Don't you want to see Georgia play Oregon? Why should Florida play in the Sugar Bowl instead of a Georgia team that (1) beat Florida and (2) came within a whisker of beating Alabama in the best SEC championship game ever?
Look, I am not a Georgia fan. Ordinarily, when Georgia plays I root for the stadium to collapse, taking out the hedges and 80,000 lunatics who are still living in 1980. But this Bulldogs team is clearly the second-best team in the SEC, and only second by the closest margin. (Time will tell if second-best in the SEC means second-best in the country. It usually does.) This Bulldogs team deserves the right to play for the title of #2. Bama gets Notre Dame. Fine. Georgia should get whoever is next, no matter what.
But while the BCS gets lambasted most years for not getting the championship game right, the dirty fact is that they screw up the rest of the BCS bowls annually even worse. And this year will highlight the problem. Georgia is probably playing in the Cotton Bowl - a game which hasn't been relevant since the Nixon Administration - as a thank you for being not-quite-on-top at the end of the best college football game played this season, and several in the past.
Now that we have become fully-invested in deciding the champion on the field, none of the other games really matter. But that doesn't mean somebody - hey, how about the networks that spend a few billion televising these things - shouldn't want the games to be as entertaining as possible. Instead we get pointless matchups based on conference affiliations from the Golden Era (Pre-Massive TV contracts)- Rose Bowl pits the Pac-10 champ against the Big Ten champ, etc. - that nobody wants to see.
And in case you didn't notice, the Big-12 gets two teams into the marquee bowls. After Kansas State, the entire Big-12 stinks on ice. Texas played Kansas State for the championship. Oklahoma gets a spot in the Orange Bowl. I would have put this up higher, but Oklahoma drilled Texas earlier this year and is therefore slightly less fraudulent. But seriously, people - Florida State, Oklahoma, Louisville? Northern Illinois doesn't sound nearly as ridiculous, given the lack of quality teams playing. Hell, Texas A&M is more interesting than all of those schools. And better.
Florida v. Kansas State. Georgia v. Oregon. Those are the only two matchups that would be interesting. Two more clashes between up-tempo, 70-point a game, flyers and kill-your-grandmother defensive behemoths.
And just remember, some of these same geniuses will be in charge of deciding the four-teams in the playoff come 2014. As in - "Georgia lost to Alabama, so we should put the team that lost to Georgia in the playoff instead."
The powers-that-be in college football have for decades demonstrated the ability to screw up a one-car parade. More stupid things to come.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The National Championship
First things first - "Mr. Bradford, this is the Downtown Athletic Club. We hoped you enjoyed a couple of weeks with our trophy. now please deliver it the rightful owner, in Gainesville, FL."
If the BCS game didn't resolve the question of a national champion to everyone's satisfaction, it certainly should have clarified that the voters who left Tebow off their Heisman ballots should all have their voting privileges revoked. Sam Bradford is a splendid passer at the helm of a wildly prolific offense. But the Heisman is supposed to go to the best college football player in America, and no one can seriously debate that Tebow is the best college football player. As a passer he is adequate enough, as a running back he is perhaps the best fullback in the SEC, but more than all of that he is without a doubt the most competitive SOB since Michael Jordan. And his ability to impose his will on the game was the difference in the game and the difference in who should have won the Heisman. Bradford was only as good as he could be passing against the Gators defense; when passing wasn't working, Tebow simply overpowered the Sooners.
When Texas won its championship a few years back, it was so clearly because Vince Young absolutely refused to lose that game. Tebow's performance this week may have been more dominant than that. (And now there's word that Tebow plans to stay at Florida for his senior year. What could be better than a college player staying in college, even when he has absolutely nothing left to prove?
Now to the debate. Texas took a little of the steam out of this one by almost tripping against an Ohio State team that no one would mistake for a title contender. Yeah, sure, you have only one loss, Horns, but with a couple of dominant programs up for the title, squeeking by everyone's favorite January punching-bag doesn't cut it.
