I'm not feeling very smart right now as a college football scribe. This must mean that another regular season has ended. Thankfully, another writer is here to talk sense. Before giving some final thoughts on the BCS and Les Miles, the Weekly Affirmation is proud to present its third guest editorial of the year. Here is Texas treasure Adam Jones, a soon-to-be published author (see note below).
NOTE: E-mail me if you want to continue these and other college football conversations during the pre-bowl break and in the offseason that's just five weeks away. The Weekly Affirmation would like to establish and develop discussion circles with fans who take sports seriously enough to connect them to meaningful social issues and relevant life questions.
The Season Where No One Was Any Good
By Adam Jones, jonestopten.com
Special to CollegeFootballNews.com
“Can’t anybody here play this game?” -Casey Stengel
So friends, our season ends exactly the way it began, with a stunning upset on the favorite’s home field in what should have been a four-touchdown romp. All Pittsburgh’s punter had to do was take a few dance steps around the end zone and, with clock safely expired, cruise on out the back, taking a safety and eliminating all hopes of West Virginia playing for the national title. I’m sorry Casey Stengel wasn’t alive to see it.
West Virginia was never the perfect national title contender anyway. Yes, the Mountaineers are jaw-droppingly talented at the skill positions, but the offense couldn’t get it going in a loss at South Florida and some of the numbers were piled up against horrific competition. Wunderkind Pat White’s extended absences in the two WVU losses made them look a little like a one-man gang. But let’s not blame the Mountaineers; we as college football fans haven’t liked anyone at the top this year:
We will no doubt look back on 2007 as the season when no one was any good.
We started with the assumption that USC was an unbeatable collection of talent, never for a minute believing that a loss to Stanford was possible. We moved on to LSU, but became wary of the close calls and Les Miles’ (somewhat undeserved) reputation for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. When the Tigers cracked in overtime against Kentucky, no one seemed surprised. Ohio State was Ohio State: dependable, solid, rugged… boring. The early-season slate, dubbed by some fans as “Y.A.W.N.” (Youngstown, Akron, Washington, Northwestern), didn’t help; nor did a down Big Ten, led by Michigan’s loss to the Team That Must Not Be Mentioned.
Oklahoma proved to be a cold-blooded set of playmakers with a smooth-as-silk redshirt freshman quarterback. The Sooners were capable of beating Missouri like a rented mule on Saturday night, but also of losing to both Colorado and Texas Tech. Kansas was the Cinderella story of the Big 12, but the cynics among us never really believed in that fairy tale, and Chase Daniel crushed the Jayhawks' glass slipper under the crushing weight of…OK, I’ll hold the Mark Mangino joke here.
We all love Georgia now. But did we love the Bulldogs when they were losing ugly to South Carolina and Tennessee? These events took place, of course, before Mark Richt, in his heart of hearts, decided that who he really wanted to be was John Jenkins.
Perhaps we should have a moment of silence for Dennis Dixon. He collapsed on the turf without being touched against Arizona and his Oregon Duck brothers followed suit.
As the Christmas season approaches, we find our emotional gauges on empty in the college football world. Ohio State and LSU for all the marbles makes a perfectly fine New Year’s gift, but it seems like a consolation prize in a season when no one team has truly captured the public imagination or, for that matter, seized the moment and made the season its own. We are an ambivalent lot, seeking the team that will truly inspire us to levels of awe, or hatred, depending on which side of the fence we sit. I am not sure we even like our own teams anymore. Of course, offering full disclosure, I am a Texas Longhorn partisan, so I may be carrying an extra dose of cynicism as the holidays approach.
How did we get here?
For starters, I blame Notre Dame. Throughout their brilliant history, the Fighting Irish have provided for this great sport a benchmark of excellence that crosses all geographic and conference boundaries. They tell us the relative worth of the Big Ten in contests with Michigan, Michigan State and Purdue. They annually apprise us of the competitive worth of USC and, by extension, the entire Pac-10. For good measure, the boys from South Bend usually throw in some other intersectional matchup that tells us much about our game from 40,000 feet. Who can forget the wars with Miami and Florida State?
