Well, I haven’t done one of these in a few weeks, because well, I was too lazy. Some interesting things have happened over the last several weeks, and it’s possible that some of the events of the previous 2-3 weeks might work into the conference rankings for this week.

Here we go…

T1: Big Ten – Although the Big Ten currently only has 3 teams ranked, two of those ranked teams are at #1 and #2 in the nation. You can’t really discount the fact that the Big Ten might screw everyone by playing a repeat game right after the last game of the season. The possibility of a OSU vs. Michigan Championship Game becomes more and more real as the weeks pass, and if that happens, well, there shall be hell and fury as never before seen. I guess it helps that the Big 10 doesn’t have a championship game (join the pack Notre Dame, don’t be so selfish), but the game might as well be the OSU UM game anyway, so it works out nicely.

T1: SEC – The Southeastern Conference currently has 5 teams ranked in the top 25 with all five teams in the top 15. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me. Of all the “one-loss team” lists, Auburn, Arkansas, Florida and Tennessee are usually somewhere in the picture. Of course, the SEC also has the “greatest (insert number of losses here)-loss team to have ever walked the face of the earth” a.k.a. the LSU Tigers. As it stands now, 7 of the 12 teams are bowl eligible, and there is a chance that number could climb as high as 10/12.

3: Big East – For those proponents of the Big East, stating that 3 of the 6 undefeated teams that are left in the country are in the Big East, all I have to say is “who have they played?” Combined, all three teams have faced a total of one (1) ranked team, which was a Miami team that is quite down at the moment. The only other ranked teams that any of these teams face are each other. Does the playing of no ranked teams merit a #3 national ranking? Personally, I don’t think so, and just because #3 is playing #5, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a #3 vs. #5 as both teams have been relatively unchallenged.

An interesting scenario presents itself, that no one thinks can happen: If West Virginia deserves a #2 ranking if they win out, what happens if instead, Rutgers were to win out? Would they be worth the #2 ranking as well? They played through the same 8-team tournament that is the Big East as West Virginia, don’t they deserve the same thing?

T4: Big XII – Texas’ huge comeback against Texas Tech was either a function of Texas being really good by being able to come back, or being a bit too lax by letting Tech get ahead 21 points in the first place. Either way, that was a pretty impressive win on an otherwise pansy ass schedule (obviously excluding Ohio State). The Big XII North brings down the rank of the entire conference. I mean, damn.

T4: Pac 10 – Well, obviously the USC loss hurts the conference’s stance as a world beater, especially when they were beaten by a team called, well, the Beavers. I’ve been defeated by several beavers in my day, but as far as I’m concerned, it was a much more valiant attempt than the Trojans put forth. That’s why for me, Durex all the way.

6: ACC – Even though the ACC is tied with the SEC for number of teams ranked in the top 25, the highest ranked team (Boston College #16) is still lower than the lowest ranked SEC team. The ACC is basically poll-filler material at this point. One can point to the rankings and attribute it to the newfound competitiveness of the conference, but no one’s buying that argument. None of the teams have quite risen to the occasion to be taken seriously, and until someone steps up, they’re going to be the cellar dwellers of the NCAA.

During football season, we’re mainly a football blog, and well, I guess generally we’re mostly a football blog, seeing as how we’re named after the head football coach, but we fully intend to cover some if not all of the college basketball season as well.

A lot has been said about the Spurrier vs. Fulmer game this past weekend, and about how Spurrier was always “zinging” the Vols (I didn’t use the phrase, mainly because I’m not a product of the 50’s). Well, Spurrier is the kind of guy who you hate if he’s against you, but who you love if he’s with you. No doubt Florida fans loved every minute of his little jibs aimed at all of their opponents while he mercilessly beat up on teams that could do nothing to shut him up.

Well, in the basketball scene, none of the coaches ever seem to be as animated or as excitable as Spurrier is to football. That is, until last season. Bruce Pearl has become the Spurrier of college basketball, bringing the media along for the long, sweaty, hoarse ride.

You think this Jacket will stay dry? You sir, are a fool.

Pearl, in all his sweaty goodness has become the new standard bearer for interesting basketball coaches. I say interesting because depending on your perspective, you either love the guy or hate the guy. Tennessee fans love nothing more than seeing Pearl ham it up wearing orange ties, orange jackets, orange suspenders, and probably orange undies (those are no doubt, sweaty too). Fans from other SEC schools however, love to hate the sweaty Coach because well, he invites it, and probably, loves it. And to Spurrier’s Visor, we’ve got Pearl’s Sweaty Jacket (although he has yet to take it off and slam it to the ground).
And for those of you who think this hamming mentality would fit better with a school like say Florida, that is not the case, as he is a Tennessee coach through and through. From the wiki:

During the 1988-1989 basketball season, Pearl, then an assistant coach at Iowa, was at the center of a recruiting scandal involving the University of Illinois. Both Illinois and Iowa were recruiting Deon Thomas, a top high school player from Chicago. Pearl recorded a phone conversation with Thomas without Thomas’ knowledge. In the conversation, Thomas said he had been offered an SUV and cash by Illinois assistant coach Jimmy Collins. Pearl then turned over the tapes to the NCAA, accompanied by a memo describing the events.