Next off the list is USC. Two words. Oregon State. Why is this decisive? You're 12-1. Utah is 13-0, but USC played a major college schedule. Wrong. So did Utah. USC played seven games against teams that played a bowl game; Utah played six. The difference is Oregon State. Utah won; USC lost. Good season, boys. See you in September.
So it's down to Utah and Florida. Who's the champion? The "and 1" game would decide it. Texas and USC can complain that they should have been in a four-team playoff, but that isn't coming any time soon. The "and 1" could happen next year if they wanted.
Florida beat Alabama. Utah beat Alabama. Line 'em up and then we'd know. Next Saturday, with the NFL championships on Sunday. Must see TV.
But that's only what should happen. It isn't what did happen. So who's the champ? My southern bias points me to Florida. My admiration for Tebow points me to Florida. Watching the Gator defense shut down the unstoppable Oklahoma offense like a high schooler getting stuffed in his locket points me to Florida. But there is that loss, at home, to Mississippi. Didn't happen to Utah, not once. The earned it, on the field, with perfection.
Florida gets the crystal football. They earned it. But so did Utah. I'd give it to them.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Rev Up The Argument
We are halfway to having the very best argument ever in college football. I just hope we get all the way there. Four teams should get a piece of the crystal football.
USC pasted Penn State. Penn State was clearly a quality team, deservedly the Big 10 representative in the Rose Bowl. But USC was also clearly on another level. USC lost a close game on the road. They have as much claim to a title as any one-loss team.
Utah waxed a decidely unimpressive Alabama, in another game that wasn't as close as the score. Unlike the Georgia Bulldogs last year, who took their BCS slight as motivation to destroy a Hawaii team that came in thinking it would prove it belonged in the National Championship, Alabama looked uninspired for most of the game. But Utah helped that impression, as the Utes were clearly better on both sides of the ball. The Utes are undefeated and have proven that it was no fluke.
Two teams have staked their claim to the mythical National Championship. Two more to go. If Texas treats Ohio State the way the last couple of BCS games have treated Ohio State, they will be hard to ignore. Like USC they lost a close game on the road; they will have both knocked off Ohio State. But Texas also beat Oklahoma
And then the winner of the BCS game will have only one loss and another very impressive win to show for it. An Oklahoma victory only enhances Texas' claim - because that tie-breaker was decided head to head. Florida can claim to have come through the hardest road - and Mississippi's beatdown of Texas Tech shows that Florida's one point loss was not so inconceivable.
It's gonna be fun. We're gonna have at least three teams still worth voting for, and maybe four. It's a teachable moment, when the subject is how not to decide a championship. Stay tuned.
Another New York Story
There are four compelling games in this weekend's Wild Card round. The bowl season is winding down to the games of interest for the annual debate about whether the BCS has identified a real National Champion (not a chance this year). And yet a full news cycle was dominated by the story of Thomas Jones bleating in public that Brett Favre ultimately hurt the Jets by being exactly what the Jets hired him to be - a gunslinger who refuses to accept the idea that his body won't respond to his every command.
This is a classic New York story. Meaning the rest of us just don't give a rat's ass, but we'll hear about it days because the media is obsessed with all things New York. And it isn't even a good New York story at that - at least Plaxico Burress had head-scratching stupidity going for him.
If the Jets had made the playoffs, we might care what one of the players said about another. Might.
If Brett Favre had won the MVP, we might care that one of his teammates called him out. Might.
But because the Jets fell like a stone in the last month while Brett Favre proved that an old quarterback's performance will always suffer in cold weather, this isn't a story at all.
Let's talk about the real stories after Week 17 - like an 11-5 Patriots team is sitting at home while an 8-8 Chargers team hosts a playoff game, and how Herm Edwards still has job.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
The Annual College Football Needs a Playoff Column
The dust has settled. A bunch of 7-5 teams are going to December bowl games. In the rapture that follows being invited to the Meinike Car Care Bowl, teams will talk about how it is a reward for their fans, and benefit to the school - and then around game time we’ll see the stories that show how the school actually ends up losing money by the time they pay all the expenses involved in the trip out to Boise or Charlotte, etc.
