have no idea what to say. I feel totally lost in situations that seem natural to ordinary humans.
Silas Nacita is a walk-on running back for college football’s Baylor Bears.2 At least he was until a couple of weeks ago. On February 25, he announced that the NCAA had declared him ineligible to play and that he was therefore dismissed from the team. Nacita elaborated that the ineligibility allegedly3 was a result of benefits he had received that the NCAA deemed to be in violation of its rules. What were these egregious violations, you ask? What was so heinous that the powers that be of college athletics ended this young man’s dream?
When Nacita walked on at Baylor after working his way through community college with partial academic scholarships, he was without a place to live. Rather than see him spend the next several months homeless, a concerned acquaintance let him crash at their apartment. Which, as has been covered before in the bizarre case of Boise State’s Antoine Turner, is illegal. No matter who is offering the assistance or how pure their motives, student athletes are not permitted to receive any help, financial or otherwise, outside of the NCAA’s very strict guidelines for the use of a special fund doled out to each school. Because Nacita didn’t have an athletic scholarship, the university couldn’t offer him any housing, which meant no one else could, either.
Now, the NCAA has categorically denied Nacita’s claim, and the statements from Baylor staff have been a bit ambiguous as to the true source of the declaration of ineligibility. But even if the school itself determined that Nacita couldn’t play, it did so using the NCAA’s own rules and track record regarding benefits infractions, preempting an expected ruling that would have probably had the same effect. Regardless, Silas Nacita has suffered by a strange, austere interpretation of rules meant to preserve amateurism, not prevent common decency.
The point is that the National Collegiate Athletic Association, like me around girls,4 has no clue what to do with itself, saying and doing all the wrong things with more tone-deafness than me in the shower. The inconsistent enforcement of the rulebook has the NCAA awkwardly shuffling its feet like a teenaged boy standing alone at a school dance – taking away Reggie Bush’s Heisman Trophy for having the audacity to talk to an agent one moment, for years turning a blind eye to multiple allegations about a host of violations by North Carolina basketball the next; first turning Penn State upside-down and yanking several years of wins for the actions (or inaction) of some disgraced former school officials and a deceased coach, then abruptly giving back all the wins and scaling back almost all of the sanctions a couple of years later.
To the casual observer, the inconsistency and convoluted rules lack the appearance of common sense and smack of, at best, total incompetence or, at worst, widespread corruption. Whatever the case, the governing body needs to get its act together, or risk sinking from a laughingstock to an afterthought.
And, for the sake of all things good, give Silas Nacita back his spot on the team, and let the poor kid stay wherever the heck he wants.
1 If you’re lucky enough never to have committed this particular driving infraction, I’ll explain that it causes a horrid grinding sound reminiscent of Steve Buscemi’s bones getting crushed by the wood chipper at the end of Fargo and simultaneously making you feel like you just caused several hundred dollars’ worth of damage and compelling you to look around you in red-faced shame to make sure no other drivers noticed.
2 This will tie together with the previous paragraph. I promise. Have some faith.
3 Now say that 5 times fast: Ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly, ineligibility allegedly.
4 That’s right, another terrible attempt at a humorous analogy by me. And you wondered why I don’t have a girlfriend.
Since this post will be about college football, let me get one important piece of business out of the way first. As a Nebraska fan, I unapologetically applauded the Bo Pelini firing as being about three years too late, but hey, better late than never. As for my reaction to the hire of Mike Riley from Oregon State (incidentally also one of my favorite teams), I am cautiously hopeful, or perhaps more accurately, neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I’m intrigued about the future in Lincoln, but I am not at all sure what to expect. The move has been hotly debated throughout Husker Nation and widely ridiculed elsewhere, but I think much of the rhetoric from both sides is overblown, as rhetoric tends to be.
No, Nebraska will not be in the inaugural “College Football Playoff”, but that four-team tournament is my subject for today. You may have noticed the quotation marks in the previous sentence. These signify my contempt for the title, which is so badly misnamed that I can’t take the hype seriously. Who ever heard of a playoff in which 4 out of 128 teams get a chance to compete? Or in which those four are selected by 13 people1 in a closed room?
If you hadn’t figured it out by now, this is not going to be a puff piece. I intend to systematically rip the “College Football Playoff” to shreds. And yes, I am going to use the quotation marks every time I mention it. “ ”
Let’s begin by examining the Selection Committee. It consists of the athletic directors of 5 schools2, two former coaches, the former commissioner of the Big East conference, a former reporter (seriously), a former quarterback, the former Air Force Academy superintendent, a former NCAA executive, and Condaleeza Rice. Condaleeza Rice. CONDALEEZA FREAKING RICE. Yes, she used to be the provost at Stanford, and she’s been heavily involved in its athletic program since leaving office as Secretary of State, but her relative lack of experience makes one thing painfully obvious: she is on the committee as both the token minority3and the token woman. Nothing like killing two birds with one stone4. Except that they literally could not have chosen a more conservative, establishment-acceptable black woman5.
