NEW POST: Chuck Klosterman's "The Nineties" Pseudo-Review
Oh god the Substack extra bit is longer than the site post
https://joebush.net/2022/03/15/chuck-klostermans-the-nineties-pseudo-review/
The thing about the BCS that I tease in the last little section is essentially this (but cut down):
Klosterman’s thesis about the BCS was that D1 College Football was, for years, different from other sports when it came to how it decided its champion because inherently, culturally it was different from other sports. He calls it “a national fascination where regional tradition mattered more than logic” (127) prior to the BCS’ introduction, after which it had to become similar to other sports in defining a singular champion each season.
To me, the pre-BCS era of College Football was the closest thing to an honest appraisal of what it meant to have a ‘champion’ in any sport, short maybe of what you see in European soccer leagues, where teams compete in balanced schedules and the team with the most points racked up from wins and draws at the end of the season is declared the league winner. Every other method of determining the best team in a given season is just as flawed, I’d argue. They all provide a set of rules to determine a champion in their specific format, but it doesn’t provide an inarguable answer. We can and will argue about it even after the whole thing is said and done.
Just in the last calendar year, every big championship can be honestly argued.
NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball: Baylor was helped by an unbalanced NCAA Tournament and by the fact that a single-elimination tournament is an obviously flawed way to determine a champion. There was no way that Baylor was that much better than Gonzaga, Gonzaga didn’t lose a game all year and was exhausted by a fast-paced overtime game from two nights prior while Baylor had sleepwalked through one of the worst final four teams in history.
Major League Baseball: The Atlanta Braves were helped because of MLB’s specific scheduling rules - had it not been for them qualifying right to the ALDS via winning their relatively weak division, would’ve had to play a single-elimination Wild Card game on the road in St. Louis, we can’t guarantee they’d win that, especially after they lost their first playoff game on the road in reality.
National Football League: Did we honestly determine that the Chiefs were better than the Bills last year? Those were perhaps the two most evenly-matched teams in any game all year, and the game only ended because of the NFL’s overtime rules. Would the Bengals have gone and won in Buffalo like they did in Kansas City? One coin flip goes the other way and that would’ve been the case. Also what kind of a system do you have wherein a team like the Green Bay Packers can so consistently finish first in their conference and so consistently get bounced in the playoffs before even making the Super Bowl? Can you honestly determine who the best team in a sport is when the championship winner plays at most twenty-one games in a season? A World Series champion could theoretically play 183 games (162 regular season games, a one-game playoff to determine the last wild card spot, the wild card game, a 5-game Division Series, a 7 game League Championship series, a 7 game World Series) before winning their championship and we could still argue about that.
(WARNING: JOE IS ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT MLS LIKE IT’S ON THE LEVEL OF THE OTHER AMERICAN MAJOR LEAGUES) Major League Soccer: First of all, though I don’t agree with this, we could say that New England won the regular season championship based on beating up on a weaker Eastern Conference while Colorado, Seattle, and Kansas City all beat each other up all year. Since we all agree with that thesis, we can also all agree that Don Garber definitely selectively enforced COVID rules to knock most of Philadelphia’s starters out of the Eastern Conference finals in order to make sure at least one big market team (NYCFC) got in the final. So, both of those are basically horribly flawed trophies.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, by the way. I’m not saying that the fact that I can do that, and the fact that we can do that with anything, completely illegitimizes all of sports. No, I’m saying the opposite, the fact that we can argue about it is part of why sports are so enthralling. The fact that every title, regardless of the manner in which it’s earned, can be argued, is part of the reasons why the cultural interest in sports has such a long tail, it’s how the NFL Network can run shows during the offseason and why I never questioned what SportsCenter would show in late June if the MLB Lockout had run all season - There’s always something to talk about!
Part of the joke of that last sentence was that MLS and NWSL would have been running in late June.
College Football’s move to the BCS tried to staple math and computerized logic on to what was a fundamentally flawed concept - That we could determine one definitively best team out of 100+ football teams playing 12 games each. That is just an illogical concept, and in this case I can appreciate that it was such an illogical concept that, for years, we didn’t try to logicize it. We just sort of came to an agreement, and if we didn’t, then that was okay as well. Three times in the 1990s, before the BCS, we had split national championships! We should’ve had four, considering that Penn State and Nebraska both finished 1994 as undefeated teams.