This year there are 34 bowl games - meaning that 68 teams had to become “bowl eligible” or some poor bowl was going to feature East Carolina playing an inter-squad scrimmage. For a while there, it was touch and go, in part because the schools in Division 1 (the NCAA can label them whatever they want, here we will speak the truth) have gotten addicted to scheduling 1-AA games to pad their victory totals. The season as expanded to 12 games (13 for teams in their conference championships) - apparently solely to allow everybody to schedule a game with The Citadel.
The Appalachian State upset of Michigan in 2007 was so sweet because it was the ultimate come-uppance for the Division 1 schools. You weren’t content with the Big 10 cupcakes on your schedule, or some of the MAC schools in your own state; you reached into the ranks of 1-AA to get that first win of the season, and you still haven’t been able to wipe the egg off your face. I love it!
(Don’t take this the wrong way, 1-AA schools:) I’m always reminded of the story of the lion who was challenged to a fight by a skunk. For weeks, the skunk strutted around boasting that he was going to take on the mighty lion, but the lion said nothing. Finally, when all of the other animals had heard enough of the skunk’s bragging, they went to the lion and asked him to fight the skunk so that order and peace could be restored. The lion refused still, and said “it isn’t that I fear somehow losing the fight, it is simply that for months I’ll wake up every morning to the smell reminding me that I fought a skunk.”
No one is impressed when a Division 1 school rolls over the 1-AA team that they’ve paid to take a beating; the alumni who puff out their chests at that probably crowed about how the US took down Grenada; you know, morons. Take a chance on Vanderbilt or Miami of Ohio, or just admit that you want a win without any real upside and schedule the local 5A high school team.
But I was talking about the bowls. Fortunately for all concerned, something like 74 teams have managed to win six games against Division 1 schools (or maybe this year it is only five), and every bowl can have two teams. And each and every one of us gets to ask - Who freaking cares? My alma mater is going to a bowl game, somewhere, one day in December, and if I was looking for a short vacation in city better known for conventions than tourism, I might think “hey, now I’ve got an excuse to go to Memphis.”
The college bowls are a quaint relic of a by-gone era - like the Electoral College or the 8-track tape. There was a time when the games were played for fun, and watched for fun and at the end of the year, some of the better teams got together in a warm weather city to play one more game for the alumni who never got a chance to see teams from the Mid-west. The outcome was secondary to the experience.
Why has the number of college bowls grown while they have been simultaneously rendered meaningless? It is an interesting question for social psychologists. My own suspicion is that the increasing number of bowls has more to do with Chambers of Commerce and commercial sponsors than the desire of every team with six wins to spend December practicing. The teams get sucked into the idea of having a bowl game as a reward for the season, and nobody actually tries to figure out if the money and time would be better spent upgrading the field hockey team.
I’m not advocating eliminating the consolation bowls. It is a wild waste of resources for all involved to create another of 7-5 teams in a city nobody wants to go to, so that ESPN can have live programming on the 27th of December. But if that’s how people want to spend their time, effort and money, then it is their God-given right as Americans.
For a handful of teams, though, the bowl game was a final chance to show that they deserved consideration to be NATIONAL CHAMPION. After all, that is the ultimate goal of every team when they suit up for two-a-days in August. In the pre-BCS days, two or three of the bowl games were important in helping sort out the chaff and identify the two or three teams that could then argue until eternity that they should have been deemed NATIONAL CHAMPION. So there were two or three bowl games that were more than just watching college football on New Years’ Day.
But like everything else that gets swept up in our hyper-competitive society, it wasn’t enough to have a system that created endless arguments about the merits of this or that team. We needed to be able to get consensus on who would be the NATIONAL CHAMPION. And so the Bowl Championship Series was created.
One of the problems with the BCS is that the name implies something that it simply isn’t - a series. And I think that this poor job of labeling part of the problem people have with the system. If they had simply called it the “Bowl Matchup Improvement System” then there would be less argument about the BCS itself. Not less argument about why major college football remains the only sport where no champion is determined on the field, just less bitching about the system itself.