He’s like the basketball equivalent of Phil Fulmer. See? Tennessee coach, through and through. (note: Bama fans will hate that last statement)

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The receiving corps has been taking a few hits as of late, with Jayson Swain being a little banged up, and Bret Smith and Robert Meachem getting tired as the season progresses.  When does it become time to bring in some new receivers?  More importantly, what ever happened to Stanley Asumnu?  He was trying out for the team, and was actually given a lot of praise from the other receivers on the team.

We already know (actually, 90% of the people who read this now probably missed one of our first posts ever) why Stanley is staying at UT, but he wants to score on the field too.  Give my man a chance, especially with Ainge overthrowing some of his passes lately, it might serve well to have someone like Asumnu who can get up and snag some of those crazy ass passes out of the air?

Candace, can make you feel like less of a man

Give Stanley a chance, if for no other reason than to make him feel manly around his woman again.  Everyone deserves at least that, and if not, ya know, just let him wear the big pads and the jock.

Well, it’s all hallow’s eve, and it’s time for the weirdos and the creepy dudes to come out of hiding to make their voices heard.  This phenomenon is true no matter how “respectable” someone might seem.  Such is the case at many organizations throughout the country as well as even ESPN is not immune to such tomfoolery.

A writer who shall go unnamed, namely because I can’t be bothered to remember such things that have such little impact on, well, anything, has come out and said it.  Oh yes, he went there.  When I actually tell you where he went, you’ll pull a horizontal head bob with the requisite triple snap with a “ooh no you di’in’t.”  Trust me.  This writer came out and said that the Big East is better than the SEC.

Sacrilege I say! 

How dare he.  It’s like saying that banana’s aren’t the most phallic looking fruit, instead giving the nod to a pear because of it’s “ball shaped area at the base.”  Said columnist actually went on and used the “d” word, saying that a Big East team that went undefeated “deserved” to be in the national championship game more than the SEC Champion (who in my opinion, should get an automatic bid into the National Championship game anyway).

It must be that it’s Halloween.  I mean, all kinds of craziness happens on Halloween, like me buying a 5 pound bag of candy for the kiddies and having not a single little ghost, Paris Hilton, or any members of the Village People coming by, and me being ahem, forced, to eat all the candy myself.

A Wing of Bat
An Eye of Newt
SEC Strength of Schedule
Rendered Moot

Happy Halloween, enjoy the spells.

I’ve been rattling on about the awesomness shittiness interesting aspects of the BCS, and decided I had so much to rant about that I should split it up into a couple different posts. Here’s part two:
The Billingsley Report

Poll Issue: Someone click on this link please. Anyone who has this large an influence in a multi-million dollar juggernaut that is the BCS, should be able to pay a pimply kid 100 bucks to design a website that doesn’t look like my butthole just shat it out on the walls of my toilet. I mean, seriously, it looks like they stole the design scheme from this site. Which I can tell you, is pretty crappy. Issue #2, is that well, they don’t even have the damn week right. Week 11? How about Week 9? Wow, smart. Really smart. Lots of confidence.

Mr. Billingsley tries to justify his rankings along with the circle jerk of other rankings, ripping into the sports media by saying:

This is the 9^th season in the existence of the BCS, an organization in which the great majority of fans recognize is without a doubt a positive participant in college football, light years ahead of the old Bowl system. Say what you will about the formula, but at least acknowledge that matching #1 and #2 team in a championship game is better than watching #1 and #2 play in separate Bowls, which is what college football had from the inception of the Associated Press Poll in 1936 until the BCS in 1998.