After the BCS happened, and after the BCS computer polls resulted in a bizarrely illogical prospect only three seasons into the BCS’s use (Washington had beaten Miami and Miami had beaten Florida State, and yet the BCS ranking at the end of the year had Florida State in second, Miami in third, and Washington in fourth) we figured out that the system was still flawed, just that the arguments that had once been used to at least make a decision on the #1 team in college football had just shifted downwards. In the BCS we really just argued to delineate who was #3, or rather, which two teams were supposed to be numbers 1 and 2, who was supposed to have a place in the national championship game. That was a relatively easy concept sometimes (2002, 2005, 2013), but the times when it failed, be it because there were too many championship-caliber teams and one or more got left out (2000 Miami and Washington, 2003 USC, 2004 Auburn, 2006 Michigan, 2009 Boise State and TCU, 2011 Oklahoma State) or because there wasn’t really a second championship caliber team (Most egregiously 2001 ending up with Nebraska as opposed to Oregon and Colorado, less controversial because Miami was the only great team that season, as well as 2012 when Notre Dame ran to 12-0 on a relatively easy schedule and favorable refereeing before getting crushed by an obviously superior Alabama team while Oregon and Kansas State, who probably also would’ve been beaten by Alabama though perhaps not as embarrassingly, were left out), or in the rare instance where nobody was all that much better than anyone else (2007, when probably seven or eight teams had genuine shots at the national title and each choked in progressively stupider fashions until we ended up with a flawed-enough-to-lose-to-Kentucky LSU team defeating a flawed-enough-to-lose-to-Illinois Ohio State team in the championship game), it failed egregiously and with plenty of hurt feelings.
The BCS brought this fun faceless computer matrix built on a defined formula whose flaws at least in one case (overrating Nebraska’s margin of victory in blowouts in 2001) became obvious as the rankings were being set. At least when it was the coaches and the AP, you had somebody to blame, those stupid journalists or those stupid coaches. Now it was a stupid algorithm.
Then when all those hurt feelings let to the introduction of the playoff in 2014, it didn’t fix any of the problems, it just shifted the line of delineation from between two and three to between four and five. I think inherently, it is harder to decide an answer to “who is the second best team” compared to “who is the best team” because you have to start picking from a pool of more and more obviously flawed teams, and that only gets harder as you widen the pool. Now you have this committee that has its own internal logic we’re supposed to understand though they’re quite bad at explaining it, introducing ideas like “The Eye Test” and “Brand Recognition”, which I believe just means “who will get better TV ratings” into the equation. There are routinely Pac-12 teams knocked more or less explicitly out of consideration because their games took place after bedtime for the playoff committee members.
I think the problem is that this sport is so inherently skewed that, after thirteen games, we inherently have a feel for who would make up the pool of teams to be honestly considered the best in the sport, and very rarely is that pool made up of four teams. The playoff did not change football so that there were more championship-caliber teams. In fact, it probably shrunk the pool. 2021 was almost unique in that, unlike in 2018, 19, and 20, there were multiple teams that honestly could’ve had an argument for who the best team in the country was. It was obvious before the playoff happened that Clemson was the best in 2018, LSU was the best in 2019, and Alabama was the best in 2020, and none of them were really challenged in their playoff games.
I think that’s an indictment. The inherent argument of the playoff was that four teams deserve a shot at the national title, and somehow recently, that concept has been challenged. There weren’t four teams honestly challenging for the national title in 2020, I don’t think there were really even two! But we still had to put four teams in there.
The problem I’ve seen is that relatively few teams have an honest argument about being the best team in the country (In 2021, it was two, Alabama and Georgia). Slightly more have an honest argument about being the second best team in the country and deserving a shot in the National Championship game like in the BCS. Way, way more have an honest argument about being the fourth best team in the country and at least deserving a shot in the playoff. You get so many more obvious flaws, and in ways more and more difficult to clarify, when you start getting into that discussion of who gets to be fourth.