The BMIS has always been an excellent idea. It has prevented the odd results of the 80s and early 90s, such as when BYU was awarded a NATIONAL CHAMPION after beating a 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl. Now we frequently get games everyone wants to see, if not an actual championship matchup. And the BMIS has pointed the way to the easiest solution to determining the NATIONAL CHAMPION. Because we need to set up a system for determining a champion, if only to shut everyone the hell up.
For a very long time, I have been advocate of college football without a tournament. My reason is that I think having people argue about whether Florida is better than Texas or USC is better than both is just lots of fun to watch. But I’ weird like that, I like debate and controversy. But I have come around to join (well, face it, just about everyone) the side calling for a change. Again, if only to shut down the argument - because the argument consists of the emotional pull of having a real champion against several lame justifications for not having a champion.
This year has been the best rebuttal ever to the “a playoff would devalue the regular season” argument. Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, USC and Penn State all have one loss and undefeated Utah may be as good. The regular season was meaningful, in separating the wheat from the chaff - remember when East Carolina was supposed to breeze its way to a perfect record and crash the major-conference’s little bowl party; the regular season took care of that. The regular season did what it does in every other sport, separate the contenders from the pretenders.
Want an even better rebuttal? The NFL last season featured a Patriots team that went undefeated, piled up the most points in history, and generally was everyone’s choice for champion. If the NFL post-season had been one round of games, they would have played Dallas or Green Bay or Indianapolis and the winner of that would have won topped the polls unanimously. The eventual champion, about whom there is no debate, was the New York Giants, who at 10-6 would have been matched up against Cleveland in the Outback Bowl at 11:00 on New Year’s Day, and after winning that game would still not have been in the conversation.
So it is time for change. Hey, this is the year for it. And because the BMIS has done such a good job, the first solution, in the twelve-step program for college presidents and the sycophants who think that the current system is satisfactory, is at hand. (The first step for each of you people is to admit that you have a problem - “I’m John [Swofford] and I’m an enabler of buffoons.”)
The current system actually does a good job of identifying who we all want to see in the championship game. The current crop of bowl games features some compelling matchups and every year, so it seems, it is clear after those bowls who is really worthy of a shot at the title.
This idea is fairly easy to implement, since it is based on exactly the system currently in place. and has to be more satisfying than the current system. Four New Years’ Day bowl games - Orange, Sugar, Rose and Fiesta - with the four winners being considered, on the merits of their play in those games, for the championship game, played on January 8 (or if that’s a weekend on the following Monday night).
It is possible that the four bowl games won’t sort everything out so that the championship game is really the game we all want to see, but the odds are so much better than under the current system. Meanwhile, these big-daddy bowl games keep their stature, because the game has some real impact on the possible national championship.
I don’t advocate seeding the four bowl games from the BCS top eight, though, because that will almost assure debate about who should be in the championship game. The top three or four have usually distanced themselves from the next group; match them up in some fashion. The winners head to the championship game. And since we already have a rotation in place amongst the bowls, the two bowls which don’t get the top matchups this year get dibs on the top matchups next year. Under the current system, maybe one of the four big-daddy bowls has a top matchup, but the bowls are fine with the system. So let’s not spill any tears on their behalf.
I’m not saying this is new - it’s been around for a while as the “plus 1" system. And I’m not saying that it is the best and final answer. But it is a good step from the current mess to a true playoff, which is where the sport ultimately needs to go. And it would have the benefit of making New Years’ Day the football festival that it used to be - a wonderful tradition devalued as the big-daddy bowls convinced everyone that if they spread out a little more they could rake in more money.
And it can be done so easily. The BCS has already created the “plus 1" game; they simply are not using it for that purpose. They already play the “plus 1" game days after the Big-daddy have concluded, so there is not even a new scheduling issue. Too close to New Years for the teams and their fans? Then play it on January 15. And to address the argument that there are too many games, cut the regular season back to 11 games. We’ve already got a number of teams playing 14 games; this would actually cut back on the number of games for all but two teams.
It is time for college football to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 1990s. Later we can pull it into the 21st century.