Which, parenthetically, brings up another problem. Who is “they”? Who chose these thirteen people? NCAA President Mark Emmert? I want to mention other options, but I genuinely can’t think of any that sound plausible. Yes, this would be an easy question to answer via The Google Machine, but I’m too lazy.
Back to the committee itself, 12 of the 13 members have a current or former affiliation with at least one particular school, an affiliation that extends far beyond being an alumnus. This particularly applies to the Athletic Directors, whose jobs are directly affected by the outcome of the committee’s decisions. Allow me to explain. If a team is included in the “playoff”, that school gets a cut of the profits from the “playoff games”, plus added exposure that leads to increased cash flow in the long term. This provides the AD of that school with job security and salary bonuses. You see where I’m going here. The ulterior motives are self-evident!
Yes, if the committee is discussing the fate of a school with which a particular committee member has or once had an association, that member will remove himself from the conversation and will not participate in any vote involving that school. But who are we kidding? Do we really believe this approach removes the bias? Say what you will about these 13 people, but you cannot say they are lacking for intelligence. They can easily work out how the positioning of other teams may impact the chances his or her own team has of being included in the “playoff”. There is absolutely no way to eliminate the possibility of these attempts at self-serving as long as the committee members possess this inherent bias.
Okay, I’m tired of talking about the committee members themselves. Let’s talk about their decisions. First of all, what is the purpose of releasing a weekly top 25? This approach really isn’t instructive or useful and only gives people more reasons to complain than they will inevitably already have. So let me complain. The rankings in this first season have seemed random, based on the whims of the committee. They remind me of the power rankings that everyone does these days for every sport and that they always subsequently publish on the internet.
Nebraska6 may be less than an afterthought now, but back when they had one loss and were therefore still alive, the committee dropped them three ranks after a bye week. Because bye weeks don’t come with enough style points, apparently. Earlier this year, number five and one-loss Alabama faced undefeated number one Mississippi State at home. The Crimson Tide won by six points, although anyone who watched the game knew that it really wasn’t that close. When the committee released their rankings the following week, Alabama had jumped three teams who also won their games, one of whom was the only remaining undefeated team in the country7 (more on that in a moment), and now possessed the number one ranking, while Mississippi State was now fourth. So in the committee’s eyes, Alabama was now number one by virtue of beating the team that was previously number one, while Mississippi only dropped three spots because their loss was to the number one team. This sort of circular reasoning is standard in the committee’s evaluations, especially in the SEC West, the division of both of these teams. Most of the division’s seven teams are rated highly because of “quality losses”, losses to each other. In other words, each of them is considered good because everybody else in the division is considered good. A logic professor would shoot holes in this reasoning like Bruce Willis shot holes in John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.8
The committee has made it clear that many factors will play into its decision, including strength of schedule, conference titles, head-to-head, margin of victory, and even team injuries. It appears that only the first of these has been consistently applied. Earlier this year, before the SEC West all but cannibalized itself, they appeared to have no qualms about putting a second team from that conference ahead of a champion of another conference with the same record, and they may do the same with two Big 12 teams, so the conference title factor has little bearing. Baylor and TCU are both 10-1 and Baylor won the game between them in Waco, but they are ranked sixth and third, respectively, mostly because Baylor had one of the worst nonconference schedules of anyone, including a blowout of a surprisingly awful Northwestern team, while TCU easily handled a surprisingly decent Minnesota team. Thus head-to-head has gone by the wayside too. Margin of victory? Aside from Florida State’s struggles (again, more on that in a moment; I’m building to a grand crescendo here, and that climax may or may not involve the Seminoles), close games against bad or mediocre teams (see: TCU vs. Kansas, Alabama vs. LSU) or blowouts of good or above average teams (see: Wisconsin vs. Nebraska9, Baylor vs. almost everyone,) haven’t mattered much in the long run. So much for margin of victory.
Ohio State is everyone’s immediate instinct when injuries are brought into the discussion, and indeed they have been this year’s primary example not once but twice. When Heisman Trophy candidate Braxton Miller suffered a season-ending injury before ever taking a snap this year, the assumption was that the Buckeyes were finished too, but the committee insisted that they would take into account the team’s adjustment to life without the quarterback if Ohio State struggled early. Sure enough, the Buckeyes lost at home to woeful Virginia Tech10 in Week 2. However, they bounced back, going undefeated in conference play, highlighted by a blowout win on the road against reigning Rose Bowl champ and top-10 ranked Michigan State. Backup quarterback J.T. Barrett turned into a Heisman candidate in his own right, proving arguably even better than Miller. The Buckeyes climbed the ranks to number 5, and many assumed that if they won the conference they would find their way into the “playoff”. Unfortunately, though, in the final game before the Big Ten Championship Barrett broke his ankle, ending his season, and the word on the street is that the third-stringer is no Heisman candidate.
