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bursday, October
SPORTS
THE battalion
3B
Thursday, October 31, 2002
BCS facing challenge as several
teams undefeated this season
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(AP)-That sure didn’t take long.
The BCS trotted out just its second poll of the
season earlier this week, but the man-vs.-machine
debate is already at a full-throated roar.
Most people wait until the end of the season to
crank up the volume because by then, the number
of teams getting hosed has been trimmed to a
manageable few.
What’s given the debate more immediacy is
it more big-time programs are unbeaten some
iwo months into the season — the largest number
...21 years — and as many as five legitimate title
contenders could hit the tape with perfect records.
What’s made it impossible to ignore is that
Notre Dame, college football’s lightning rod, has
landed squarely in the middle of that pack.
This past Saturday, the Fighting Irish ventured
oDoak Campbell Stadium, a very hostile envi
ronment, and punished what was supposed to be a
good Florida State team.
How good does that make Notre Dame?
Everybody has an opinion. This was FSU
coach Bobby Bowden's: “They kept us bumfuz-
zled all day.”
Turns out the Seminoles weren’t the only ones
t bumfuzzled.
For some reason, the coaches who vote in the
USAToday-ESPN poll looked at ND 34, FSU 24
and decided to leave the Fighting Irish exactly
where they were Saturday morning, at No. 6. The
writers and broadcasters who vote in The
Associated Press poll were impressed enough to
reshuffle the deck, moving them up two places to
’’). 4.
That Purrs 1 Disagreements between the humans who vote
s 3-young adultsitra in the AP and coaches polls are nothing new.
399 The CatsOrt They’ve been going on for decades; that’s why the
national championship came to be called a “myth
ical” title in the first place.
But most of the guesswork was supposed to be
taken out of the process five seasons ago, with the
advent of the BCS, or Bowl Championship Series.
There isn’t room here to go into the intricacies
of the latest BCS formula, but the simplified ver
sion is this:
Each team’s total in the rankings is determined
by four components — the average of the two
polls; the average of seven computers (worst score
thrown out); number of losses; and strength c
ided asap lor 2tc schedule. Bonus points are subtracted for “quali
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jy wins” over schools ranked in the BCS Top 10
tit doesn’t apply in all cases.
Finally, the teams with the two lowest scores a
the end of the season are matched in the nationa
dw/npionship game, this time at the Fiesta Bow
on Jan. 3.
After being put through the BCS ringer, the
Fighting Irish came out of the weekend in exactly
the same place they began it, ranked No. 3.
The strong move in the media poll trimmed a
full point from Notre Dame’s BCS poll average,
but the computers put some of it back on. A week
after ranking first in four of the seven BCS com
puter systems, the Fighting Irish managed to snag
only two.
“People see Notre Dame rising in the polls at
the same time they’re slipping in the computers
and you can almost hear them thinking, ’Stupid
humans,’” Andrew Bagnato of the Chicago
Tribune said.
“On top of that, half the fans think we’re rabid,
pro-Notre Dame and half think we’re hopelessly
biased against the school. The truth,” he said, “is
if you’re doing the job right, it takes too much
effort to be biased.”
The simple fact is that you only learn so much
about a team without watching them play. No
team is the same in November as it was in
September. Injuries crop up and roles change.
All the other factors in a long college season,
from margin of victory to the timing of a loss to
the way a team looks heading into the fourth quar
ter of a tough game on the road, are open to inter
pretation.
The suits in charge of the BCS would have you
believe otherwise.
One of the computer operators-for-hire last
year boasted, “I don’t have to watch a minute of
football. That’s the whole point of having an
objective system. I could be dead and gone and it
wouldn’t matter.”
That kind of thinking is why the BCS rankings
have produced the wrong championship game
matchup the past two seasons. The number of
unbeatens means the odds on a making it three in
a row grow more daunting with each passing
week.
That kind of suspense is exactly what makes
the BCS the smashing success it’s become. Fans
of every team love complaining about injustices,
and never more than when a solution exists — a
playoff system — and yet remains out of reach.
But this year, the BCS is treading on some dan
gerous turf. Oklahoma, Notre Dame and defend
ing national champion Miami — currently No. 1
in both polls — could all wind up undefeated and
one would get squeezed out of the title game.
“The argument for the BCS is that computers
don’t have biases,” Bagnato said. “But let Notre
Dame or Miami miss out and a lot of people
would suddenly want to know exactly who was
programming them.”
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No person above the law
I want government accountability, but I also promise the following:
When Elected I will:
1. Make it possible for every citizen to
afford privately purchased health care
by eliminating the IRS and using the
savings to pay for private health care.
2. Use the surplus created by changing to
a national sales tax to guarantee to each
citizen prescription drug benefits.
3. Fully protect Social Security and set up
a companion program that allows each
citizen a tax credit of up to $1000.00 per
month held in government bonds to use
for his retirement after the age 65.
Vote Crawford for U.S. Congress Dist. 31
Not a lawyer, not a judge, he is one of us!
Visit justicelives.com and dnet.org to learn more.
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