This year there are 34 bowl games - meaning that 68 teams had to become “bowl eligible” or some poor bowl was going to feature East Carolina playing an inter-squad scrimmage. For a while there, it was touch and go, in part because the schools in Division 1 (the NCAA can label them whatever they want, here we will speak the truth) have gotten addicted to scheduling 1-AA games to pad their victory totals. The season as expanded to 12 games (13 for teams in their conference championships) - apparently solely to allow everybody to schedule a game with The Citadel.
The Appalachian State upset of Michigan in 2007 was so sweet because it was the ultimate come-uppance for the Division 1 schools. You weren’t content with the Big 10 cupcakes on your schedule, or some of the MAC schools in your own state; you reached into the ranks of 1-AA to get that first win of the season, and you still haven’t been able to wipe the egg off your face. I love it!
(Don’t take this the wrong way, 1-AA schools:) I’m always reminded of the story of the lion who was challenged to a fight by a skunk. For weeks, the skunk strutted around boasting that he was going to take on the mighty lion, but the lion said nothing. Finally, when all of the other animals had heard enough of the skunk’s bragging, they went to the lion and asked him to fight the skunk so that order and peace could be restored. The lion refused still, and said “it isn’t that I fear somehow losing the fight, it is simply that for months I’ll wake up every morning to the smell reminding me that I fought a skunk.”
No one is impressed when a Division 1 school rolls over the 1-AA team that they’ve paid to take a beating; the alumni who puff out their chests at that probably crowed about how the US took down Grenada; you know, morons. Take a chance on Vanderbilt or Miami of Ohio, or just admit that you want a win without any real upside and schedule the local 5A high school team.
But I was talking about the bowls. Fortunately for all concerned, something like 74 teams have managed to win six games against Division 1 schools (or maybe this year it is only five), and every bowl can have two teams. And each and every one of us gets to ask - Who freaking cares? My alma mater is going to a bowl game, somewhere, one day in December, and if I was looking for a short vacation in city better known for conventions than tourism, I might think “hey, now I’ve got an excuse to go to Memphis.”
The college bowls are a quaint relic of a by-gone era - like the Electoral College or the 8-track tape. There was a time when the games were played for fun, and watched for fun and at the end of the year, some of the better teams got together in a warm weather city to play one more game for the alumni who never got a chance to see teams from the Mid-west. The outcome was secondary to the experience.
Why has the number of college bowls grown while they have been simultaneously rendered meaningless? It is an interesting question for social psychologists. My own suspicion is that the increasing number of bowls has more to do with Chambers of Commerce and commercial sponsors than the desire of every team with six wins to spend December practicing. The teams get sucked into the idea of having a bowl game as a reward for the season, and nobody actually tries to figure out if the money and time would be better spent upgrading the field hockey team.
I’m not advocating eliminating the consolation bowls. It is a wild waste of resources for all involved to create another of 7-5 teams in a city nobody wants to go to, so that ESPN can have live programming on the 27th of December. But if that’s how people want to spend their time, effort and money, then it is their God-given right as Americans.
For a handful of teams, though, the bowl game was a final chance to show that they deserved consideration to be NATIONAL CHAMPION. After all, that is the ultimate goal of every team when they suit up for two-a-days in August. In the pre-BCS days, two or three of the bowl games were important in helping sort out the chaff and identify the two or three teams that could then argue until eternity that they should have been deemed NATIONAL CHAMPION. So there were two or three bowl games that were more than just watching college football on New Years’ Day.
But like everything else that gets swept up in our hyper-competitive society, it wasn’t enough to have a system that created endless arguments about the merits of this or that team. We needed to be able to get consensus on who would be the NATIONAL CHAMPION. And so the Bowl Championship Series was created.
One of the problems with the BCS is that the name implies something that it simply isn’t - a series. And I think that this poor job of labeling part of the problem people have with the system. If they had simply called it the “Bowl Matchup Improvement System” then there would be less argument about the BCS itself. Not less argument about why major college football remains the only sport where no champion is determined on the field, just less bitching about the system itself.
The BMIS has always been an excellent idea. It has prevented the odd results of the 80s and early 90s, such as when BYU was awarded a NATIONAL CHAMPION after beating a 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl. Now we frequently get games everyone wants to see, if not an actual championship matchup. And the BMIS has pointed the way to the easiest solution to determining the NATIONAL CHAMPION. Because we need to set up a system for determining a champion, if only to shut everyone the hell up.