I started this season in Notre Dame Stadium. The trip satisfied a personal quest and gave me an up-close look at a very good Georgia Tech squad. The Yellow Jackets looked like a top-ten team that afternoon, but the day was a mirage: Tech would finish 7-5, just like they always do. The only thing they proved that September day was that a good team will usually beat a bad one.
Without Notre Dame, we have had to look for others to validate our expectations. The pickings are slim. LSU’s throttling of Virginia Tech remains the only non-conference result in the data set among top ten teams. That game took place long ago, and it featured a ready-made title contender in LSU against a Tech squad built to improve over the course of the season (they did) and burdened by communal expectations that would sink all but the hardiest competitors (the Hokie players are). The result was predictable.
Quite frankly, the rest of our relevant observations on the national scene have given us about as much data as the average freshman chemistry experiment. We made much of Cal’s demolition of Tennessee only to watch the Golden Bears slide ignominiously down to a 6-6 record and a loss to Stanford. Meanwhile, the Vols played valiant football at times, standing toe-to-toe with LSU in the SEC title game.
We should rightfully applaud USC and Oklahoma for scheduling Nebraska and Miami, respectively. But how were we to know that games against Cincinnati and South Florida—or even Central Florida—would have been better instruments to measure Trojan or Sooner greatness? We may lament the BCS era robbing us of the great national matchups, but we sometimes forget that for those matchups to occur, it all depends on the maddeningly mercurial talents of 18-22 year-olds, which can’t be predicted four years in advance for convenient scheduling.
Even within the conference wars, teams let us down. Louisville, finally considered a legitimate top- ten football program by most of the cognoscenti, promptly fell apart, which couldn’t have thrilled West Virginia as the Mountaineers strived for respectability. The resurgence of Florida State under a new coaching staff never really happened, and the ACC was poorer for it. Pity that Ohio State never really got the challenge we expected from Penn State or Michigan—although hats off to the youthful exuberance of Illinois. As for Texas, well, they weren’t really Texas were they? Vince Young has clearly left the building.
We are all left not quite knowing who reigns supreme in the college football world. I shudder to think what the newly independent and historically mischievous voters of the Associated Press will leave us with after this bowl season. The cacophonic clamorings for a playoff—at least of the “plus-one” variety—will continue, but likely on deaf ears; a 12-0 romp by USC next season will make everyone forget this ugly anomaly.
We would do better to remember the season where no one was any good as perhaps “The season where we saw things we may never see again.” It is at least somewhat more celebratory.
But not quite as satisfying.
Adam Jones is the author of the website www.jonestopten.com: the Truth about College Football since 1995. His first book, Rose Bowl Dreams: a Memoir of Faith, Family and Football, will be released by St. Martin’s Press in August of 2008. He lives in Austin, Tex., with his wife and three sons.
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Now that the Weekly Affirmation has kept up with the Joneses, a few final words from this columnist. (If anyone wants to write a guest editorial during or just after the bowl season, you're welcome to do so. And in future seasons, this offer will remain. This space will always be welcome for citizens who care enough about college football journalism to submit their own work for public consumption.
You need to help me out, dear readers. It's hard to generate thoughts that are both coherent and original at this point in time. When the calendar turns to December, two thngs always happen: 1) The BCS makes college football a national laughingstock while toying with the psyches and souls of many decent Americans whose lives are intimately connected to this game. The bitter irony of this particular reality is found in the fact that the person preventing college football from having a plus-one (a very modest and reasonable proposal, one would think) is the commissioner of the SEC, the conference where football means more to its fans than anywhere else in the country. 2) Coaches and athletic departments embarrass themselves with their behavior. It's as though two office co-workers insist on having an extramarital affair in a way that causes maximum emotional harm to their spouses. Disgusting, ethically challenged, and morally repugnant. If it's early December, logic and morals must be getting forcefully assaulted. If college football's regular season has just ended, grown human beings must be injuring each other with the blunt weapons of stupidity, cowardice and greed.
