Every Game Counts…Week 6

In my neverending quest to rail against the BCS, I am calculating week-by-week how many games this college football season really “count” (as in, influence the national title picture).

After five weeks, 82 of the 120 FBS teams cannot make the BCS championship (a refresher on my criteria), including JoePa’s Nittany Lions. We can start breaking it down a little more now that we’re reducing the field.

Every Game Counts…Week 5

In my neverending quest to rail against the BCS, I am calculating week-by-week how many games this college football season really “count” (as in, influence the national title picture).

After four weeks, 76 of the 120 FBS teams cannot make the BCS championship (a refresher on my criteria), including a preseason Top 15 team in Pittsburgh:

Whose Ties Are You Calling “Weak”?

In this week’s New Yorker, the estimable Malcolm Gladwell takes, among other things, umbrage at the idea that tools of social media, like Twitter and Facebook, can be used for social activism. This idea has been popular for over a year now, dating back at least to the so-called “Twitter Revolution” in Moldova last year, as well as the site’s role in Iran’s 2009 elections. Gladwell, however, insists the “weak ties” promoted by these sites can never effect real social change. He compares it to the civil rights activism of the 1960s, in which “participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going” down South. This kind of activism—what Gladwell calls “high-risk activism”—is about strong ties.

As usual, Gladwell’s piece is brilliantly written and very compelling, but I’m afraid he falls into the same trap that many critics of modern social media are stuck in: this false dichotomy between “strong” and “weak” ties. It is indeed true that Facebook and Twitter are not built to maintain “strong ties” (like the ties between the four Greensboro students who began the Woolworth’s sit-ins, who were roommates). In fact, Gladwell provides as good a description of the uses of these sites as I’ve seen:

Every Game Counts…Week 4

In my neverending quest to rail against the BCS, I am calculating week-by-week how many games this college football season really “count” (as in, influence the national title picture).

After three weeks, the carnage is settling in, with 66 of the 120 FBS teams cannot make the BCS championship (a refresher on my criteria), including my precious Blue Devils:

You Can (Obviously) Prove A Negative

Everyone knows this is true. For one, there are several obvious negative statements that pretty much everyone knows are true and can easily prove (“George W. Bush is not the President,” “Red is not the same color as blue,” “Carlos Mencia is not funny,” etc.). On a less mundane level, whether a statement is positive or negative is a matter of how it is constructed—every positive statement (p) can be restated as a negative (~ ~ p).

And yet you will still hear people—smart people—resort to the obvious fallacy that you cannot prove a negative. Most commonly, you hear it in discussions of atheism. I’m sure even I have resorted to such a claim in my defenses of atheism. Even the brilliant Daniel Dennett erroneously invoked it here to explain why he couldn’t disprove God:

“You can’t prove a negative… I think it was Bertrand Russell who once said that he couldn’t prove that there was not a teapot orbiting Mars. So he’s a teapot agnostic. I’m a teapot agnostic with regard to God, too. I can’t prove that God doesn’t exist.”

Every Game Counts…Week 3

In my neverending quest to rail against the BCS, I am calculating week-by-week how many games this college football season really “count” (as in, influence the national title picture).

After two weeks, 47 of the 120 FBS teams cannot make the BCS championship (a refresher on my criteria). Congratulations to UCLA and Vanderbilt for being the first two BCS teams to be eliminated from the title picture:

Every Game Counts…Week 2

In my neverending quest to rail against the BCS, I am calculating week-by-week how many games this college football season really “count” (as in, influence the national title picture).

After one week, 36 of the 120 FBS teams cannot make the BCS championship (a refresher on my criteria):

How Boise State Is Not Killing The BCS

Last night, as Virginia Tech was turning Boise State’s 17-0 lead into a game that would come down to the final minute, ESPN put up a graphic of the current AP top ten. “If the Hokies come back,” Brent Musberger said, “then TCU becomes the new darling of the anti-BCS crowd.”

This is the conventional wisdom—that college football fans who hate the BCS and want to see a playoff (in other words, pretty much every college football fan) should root for underdogs like Boise State and TCU in order to undermine the BCS’ legitimacy.

But this is wrong. People who want to see the end of the BCS should have been rooting against the Broncos last night. After their win, there is a more-than-decent chance that the Broncos will go undefeated—of their remaining opponents, only Oregon State is ranked in the Top 25, and they are already in danger of falling out. And if Boise State goes undefeated, then there is a more-than-decent chance that the team makes the National Championship.

Every Game Counts…Kinda, Sorta, Not Really

College football has long billed itself as the sport of the regular season. Opponents of a playoff will always cite, as the main reason for the status quo, that every game counts, and that this is what makes college football unique.

But how many games actually do count? One of the points I made in last season’s attack on the BCS was that the system is inherently flawed because certain games do not–indeed, cannot–count. Many teams cannot control their own destiny. These are games that, regardless of what happens before or after them, will have no bearing on the national championship picture.

And so this season, I decided to try a little experiment. Each week, I will track how many games count; that is, how many games can possibly impact the national championship landscape. The criteria for games that do not count include the following:

Why I Hate the Little League World Series

I know we’ve reached a bit of a lull in the sports conversation when preseason NFL games are being broken down into minutiae and ESPN: The Magazine is ranking college football tunnel entrances in its latest issue. There’s a reason we all hate August.

But I didn’t know it had gotten this bad. This 70-hours-of-Little-League-Baseball-on-a-major-sports-network-over-the-course-of-10-days bad. This the-starting-lineups-are-brought-to-you-by-Camp-Rock-2-presented-by-Disney bad.

Can you conceptualize 70 hours of Little League Baseball? That’s seven hours a day! If you’re an American who watches an average amount of television every day, you cannot watch all the Little League World Series action ESPN is jamming down our throats. When it could be airing PTI and a Mariotti-less Around the Horn!

And yes, I can admit it: I hate the Little League World Series.