For a very long time, I have been advocate of college football without a tournament. My reason is that I think having people argue about whether Florida is better than Texas or USC is better than both is just lots of fun to watch. But I’ weird like that, I like debate and controversy. But I have come around to join (well, face it, just about everyone) the side calling for a change. Again, if only to shut down the argument - because the argument consists of the emotional pull of having a real champion against several lame justifications for not having a champion.
This year has been the best rebuttal ever to the “a playoff would devalue the regular season” argument. Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, USC and Penn State all have one loss and undefeated Utah may be as good. The regular season was meaningful, in separating the wheat from the chaff - remember when East Carolina was supposed to breeze its way to a perfect record and crash the major-conference’s little bowl party; the regular season took care of that. The regular season did what it does in every other sport, separate the contenders from the pretenders.
Want an even better rebuttal? The NFL last season featured a Patriots team that went undefeated, piled up the most points in history, and generally was everyone’s choice for champion. If the NFL post-season had been one round of games, they would have played Dallas or Green Bay or Indianapolis and the winner of that would have won topped the polls unanimously. The eventual champion, about whom there is no debate, was the New York Giants, who at 10-6 would have been matched up against Cleveland in the Outback Bowl at 11:00 on New Year’s Day, and after winning that game would still not have been in the conversation.
So it is time for change. Hey, this is the year for it. And because the BMIS has done such a good job, the first solution, in the twelve-step program for college presidents and the sycophants who think that the current system is satisfactory, is at hand. (The first step for each of you people is to admit that you have a problem - “I’m John [Swofford] and I’m an enabler of buffoons.”)
The current system actually does a good job of identifying who we all want to see in the championship game. The current crop of bowl games features some compelling matchups and every year, so it seems, it is clear after those bowls who is really worthy of a shot at the title.
This idea is fairly easy to implement, since it is based on exactly the system currently in place. and has to be more satisfying than the current system. Four New Years’ Day bowl games - Orange, Sugar, Rose and Fiesta - with the four winners being considered, on the merits of their play in those games, for the championship game, played on January 8 (or if that’s a weekend on the following Monday night).
It is possible that the four bowl games won’t sort everything out so that the championship game is really the game we all want to see, but the odds are so much better than under the current system. Meanwhile, these big-daddy bowl games keep their stature, because the game has some real impact on the possible national championship.
I don’t advocate seeding the four bowl games from the BCS top eight, though, because that will almost assure debate about who should be in the championship game. The top three or four have usually distanced themselves from the next group; match them up in some fashion. The winners head to the championship game. And since we already have a rotation in place amongst the bowls, the two bowls which don’t get the top matchups this year get dibs on the top matchups next year. Under the current system, maybe one of the four big-daddy bowls has a top matchup, but the bowls are fine with the system. So let’s not spill any tears on their behalf.
I’m not saying this is new - it’s been around for a while as the “plus 1" system. And I’m not saying that it is the best and final answer. But it is a good step from the current mess to a true playoff, which is where the sport ultimately needs to go. And it would have the benefit of making New Years’ Day the football festival that it used to be - a wonderful tradition devalued as the big-daddy bowls convinced everyone that if they spread out a little more they could rake in more money.
And it can be done so easily. The BCS has already created the “plus 1" game; they simply are not using it for that purpose. They already play the “plus 1" game days after the Big-daddy have concluded, so there is not even a new scheduling issue. Too close to New Years for the teams and their fans? Then play it on January 15. And to address the argument that there are too many games, cut the regular season back to 11 games. We’ve already got a number of teams playing 14 games; this would actually cut back on the number of games for all but two teams.
It is time for college football to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 1990s. Later we can pull it into the 21st century.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Overtime in the NFL
It says something about our society that we are no longer tolerant of ties in our sporting events. When the Eagles and Bengals recorded the first tie in the NFL in six years, there was a fair amount of commentary about the travesty of permitting a game to end in a tie. What exactly is wrong with a game ending tied? They played for the sixty minutes and nobody won. End of story.