What should you do if you're a college football fan right now? Let's maintain our passion for the sport while also displaying sober realism and--much more importantly--authentic humanity.
On the night of the BCS Selection Show--which has now been conducted ten times (which is seven times too many if you're an astute follower of college football)--I feel used... emotionally, physically, intellectually, and professionally. I've been covering this sport since 1999, and it still isn't easy to accept the absurdity of being told that a national title game is about to be played in which the winner might not deserve the national championship. For those who don't like a playoff (I'd be glad to settle for a plus-one at this point in time; surely, cooler heads can prevail and create that one extra game which will surely not destroy the academic integrity of the sport), just remember a fundamental reality of sports: football is the big-game sport. Basketball, baseball and hockey demand series. Football is all about the big game, the classic matchup, the epic confrontation, the electricity in the stadium, the purity of knowing that if a sport is excessively violent and brutal, it is at least deciding something clear-cut and final. If kids are going to risk broken limbs and concussions for our entertainment and pleasure, then dadgummit, we ought to have a true(r) champion. If football matters as much as it does to the people of the Deep South and Texas... and Oklahoma and Nebraska... and Ohio and West Virginia (among other states and regions), then by golly, we deserve to have a true(r) champion in college football. How many times are we going to have to say this in the first week of December? How long will the wait for a plus-one continue? How long, Mike Slive, how long?
The truly maddening aspect of the 2007 college football season is that we know just about as much right now as we did at the beginning of the season--which is to say, practically nothing. You and I, dear reader, have spent the past three months of our lives trying to figure out the best teams in the country, and now it feels as though these three months have been wasted--can we have them back? Consider all the ink spilled, the bandwidth used, the cameras trained, the electricity consumed, the papers printed, and the other resources poured out across the country so that analysts, coaches, and millions of other people connected to college football could search for the two best teams in the land. It's been an entirely fruitless quest, hasn't it? "Used and abused"--that's the popular feeling for a devotee of college football these days.
One has to constantly repeat oneself when discussing the latest BCS travesty at the end of yet another regular season. When you cut through all the bull and get down to brass tacks, there's only one simple reality you ever need to know (year after year) about this ridiculous and fraudulent system: while destroying college football's previously existing bowl traditions, the BCS fails to deliver fairness to college football's championship chase in every scenario but one.
As this 2007 season proved, college football is nothing if not unpredictable. Yet, the BCS works when only one scenario emerges: two and only two BCS conference teams remain unbeaten at the end of the regular season. Let's repeat that for effect: two and only two unbeaten teams from BCS conferences is the one season-ending scenario in which the BCS actually works. The Virginia Tech-Florida State scenario from 1999; the Ohio State-Miami scenario from 2002; and the Texas-USC scenario from 2005 are the only three times when the BCS did what previous bowl systems failed to do: ensure that unbeaten No. 1 could play unbeaten No. 2 in a winner-take-all battle. It's interesting, as a side note, that those three title games were particularly entertaining--both teams appreciated the purity of the battle. The other six--and far less legitimate--title games in the BCS era ALL fell flat. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
The eternal argument used to prop up the BCS (or, at the very least, to oppose any kind of playoff) is that the system preserves the identity of a regular season as a playoff. Tell Ohio State and UCLA that Florida State's loss to N.C. State was a playoff in 1998. Tell Miami that its win over Florida State in 2000 represented a playoff. Tell Big XII champion Colorado and Pac-10 champion Oregon that Nebraska won its "playoff" game late in the 2001 season. Tell Pac-10 champion USC that Oklahoma's loss to Kansas State in the 2003 Big XII title tilt was a playoff. Tell undefeated Auburn that all 12 of its regular-season wins in 2004 were playoff games. And tell Michigan that losing out to Florida in 2006 was anything but the artificial political product of a desire among poll voters to avoid a rematch in the national title game. If the Wolverines had played (and lost to) Ohio State on Dec. 2, 2006, and not Nov. 18 of that same year, Michigan would likely have gotten its rematch anyway.