And what was the illustrious committee’s response? Chairman Jeff Long said the injury hadn’t affected the team’s ranking yet, but that they would evaluate how the Buckeyes perform without Barrett in the lineup in Saturday’s championship against Wisconsin to determine whether the injury changes anything. The inconsistency of this is insane: the injury to Miller affects how we view early-season struggles, while the injury to Barrett may or may not affect how we view potential struggles in the final game. It’s bad enough that they take injuries into account in the first place – shouldn’t the top four teams be chosen based on on-field performance alone, regardless of circumstances?
And now for my knock-out blow. Florida State dominated college football in 2013, winning every game in the regular season by an average of 42 points (!), setting the all-time FBS record for total points scored in a season, and winning the national the National Championship, an effort that also won freshman quarterback Jameis Winston the Heisman Trophy. Well, 2014 has been quite different – and also much the same. Although nearly every game has been a struggle, and several were handed to them by opponents’ silly mistakes, the Seminoles have still found a way to win them all, leaving them as college football’s only undefeated team, having now won 28 consecutive contests. A sole undefeated team from a power conference that’s somehow ranked number four? That’s literally unprecedented, especially from a perennial national powerhouse that’s also the defending national champion. Yes, the wins have been closer than they should have been, but unlike anyone else, they were all wins. It’s quite conceivable that in the final standings, the ’Noles could actually find themselves supplanted in the “playoff” by Ohio State or Baylor.
Now, let’s be honest here. Outside of Tallahassee, no one would much miss Florida State, myself least of all. With Winston’s repeated boneheaded decisions, coach Jimbo Fisher’s belligerence with the media and annoying southern twang, that obnoxious Teflon habit they have of winning no matter what, and worst of all by far, the rape allegations against Winston and the subsequent claims of a systematic police and university cover-up, everyone wants the Seminoles to lose by now. But even the most committed hater realizes the frightening possibilities opened up if they get left out. Forget the perceived slights during the BCS era against Auburn, Boise State, Oklahoma State, TCU, and whoever else you may want to mention, add them all up and they still pale in comparison to the horrifying precedent that would be set by passing over an undefeated powerhouse in favor of four one-loss teams. It could be enough to bring down the “College Football Playoff” before it ever really gets off the ground. Even putting them fourth is an outrageous miscarriage of justice, and everyone who is honest with themselves knows it, no matter what they think of Florida State, Winston, Fisher, or the ACC.
As terrible as the BCS system was, at least it was balanced. In place of multiple polls and several inherently unbiased computer rankings, we now have thirteen very human selectors choosing the fate of college football, thirteen people making history all on their own. It’s an oligarchy of the highest degree.
Ninety percent of college football fans have been screaming for a playoff for years. We didn’t get it. Most of us didn’t think it was possible to get a worse system than the BCS. We were wrong. This “playoff” has been a train wreck, derailed the moment it left the station. If we can’t either have at least eight teams or a system that is relatively fair and consistent11, then I vote we return to the old system, as sacrilegious as that would have sounded as little as a year ago.
(Kill me now. Before I say it. I will literally die of self-loathing if I put this next sentence down on the page.)
Bring back the computers.12
1 Or, for this year, 12 people, as Archie Manning has removed himself for health reasons. So right off the bat the system isn’t even operating the way it was intended. And, to be clear, the way it was intended was a joke to begin with.
2 Arkansas, Wisconsin, USC, West Virginia, and Clemson. And just to be clear, they are all current AD’s.
3 Yes, I know Tyrone Willingham is also African-American, but you don’t even know who he is, so I win.
4 Where did this idiom originate? Who said to his friend one day, “There’s a bird. Oh look! There’s another bird. I’m going to pick up this rock and kill both of them.” And his friend said, “No way, man. You can’t do it.” And the first guy said, “How much you wanna bet?” And the friend said, “Twenty bucks.” And dude said, “You’re on!” And he picked up a rock, cocked his arm back, threw a perfect fastball, knocked the two poor innocent birdies good and dead, won himself a little dough, and bragged thereafter to his friend and everyone else how he once killed two birds with one stone. Huh? Who did that?
5 Which is fine with me, by the way. As a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, I have the utmost respect for Condi. I just question her qualifications for this committee.
6 Of course I was going to start by talking about Nebraska. It’s the closest they may ever come to the “College Football Playoff” discussion.
7 Not counting Marshall. As much as I wish I could count Marshall, I won’t. Had they not lost last week in overtime in pretty much the game of the year, they would have been perhaps the worst undefeated team in decades. The Conference USA doesn’t count as college football. More like Pop Warner.
8 Hey, I really am making an effort at learning pop culture references. It’s slow going, cut me some slack.
9 I had to. I couldn’t resist one more mention. Although this one is painful for me. Thankfully Melvin Gordon’s all-time single-game rushing record set in this game only lasted a week.
10 This is by far the worst loss of any team in serious consideration for the “playoff”.
11 I’m not asking for much here. Just one or the other!
12 Holy #@$*! (Insert your favorite “holy ___” phrase here. Mine is “holy hopscotch!”) That was a long post! Can you tell I’m a little steamed about this subject?
Useless Sports 