aurorasooner
12/4/2008, 02:51 AM
I hate to say it but this one's from Big 12 country- Denver, and according to his resume he's been a sportswriter forever. I knew there was a reason I didn't take the RMN. I just now saw the article flipping through Google news or I would've pounded him as well, but there's nothing more to be said in the comments section. Kudo's to all the Sooners who hammered this hack. Just embarrassing to see a writer in a major Big 12 city write an article on Big 12 football and not know a damn thing about his subject, and fabricate non-truths about the workings of the BCS system. I'm quoting his column because surely the RMN will pull it because of so many fabricated inaccuracies. However it's been up 2 days.
Bernie Lincicome is a nationally renowned sports columnist who wrote for the Chicago Tribune for 17 years. He now turns his skeptical eye, sharp wit and engaging style to Denver's sports scene. His column appears four times a week.
LINCICOME: Sooners have cyberspace pals
By Bernie Lincicome
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Trying to imagine CU or Air Force or Colorado State in the middle of the annual BCS taffy pull brings this thought. Yes, please.
To be one of the three or four best college football teams in the nation and then to get excluded from the final sorting out is beyond the reality in which the local teams rest. I mean by that, both the front part and last part of the preceding sentence, the including and excluding.
So, it is a little hard to know exactly how Texas or even Texas Tech feels about Oklahoma being their proxy for more marbles than anyone hereabouts plays for.
One does imagine, it being the state of Texas, something along the lines of somebody put a skunk in the chili, and I'm cleaning that up.
This is not the first time computers have favored Oklahoma in football matters, allowing all sorts of suspicions about neutrality of dumb machines, not to insult computers, or . . . wait, yes, to insult computers directly.
Computers put the Sooners in a title game against LSU, even though they lost the '03 Big 12 title game to Kansas State, leaving USC out, and the next year in a three-way tug with USC and Auburn, again the Sooners found friends among the microchips and Auburn has been crying ever since.
As an advocate of human error - I am against instant replay as well as some guy in his bathrobe deciding matters as grave as a national football championship (and I don't mean to imply that Barack Obama, who wants an eight- team playoff, wears a bathrobe or even owns one) - I automatically side with instinct.
Go with your gut, as Mike Shanahan might say, but use a little common sense.
So it is that the human polls went with Texas while the nonhuman side found Oklahoma better as three of the six BCS computers picked the Sooners No. 1. This is not to forget the old computer adage - garbage in, garbage out - and so we have an opponent for Missouri for the Big 12 title and likely for Florida or Alabama, probably Florida, for it all.
The fallacy in all of this is that Texas, you see, beat Oklahoma earlier, the clearest of all tests of who is better. Humans know this; machines do not. Texas barely lost to Texas Tech, on one of the most dramatic game-enders since Doug Flutie was at Boston College. Oklahoma slaughtered Texas Tech. So what?
All three teams finished with one loss, and to pick a Big 12 representative for the conference title game and for what might happen later, the Big 12 relied on the BCS to let it know whom to choose.
Now, this is a little like asking a wind sock for directions, but the BCS is capable of looking up its own armpit, so here we are.
We are letting another football season end because little machines whirr and cough and clatter and come up with the wrong answer. At least, that's what my laptop does, and I've been meaning to speak to our tech people about it.
As Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe said, people are entitled to argue all sides, and he said this without breaking out into giggles because all of this is as free as gossip.
As conclusive as Obama's eight-team playoff might make things, consider not just the loss of controversy and cross- country chatter, otherwise known as publicity, but under such a plan, Texas would still be left out, as would Texas Tech and either Alabama or Florida, considering that only conference champions need apply.
Clearly the reason Oklahoma got the computer edge was because it ran up the score on teams, since most of the computer programs are based on point differential. Oklahoma has won four games scoring in the 60s, another four in the 50s.
Even losing to Texas, OU scored 35. And the Longhorns did not make it into the 60s even once.
Running up the score is an old tactic, and I am not against it per se. One team ought to be able to establish how much better it is than another team. Or, as FSU coach Bobby Bowden once told me, "Son, I can't coach both teams."