The BCS promised to provide an undisputed title game, but in 2003, we all found out how false that claim turned out to be. Now, four years later, we have another crazy season that has once again created complete and utter chaos. Sense a trend here? You can't say that "this season was unusually unpredictable," because every college football season is unpredictable. Granted, few seasons are likely to have more upsets than this topsy-turvy 2007 campaign, but even with more routine results, a college football season is still random enough that clear-cut comparisons are very hard to come by. Some years, a multi-car pileup might involve just three teams. In years like this one, a solid six teams (perhaps as many as eight) have a valid claim to a national title game appearance. The end of the story, though, is the same: a big-game sport is deprived of the showcase events that make it sing. This leads us to another familiar and not-very-original statement we have to make whenever December comes across the calendar.
At this time of year, I'm always having to say that if college football can't put together a playoff, it would be far better for the sport to return to the old bowl system. In other words, either go for 100 percent tradition or no tradition at all. Go all the way in one direction or another. In an attempt to have it both ways, the BCS gives us nothing, except in those rare seasons when two and only two unbeaten teams remain at the end of Autumn.
Just consider this alarmingly untidy dimension of the BCS bowl selection process: while the championship game will almost always be shrouded in controversy, the most underreported and overlooked aspect of this faulty system is that it provides secondary bowl games that don't answer very many questions.
While fans will generally gravitate to the title game and decry the lack of a clear 1 versus 2 matchup, what's even worse is that the other BCS bowls provide imbalanced matchups that still leave the college football community in the lurch. Why is this the case? The BCS system, of course, which is a 50-percent solution with respect to both tradition and modernity. As we all know, a half-baked approach nets absolutely nothing: 50 percent old plus 50 percent new equals 100 percent disaster.
Here's how this year's BCS process left everyone unhappy... just as it almost always does (except when the one magic scenario occurs). Whenever you're inclined to accept the BCS and defend it, it's worth pointing out what alternative approaches--both old and new--would have created had they been implemented.
With the real tradition of the old bowl system (we're talking pre-Bowl Alliance here), we'd have had Ohio State and USC in the Rose Bowl; LSU versus West Virginia or Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl; Oklahoma versus West Virginia, Georgia, or Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl; and a Fiesta Bowl involving Missouri or Kansas against WVU/Georgia/Va Tech. Those would have been four equally compelling matchups that would have answered far more questions about the national title debate than the crop of BCS bowls that will be played in the first week of 2008.
With zero tradition but complete flexibility built into the BCS bowl selection process, there would have been a way to have Oklahoma, USC, Georgia and Virginia Tech play each other in two of the four BCS bowls (Arizona State, Hawaii, Missouri and West Virginia could have been paired off in the two remaining games). In this way, the sport could still have engaged in the typical political horsetrading that's part of the bowl system, while simultaneously providing fan-friendly matchups that would answer more questions about the nation's best teams. The point should be painfully obvious by now: a bowl system should either have no freedom or complete freedom. Either embrace tradition whole-hog, or give bowls unrestricted political flexibility so that the perfect matchups can be created. It's a mild source of disappointment that Ohio State and LSU are playing in the title game, but what really irritates this columnist is that USC and Georgia aren't playing in Pasadena, while Oklahoma and Virginia Tech aren't duking it out in either Glendale or Miami. If two-loss LSU barely beats the Buckeyes in what is essentially a home game, it would be nice to see if a resounding performance from Mark Richt's team... or Bob Stoops' troops... or Pete Carroll's crew... or Frank Beamer's boys would make the season-ending debate interesting. But with the BCS bowl matchups we have, there won't be a whole lot of drama. No one will learn much about USC when the Trojans tackle Illinois. Few will find fresh info on Georgia against Hawaii in New Orleans. The nation won't make Virginia Tech's case for No. 1 based on a game against Kansas. It's just a shame. Under systems both old and new, tried and untried, you could get far better bowl matchups--for both tourism and television--than what we have under the current BCS system. Roy Kramer's creation truly is the worst thing to happen to college football from an on-field standpoint.