In this case, the teams played for 75 minutes and nobody won. Why are people rending their garments over it? Because we like things clear-cut, black and white, winners and losers. No kissing your sister any more. How do we know who to scapegoat if we can't call them losers. Somehow just tying has become less honorable than losing.
But longing for the days of a good old fashioned "kissing your sister" tie is like longing for the days of single-bar facemasks or basketball shorts that don't look like gym bloomers. Ain't coming back, Uncle Henry, meet the new boss.
Which is why the NFL system is the worst of every possible world. First of all, there is still the possibility of a tie - it is just delayed by another 15 minutes of scrumming in the middle of the field. What's the use of slogging on after the final whistle if ultimately you can end up right where you started; let's settle these things or don't. Second of all (and this was first on the list until the Eagles and Bengals reminded us of the other reason), about half of NFL overtimes are determined by the coin flip - as the team that wins the toss marches down the field and scores while the opposing offense sits on the sidelines with as much change of impacting the outcome as I have sitting on my couch. Why not just flip the coin and declare a winner that way? Because the other half the time, the teams jockey around between the thirty-yard lines for a while?
Overtime should be more exciting than regulation. And theoretically sudden-death overtime gives you that, but not the way the NFL does it. NFL overtime is exciting in the "cover your eyes and peek out in between to see if your team screws it up" way. Not exactly riveting theatre.
College overtime has it figured out. Both teams get a chance to score, and when they're still tied, you switch who goes first and start in again. They even juiced up the excitement by requiring that teams attempt the two-point conversion when the third overtime starts. College overtime is edge of your seat exciting. From the first snap to the last. I can watch any two teams in college play overtime and enjoy it.
The pro game is great in almost every way. (Okay, NFL replays sucks just a little too, but we'll come back to that.) But the college boys have it all over you when it comes to exciting finishes. To avoid a boring 3 and out field-goal festival, NFL overtimes should start with the ball on the opponent's 35 yard line. So get with it, NFL, before a Super Bowl is decided by a coin flip and a 14-play Bataan death march to a 19-yard field goal.
In this case, the teams played for 75 minutes and nobody won. Why are people rending their garments over it? Because we like things clear-cut, black and white, winners and losers. No kissing your sister any more. How do we know who to scapegoat if we can't call them losers. Somehow just tying has become less honorable than losing.
But longing for the days of a good old fashioned "kissing your sister" tie is like longing for the days of single-bar facemasks or basketball shorts that don't look like gym bloomers. Ain't coming back, Uncle Henry, meet the new boss.
Which is why the NFL system is the worst of every possible world. First of all, there is still the possibility of a tie - it is just delayed by another 15 minutes of scrumming in the middle of the field. What's the use of slogging on after the final whistle if ultimately you can end up right where you started; let's settle these things or don't. Second of all (and this was first on the list until the Eagles and Bengals reminded us of the other reason), about half of NFL overtimes are determined by the coin flip - as the team that wins the toss marches down the field and scores while the opposing offense sits on the sidelines with as much change of impacting the outcome as I have sitting on my couch. Why not just flip the coin and declare a winner that way? Because the other half the time, the teams jockey around between the thirty-yard lines for a while?
Overtime should be more exciting than regulation. And theoretically sudden-death overtime gives you that, but not the way the NFL does it. NFL overtime is exciting in the "cover your eyes and peek out in between to see if your team screws it up" way. Not exactly riveting theatre.
College overtime has it figured out. Both teams get a chance to score, and when they're still tied, you switch who goes first and start in again. They even juiced up the excitement by requiring that teams attempt the two-point conversion when the third overtime starts. College overtime is edge of your seat exciting. From the first snap to the last. I can watch any two teams in college play overtime and enjoy it.
The pro game is great in almost every way. (Okay, NFL replays sucks just a little too, but we'll come back to that.) But the college boys have it all over you when it comes to exciting finishes. To avoid a boring 3 and out field-goal festival, NFL overtimes should start with the ball on the opponent's 35 yard line. So get with it, NFL, before a Super Bowl is decided by a coin flip and a 14-play Bataan death march to a 19-yard field goal.
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