This and That
Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 09:12AM Holding The Line
Bernard Fernandez of Philly.com thinks the Pac-10 and Big Ten are punting on "reform ideas".
Not all reform is good, and it sounds like he is grouping early 90's conference expansion and conference title games into the "reform" category. Personally, each of those moves struck me as an abomination. They've been good cash-grabs for participating conferences but have driven a huge divide in the game. Non-conference scheduling has been exploited like never before. Conference schedules are diluted. Rankings teams has never been more challenging. Not good.
So here we are years later and the guys who didn't want to play that game are being told they're in the wrong when in fact the inverse is true. Nice job of looking out for the game and retaining perspective, college football media. Oy.
(H/T: The Wiz)
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Reader Comments (5)
What are you talking about?
12
How many conference games are played?
8
How many teams are there in the Big Ten?
11
How many conference games are played?
8
How many teams are in the Pac-10?
10
How many conference games are played?
The full 9 (8 until last year)
The greater the number of teams, the greater the dilution. With the number of conferences with 12 teams growing from 0 in the early 90's to three today, conference schedules are being diluted.
The Big 10 is the only BCS conference with more than 8 teams where the champion doesn't have to play 9 games.
This is why people like myself hate the conference title games. They get used as a prop in a discussion like this (look, a 9th game! For two teams, at least), and then when it suits the argument, it can be used to whine that such and such team or conference wasn't treated fairly in spite of the extra game and apparent conference strength (see Les Miles).
I was reading Baseball Savant's SEC preview ( http://baseballsavant.blogspot.com/2007/07/2007-sec-football-predictions-can-you.html ) last night, and the various schedule permutations for the SEC are ridiculous. Some teams I think will do quite well might end up with much worse records than inferior teams. That isn't good, its just more confusion because in these 12 team leagues there just isn't quite enough of an even mix of games beyond the "Division" slate. The dilution serves to muddy the water and give us an imperfect picture of the quality of football being played out there.
I realize the Big Ten isn't immune to this problem, but they're closer to having it right. And the Pac-10 with its uneven home/road thing gets tricky but its a less diluted conference schedule all things considered.
I realize everyone is in their camps and this argument is old, but the SEC (and all 12-team conferences, I'm not trying to pick on the SEC here) dilution is obvious. Defending it or comparing to the Big Ten ... argh.
And it's not a prop to say that a title game improves dilution. It's a fact. Florida played the next 9 best teams in the SEC last year. They missed the worst 2. The year before, Georgia played 9 other conference teams. 9 conference games is 9 conerence games. Some years the two teams that get missed (for the champions) might be good teams, other years (like Florida last year), the teams missed might be the worst.
To say the Big Ten does a good job of having a balanced schedule really requires a leap of logic. There's no set and equal rotation of teams over several years (think OSU and Michigan won't play every season?). Every year, teams miss 2 others, but there's no real rhyme or reason for it. Sometimes teams play at home against the same opponent in back to back years. Compare that to the 12 team leagues, where over a specific number of years, everyone will play everyone else - in an orderly rotation. Yes, for 12 team leagues sometimes within a season there are unbalanced schedules. But that's the case in the Big Ten every year just as well. And there's no "evening out" over several years in the Big 10.
Here's an anecdote on the Big Ten. From 1984 to 2006, Ohio State didn't win a single undisputed Big Ten title. Even in their National Title year, they shared the Big Ten title (with Iowa, whom they didn't play). Sounds crazy? We all think of Ohio State as being a perennial title contender. That's very true: in fact, they've won 6 shared titles over that time. But for 22 years they didn't win one outright, because there wasn't a full round robin or a title game.
The Big Ten makes little effort at all to ensure the maximum number of teams play one another. A full round robin schedule would improve on what they have, but so would a title game. And most important of all, there would be clear-cut champions. Yes, the Baseball Savant article does display that there's an unbalanced schedule in the SEC - but such has been the case in every conference every year. And that's definitely the case in the Big Ten every bit as much. It's a huge advantage for a team like Wisconsin to miss Ohio State (like they did last year). Iowa misses BOTH Michigan AND Ohio State this year - think that won't affect their final record? How exactly can that happen but the Big Ten is "closer to having it right"?
I suppose there's a philospohical argument over what the goals of a conference should be. I dispute that there was ever a traditional goal of "making certain everyone plays everyone else", because for 99% of the time in college football, that wasn't the case. The raison d'etre for a conference is cost effectiveness. Teams joined conferences for ease in scheduling - to limit the distances they had to travel to play games - and for economic bargaining power. The goal was never requiring balanced scheduling.