And now, we come to the other part of this silly season in college football: the dreadfully dumb and depressingly dishonest dealings among various coaches, athletic directors, and other participants in a pathetically predictable process that still unfolds every December.
This topic--unlike the BCS--demands few words. Apparently, last year's Nick Saban debacle in Alabama didn't educate many people about the right way to go about a coaching search/inquiry for any and all parties involved. It's not that hard, folks: give honest answers to simple questions. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Wait until after big games to either court or be courted. Michigan and Les Miles--initially responsible when last week began--quickly sullied their reputations as last weekend approached, with a fine mess spilling out in the bowels of the Georgia Dome just hours before Saturday's SEC Championship Game. Simply stated, if adults on all sides of this issue had acted responsibly, there never would have been a need for the hasty and unusual press conference called by Miles just before LSU took the field against Tennessee.
It shouldn't be too much to ask, guys. Be above board in your dealings. Shoot straight, and do what you need to do at the appointed time. Fans, journalists and--most of all--players and their parents should not be left twisting in the wind, where speculation is their only reality and refuge. Who knows how much the LSU Tigers, up and down the roster, needlessly suffered because of their coach's awkward dance with Michigan? The questions were smartly deflected early last week, but that pattern regrettably didn't continue. Maybe in the future, coaches and ADs will get it right. But as long as adults behave badly, we shouldn't wonder why young people find it so hard to be consistently motivated in their own right. As long as grown men act distracted, why should the players they coach behave any differently, on or off the field?
Before we conclude this season finale of the Weekly Affirmation, a final few thoughts if holiday plans with the family--or the demands of a football-weary wife, or both (or something else)--prevent you from reading this column until Labor Day weekend of 2008.
A good story needs a lot of time and space if it is to be told well.
Pretentiousness is not synonymous with length or complexity of expression. It's an attitude that has to be known, breathed deeply, and personally understood.
If you value a good discussion, you'll almost always ask questions before making overly finite conclusions on a given topic.
An opinion you disagree with is not necessarily a bad opinion; it's merely an opinion that's very different from your own. Favorable opinions and editorials can be crafted and formulated with absolutely no skill whatsoever; conversely, unfavorable commentaries can be artfully and cleverly arranged. Remember that.
Forms or genres of commentary and analysis--relative to their scope and scale, not their argumentative or literary quality--do not represent a true measure of journalistic merit. Location is important in real estate; it's not nearly as important in journalism. A problem with this profession is that it's being poisoned by an entertainment mentalilty. Injecting entertainment realms with a large dose of journalism--the perpendicularly opposite tack--is very much needed in contemporary American society.
After following this particular season, it is hoped that you'll finally realize--if you haven't already--that mental toughness is the foremost determinant of supreme success in this sport. At the highest levels of athletic competition, the Xs and Os cease to matter; the main-event ballgame is decided by the heart. These past few weekends of late-season surprises have had very little to do with technique, scheme, tactics, or game planning. They've had everything to do with composure, poise, confidence, self-belief, motivation, urgency, experience, relaxation, swagger, and various other fruits (or lack thereof) attached to the realms of mind, body and spirit. You can read all the season previews and size up all the physical specimens you want; when games are waiting to be won, however, it's the intangible interior factors that count. No team ever really managed to withstand white-hot pressure this season; the teams that hang in amidst the heat are the ones that win championships in college football. Similarly, the mind is the gateway to more fulfilling (or frustrating) outcomes and experiences in all other aspects of life.
The Weekly Affirmation wishes you positive outcomes and experiences over the next nine months, until another season kicks off at the end of another summer. In this time of coaching craziness and BCS dysfunctionalilty, there aren't many positive things to talk about, so one hopes that your own life will encounter what college football--stubbornly and stupidly--refuses to find.