Sportsmanship suffers, if it matters, and it should. Piling on is unseemly, but as long as the present system exists, it is how teams separate themselves.
Texas' problem is not that it is not as good as Oklahoma - it already proved it was better - but it was more compassionate. Imagine that.
Link to the article and comments. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/dec/02/lincicome-sooners-have-cyberspace-pals/
Bernie Lincicome is a nationally renowned sports columnist who wrote for the Chicago Tribune for 17 years. He now turns his skeptical eye, sharp wit and engaging style to Denver's sports scene. His column appears four times a week.
LINCICOME: Sooners have cyberspace pals
By Bernie Lincicome
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Trying to imagine CU or Air Force or Colorado State in the middle of the annual BCS taffy pull brings this thought. Yes, please.
To be one of the three or four best college football teams in the nation and then to get excluded from the final sorting out is beyond the reality in which the local teams rest. I mean by that, both the front part and last part of the preceding sentence, the including and excluding.
So, it is a little hard to know exactly how Texas or even Texas Tech feels about Oklahoma being their proxy for more marbles than anyone hereabouts plays for.
One does imagine, it being the state of Texas, something along the lines of somebody put a skunk in the chili, and I'm cleaning that up.
This is not the first time computers have favored Oklahoma in football matters, allowing all sorts of suspicions about neutrality of dumb machines, not to insult computers, or . . . wait, yes, to insult computers directly.
Computers put the Sooners in a title game against LSU, even though they lost the '03 Big 12 title game to Kansas State, leaving USC out, and the next year in a three-way tug with USC and Auburn, again the Sooners found friends among the microchips and Auburn has been crying ever since.
As an advocate of human error - I am against instant replay as well as some guy in his bathrobe deciding matters as grave as a national football championship (and I don't mean to imply that Barack Obama, who wants an eight- team playoff, wears a bathrobe or even owns one) - I automatically side with instinct.
Go with your gut, as Mike Shanahan might say, but use a little common sense.
So it is that the human polls went with Texas while the nonhuman side found Oklahoma better as three of the six BCS computers picked the Sooners No. 1. This is not to forget the old computer adage - garbage in, garbage out - and so we have an opponent for Missouri for the Big 12 title and likely for Florida or Alabama, probably Florida, for it all.
The fallacy in all of this is that Texas, you see, beat Oklahoma earlier, the clearest of all tests of who is better. Humans know this; machines do not. Texas barely lost to Texas Tech, on one of the most dramatic game-enders since Doug Flutie was at Boston College. Oklahoma slaughtered Texas Tech. So what?
All three teams finished with one loss, and to pick a Big 12 representative for the conference title game and for what might happen later, the Big 12 relied on the BCS to let it know whom to choose.
Now, this is a little like asking a wind sock for directions, but the BCS is capable of looking up its own armpit, so here we are.
We are letting another football season end because little machines whirr and cough and clatter and come up with the wrong answer. At least, that's what my laptop does, and I've been meaning to speak to our tech people about it.
As Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe said, people are entitled to argue all sides, and he said this without breaking out into giggles because all of this is as free as gossip.
As conclusive as Obama's eight-team playoff might make things, consider not just the loss of controversy and cross- country chatter, otherwise known as publicity, but under such a plan, Texas would still be left out, as would Texas Tech and either Alabama or Florida, considering that only conference champions need apply.
Clearly the reason Oklahoma got the computer edge was because it ran up the score on teams, since most of the computer programs are based on point differential. Oklahoma has won four games scoring in the 60s, another four in the 50s.
Even losing to Texas, OU scored 35. And the Longhorns did not make it into the 60s even once.
Running up the score is an old tactic, and I am not against it per se. One team ought to be able to establish how much better it is than another team. Or, as FSU coach Bobby Bowden once told me, "Son, I can't coach both teams."
Sportsmanship suffers, if it matters, and it should. Piling on is unseemly, but as long as the present system exists, it is how teams separate themselves.
Texas' problem is not that it is not as good as Oklahoma - it already proved it was better - but it was more compassionate. Imagine that.
Link to the article and comments. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/dec/02/lincicome-sooners-have-cyberspace-pals/