a referral, another sports-related rant

To a slimmed-down and stylized (and logically coherent) post that parallels what I'm trying to say/do about basketball with this space. Basically, I got love and admiration for the writers over at FreeDarko. While I would love to speak with that same level of authority, they have the NBA League Pass cable package, whereas I am 1. busy 2. sick and 3. the tvs at college are all in public use, so usually you have to fight off a pack of people trying to watch Gray's Anatomy if you want to see anything at all.

In other news, Michigan goes to the first Classic Rose Bowl (Big 10 v Pac 10, even though the Big 10 champion is technically playing elsewhere) since 2003. This will be their third Rose in the four years I've been in college, a span over which they are 0-2. On the plus side, it reminds me of the days when college football was the best sport in the country, precisely because they didn't even pretend that the scientific method played a factor in their crowning of each year's National Champion(s). The bitter arguments employed by fans, even years after the fact, about the hypothetical matchup between, say, 1997 Michigan and 1997 Nebraska really make my day. Fact is, team sports cannot possibly say with absolute authority that the year's best team has separated itself from the pack, and thus deserves its title (with the possible exception of the 95-96 Bulls): NFL schedules differ markedly between good and bad teams, series like last year's NBA finals test the credibility of the process, the mandate given by winning the "World Series" trophy is called into question when a team made up almost (though not quite) entirely of Japan-league baseball players beats everyone else in the World Baseball Classic, and even the NCAA basketball tournament is a flawed beast riddled with unfair seedings, tilted brackets, and tangible home-court advantages. Bias happens, unfairness happens, but only in pre-BCS college football was there the acknowledgement of subjectivity, even, in some years, of blatant favoritism. And that's what made it so great. The possibility of a workable system that did not force college football players to schedule into the depths of December but still produced an uncontested champion occasionally arose, but was dismissed as ridiculous. Since the BCS, controversies have emerged, but blaming the process takes the place of those hypothetical matchup arguments. By claiming to fulfill a standard that is essentially infeasible for 117 teams playing only twelve or thirteen games a year, the BCS has stripped the system of its charm, its opacity. Expecting a bunch of sportswriters, retired players, and computers to fairly determine the best two teams via polling is hopeless, and the BCS's assertion of legitimacy attempts to "compensate" for human faults by encoding them in formulae, burying the system's structural problems. Hopefully, the sport can reestablish a balance between the objectivity (and thus credibility) with which its governors seem to be obsessed and the subjectivity and imperfections that make it enjoyable, human, worth discussing.