It was Cincinnati this year. But they played a relatively easy schedule outside of Notre Dame, they almost lost several times to poor American conference teams like Tulsa. Meanwhile Baylor beat an Oklahoma State team that would’ve made the playoff in the Big XII championship game on a neutral field, you could argue honestly that they were better than Cincinnati. The Utah team that lost to San Diego State and BYU, arguably the second and third best non-Power 5 teams, early in the year was completely different after they’d changed quarterbacks, they dominated Oregon twice, you could argue honestly that they were better than Cincinnati. Ohio State just looked like a great team that got unlucky at the wrong time, you could honestly argue that they were better than Cincinnati. None of those teams you could really argue were better than Georgia or Alabama, but you could argue they were better than Cincinnati, and since it matters to make the playoff and get a chance at all, and since the committee is full of humans middle-aged to elderly men and women who can legitimately be swayed by arguments on cable TV, it is imperative that we argue about it all the fucking time up to the time when the playoff is announced, and then we wait a few weeks to watch two teams (and let’s be clear, the non-SEC/Clemson/Ohio State teams) get blown out.
This is what college football gets to be now on a national scale, constant inane arguing about who’s number four leading up to a climax of shitty semifinals and maybe hopefully a decent final. You are lucky to get one competitive game out of the three playoff games. Only once, really, (2017) did we get two competitive playoff games.
And ask yourself - Will this get better or worse if the playoffs expand? Think about that! If you thought deciding who #4 is was hard, just think about making the honest delineation between who deserves to be #12 and who deserves to be #13. Won’t that be fun? Won’t that be fun to try to determine if three-loss #12 Auburn is better than two-loss #13 Wisconsin? And then we get to have four rounds of blowouts instead of two?
God damn it. I was trying to shorten this and not write a book about how bizarre the current college football structure is (and I haven’t even tried to connect it to anything culturally and societally here, and I won’t, save for the next phrase following the colon in this parenthetical: Isn’t that just how everything is now though? Constant arguments that lead to an unsatisfying uncathartic climax?) but it is going to make me completely dissolve because, paradoxically, I also probably love watching college football now more than I ever did before, because I really only focus on the two teams of the two schools I attended, one of whom is typically caught up in an always interesting Mountain West conference championship race, and the other of whom is just trying to win any games at all.
If you treat college football like that “national fascination” Klosterman describes, I think it’s one of the most fun sports to follow still. Everybody else is constantly stuck in inane, furious Reddit and Twitter arguing every week and I can sit there and be like “God our punter is so fucking good” and “We didn’t lose to Coastal Carolina by all that much in the grand scheme of things.” The sport’s attempts on a national scale to staple more and more logic on to this inherently impossible question of who the best team of 130+ teams that each play twelve games is have just just exacerbated the arguing, and just moved the arguing from being the entire makeup of the sport to some impotent screaming that goes on constantly all the time on the periphery. And the most important games all suck ass.
So, here we are. We made it. We’re several paragraphs down the Substack post intended to link to a blog post about a Chuck Klosterman book. Statistically, nobody in the world has read this. There are secret personal diary entries that I imagine will have more readers than this specific Substack post at some point in the future, given that my next of kin may read them after I die. I could put anything I want here and be more confident that nobody will ever read it than almost anywhere else. I could list every embarrassing thing that ever happened to me, I could list out sexual interests, I could list out which TV commercial actresses I have crushes on, and I would be confident that nobody would ever read them. I like the woman from that AT&T ad who says like “an animalistic primal scream that devolves to full-on sobbing” when her network cuts out of the football game. Not because of that line I just like her voice and the way she delivers that line and think she’s attractive. Of course she is everybody in TV commercials is attractive. Anyway. I don’t even need to do the Substack. I found a way to post to Twitter and send e-mails directly through dlvr.it rather than running my Substack through dlvr.it. But I like Substack. I like the way it’s set up. I’m gonna keep doing Substack. Eventually I’ll have other stuff to put here that isn’t just links from the site. I promise. I am constantly working on videos and other things, I just fuuuucking suck at finishing things nowadays for some reason.