« MRI Basketball Preview - The ACC | Main | Big East Coast BiACC - ACC Preview, Week 12 »

On the Field: Dealing with Rankings Madness

November 16, 2010  |  By Jeff Popelka

[Ed. Note: So I know I said no more ranting on the rankings. But Sunday night, I kept becoming more and more frustrated with the state of affairs in the voting process. A short email to Jeff Popelka went as follows:

“I understand the Oregon State and Utah arguments, but it is still a little ridiculous that Boise jumped TCU.

The Horned Frogs beat a much better team in SD State. Idaho is ridiculously bad. If Boise didn’t win by 30 they should have been shot.”

Jeff kept his head and wrote back probably the most well-reasoned piece I have seen on the insanity of trying to choose between the four teams currently at the top.

With his permission, enjoy]

Ultimately, this just proves to me that it is impossible to choose between the top teams. If there are three, four or even five unbeatens, I think there may be so little to separate them that such discussions are moot. I’m not sure that either of this week’s wins really told us anything about Boise or TCU.

Instead, we learn more about their opponents (like last week when we learned Utah sucked, and this week when we had it confirmed that San Diego State is pretty good) than about the favorites.

Both teams won, but I think margin of victory for Boise doesn’t really say anything about them, positive or negative. They won; they won pretty big; and that’s about all there is to it. If they had beaten Idaho by 64 (ahem, a Badgers-Hoosiers style blowout), it would have been a much bigger indictment of Idaho than an expression of how good Boise might be.

The eye test tells me TCU is better, but the lack of real comparables means that I have no idea if that’s really true. I thought TCU was better last year, but it turned out that when they did that thing (you know, the one where they put the jerseys on and run around on the field in close proximity to each other), TCU was beaten.

So even if people paid attention, I think that the path we are on, i.e, headed for a single title game, would still be an abomination, and that it has at best about a 25 percent chance of crowning the true national champion.

However, I’m with you in that I still think the polls need to be more accurate, as even under a playoff scenario, they would need a method to whittle down the teams to the desired four or six or eight or whatever number would fit in the tournament bracket.

Until then, I like to watch college football, but I hold no illusions that at some point we’ll actually discover who the real national champion is.

But remember, I’m the same guy who loved the Sopranos ending, so maybe I don’t need the kind of closure that other people seem to require.

[Amen.]

Posted November 16, 2010 3:00 PM

blog comments powered by Disqus