Yeah, #1 vs. #2 in who’s opinion? Yours? Nice job ripping into the AP poll which no longer has any say in the process. He goes on to fluff his friends by talking about how awesome they are and about their math backgrounds. His own credentials basically consist of the fact that he has provided “over 1300″ pages of the 1,625-page ESPN College Football Encyclopedia as well as saying “I do hundreds of radio and newspaper interviews a season and I never tire of talking college football.” Nice argument. You wrote a book. Woo. I wrote a book once, it was called BOOBIES! I should be considered an expert on boobs now. Ladies, drop your shirts.
Arbitrary Component: Whereas the aforementioned phrase “computers” is used to imply some sort of impartiality, as it turns out, Mr. Billingsley doesn’t feel that this is so. He goes on to illustrate this via the following example:

I want my poll to “look logical”. In the first week of the season if Florida St. beats #107 No. Illinois, and Ball St. beats #58 Memphis, I don’t want Ball St. ranked ahead of Florida St. just because they both have 1-0 records. That’s not logical. We ALL KNOW Ball St. is not in the same league with Florida St., at least not at this juncture. Let them EARN IT first. Let them prove it over due course of time, then my poll will respond accordingly. That’s what I mean by Season Progression. All of my teams start out with a rank, #1-#117, because they ARE NOT ALL EQUAL. We KNOW THAT from past experience, so why not use that experience to begin with.

Um, okie dokie then. Perhaps you shouldn’t be a “computer” and should replace the Harris Poll.
College Fooball? Meh: Actually, this part of my argument, well, there’s no argument from me. It seems to me that Mr. Billingsley is perhaps the only one of the BCS Computer corps that knows what football actually is, but my issue being that he is lumped in with the so called “impartial” computers. Perhaps he should replace the Harris Poll which no one has ever heard of and of which there is no knowledge of those people involved in the poll.

More after the jump…

(more…)

While not wanting to get too deep into Jon’s BCS topic, I do want to say that I have to be one of the dumbest people alive (nevermind my masters degree in chemistry).  I ventured over to ESPN to get a breakdown of the BCS rankings, and they made absolutely no sense to me.  I understand that there is a set way to calculating the BCS rankings and that there really is no conspiracy against Tennessee, but how is it that a team ranked 8th in the Harris and Coach’s poll (combined to give 2/3 of the weight for the BCS ranking) can end up to be 11th in the BCS?  The computers have an average ranking of Tennessee as 10.  So if 2/3 of the voters say 8 and 1/3 of them say (on average) 10, how exactly is it that we arrive at 11?  Did I miss that lesson in elementary school?

I don’t want to make too much noise about this as I do understand that nothing matters until the end of the regular season, but how messed up is a system where 8+8+10 / 3 = 11?  And I’m not even getting into the fact that UT is ranked lower than Cal (”Nevermind you beat them by 18 points…they weren’t ready - and they called do-over”).

I already know there’s more than a few of you wise-asses out there that’s going to tell me that it’s not the computer average that is figured into determining the BCS ranking and it’s more a measure of how other teams fared in the computers.  Okay, so if it is so much more complicated than that…why bother releasing the average rank of the computer polls?  It seems to me that for Tennessee to be ranked 11, the average computer ranking should have Tennessee at 17.  And why is it that WVU has a human poll average of 3 and a computer average of 13, yet their BCS ranking is 3?  If being unbeaten is more important than the quality of teams you’ve faced, it’s about time we start scheduling in-state rivalries with MTSU (who is ranked higher than Miami in the H&S poll) and Tennessee Tech.

This all apparently makes sense to whatever mathmeticians worked out the BCS formula, but those of us with a bare minimum of a 5th grade education (that’s like seven fifths of the Tennessee population), we’re left scratching our heads.  We should be ranked 8 with a remainder of 2, and I’ll accept nothing else.

People must accept things in life. They must accept accolades when appropriate for good things that happen. Conversely, people must assume responsibility for the things they do wrong. I will do the second of those things right now.

I am responsible for GameDay not coming to Knoxville for the showdown between #13 LSU vs. #8 Tennessee, instead opting to go to the annual barnburner classic, uh, Oklahoma vs. Texas. Oh, not Texas? Weird. Texas A&M? Ooooh. Yeah, totally stupid.

As you might have guessed, the powers that be over at Disney were mad at the mere mention that the Gameday crew might go to a game that is on CBS, and decided to send the boys to College Station.

That’s the official explanation anyway. The real reason? They were mad at me writing about how the Tennessee vs. SC game wasn’t really the premiere game of the week. Sure, Tennessee played, and I was glad they were there to get the Vols some exposure, and I made fun of the non-used theme song, but I didn’t mean it toward the Gameday crew.

There is the possibility (if Tennessee were to pull out a win against the so-called greatest 2-loss team of all time) that Gameday might go to Fayetville next week for the game against Tennessee. Of course, following the vols for 3 weeks would simply burn out the orange sensor on the cameras, and I’m no expert, but I think those things are pretty expensive.

Anyway, back to responsibility. You thought I made fun of Gameday when they went to Columbia? Just wait until this week when I’m done wham blasting the BCS (does that even make sense?), I’m coming for you Gameday.

Gameday: You’re NEXT!