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Sunday, December 3, 2006
The BCS blows it again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Michigan has the second-best team in the country, but Florida has had the better season. Michigan stood a better chance of beating Ohio State in Glendale, Ariz., but Florida-OSU represents the better matchup. Does any of this add up?
Of course not.
It’s the BCS.
The BCS was created to ward off a playoff system, created to give the illusion of a legitimate championship game without damaging the sacrosanct bowls. And most every January, that’s what we get — the illusion of legitimacy. We’ll never know if Michigan is actually superior to the Gators, though the belief here is that it is. We’ll know only that Florida swung enough votes by playing on the last Saturday night of the season to outpoll the Wolverines, whose bad fortune it was to have concluded their schedule Nov. 18.
Did Florida deserve to go to Glendale? Unless it finishes undefeated, no team actually “deserves” anything. And even going unbeaten guarantees nothing if you’re not from one of the glamour leagues. Ask Boise State. Why didn’t it get a shot at the Buckeyes? Ask Louisville, which is technically from a BCS league and which finished its season with one-three point road loss, same as Michigan, but finished only sixth in the final BCS standings.
Urban Meyer took much grief for lobbying so hard — the latest round from Lloyd Carr, who coaches Michigan — for his Gators these last two weeks, but Meyer’s lobbying is the key reason Florida jumped above the Wolverines. The “no-rematch” argument was the clincher, even though it seems utterly disingenuous for any Gators coach ever to make that case. The only reason Florida has a mythical national championship to its name is because, 10 years ago, it was granted a bowl rematch with Florida State.
The voters penalized Michigan not because the Wolverines had gotten appreciably worse this last fortnight but because the desire to create a more palatable BCS title game outweighed all else. That’s what happens when voting is involved. Consistency takes a last-minute hike.
This isn’t to say Florida is without compelling merit. It won the nation’s best conference and lost only one game en route. The Gators are a really good team; I just happen to believe Michigan is slightly better. (And I generally give SEC team the benefit of all doubt.) But that’s why the BCS is flawed at its core — it runs on opinion, and reasonable minds can disagree reasonably. The beauty of the NCAA basketball tournament is that opinions play little part in deciding a champion. It all gets worked out on the court.
No matter how hard it’s tweaked, the BCS only gets more tangled every year. On Sunday it was learned that Jim Tressel, who coaches Ohio State, had recused himself from the balloting because he didn’t want to pick his own opponent. As noble as that sounds, Tressel’s self-disenfranchisement surely hurt Michigan: Who’s a better judge of the Wolverines than the last coach to face them? And should a man who has agreed to vote in the coaches’ poll be allowed to pull out just because it becomes politically inconvenient?
We live in a society controlled by politics, which is why we look to sports as our refuge. In sports, the cold reality of the scoreboard carries the day. Except in Division I-A college football, where the regular season ends and the scoreboard gets turned off and clarity disappears.
We’ll never know if Michigan could have taken Ohio State on a neutral field, or if Louisville or even Boise State could have pulled a George Mason in Glendale. We’ll never know because the men who oversee the BCS are more consumed with safeguarding the status quo than with doing what’s right. There needs to be a playoff, but there will never be a playoff.
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Milloy leads, but too late
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Landover, Md. – Maybe Ed Jasper would have discovered ways to pump this much life into a Falcons corpse. Definitely Shawn Jefferson, noted for melting a wall or three with his sizzling tongue. Actually, not since Eugene Robinson (you know, before his little incident prior to the night of that Super Bowl) has this franchise had a leader in its locker room as strikingly effective as Lawyer Milloy.
Thus there is hope for the Falcons in search of the playoffs.
It’s false hope. Despite moving to 6-6 after overcoming a 14-0 deficit in the first quarter Sunday at FedEx Field to steamroll their way to a 24-14 victory over the pitiful Washington Redskins, the Falcons have too many issues to conquer. They range from a coaching staff that has yet to prove it deserves longevity, to a personnel department that has acquired a slew of big-money underachievers (or busts), to huge weaknesses on the offensive line, at wide receiver and in the secondary.
Even so, what remains of the Falcons’ hope wears No. 36, still plays a potent strong safety at 33 and has a habit of matching his actions with his words.
“He lets us know how he feels, and he fires everybody up,” wide receiver Michael Jenkins said. Added linebacker Michael Boley, “He’s constantly out there telling us to keep the energy up, to keep the blood flowing, to stay poised, to stay focused.” Then there was this from Falcons coach Jim Mora, with eyes sparkling while saying the only picture of a player on his office walls is of Ronnie Lott: “The same type of mind-set, mentality, approach to the game that Ronnie had, that made him my favorite player of all time, is what Lawyer has.”
This time, Milloy called a meeting only for players on Saturday night at the team hotel, and then he did all sorts of wonderful things Sunday afternoon to help the Falcons end a four-game losing streak. Mostly, there was his deflected pass to a teammate that became an interception return that helped ignite the Falcons’ comeback. Afterward, while heading to the locker room, Milloy shouted to everybody in general but to his teammates in particular, “Don’t count us out.”
Too late. Courtesy of two brutal losses to NFC South rival New Orleans, the Falcons have dropped more than a few tiebreaking scenarios. As a result, the only way they can assure themselves of a playoff berth is to sweep their way to the end of the regular season, with victories at Tampa and Philadelphia, sandwiched around home victories against Dallas and Carolina. In the highly mediocre NFC, 9-7 might push the Falcons into the postseason, but 10-6 definitely would.
This is for sure: The Falcons players have the opportunity the rest of the way to try to save the jobs of a coaching staff that they claim they relish. Which brings us back to that Saturday night meeting. Milloy requested that coaches and other team officials and personnel leave the room, and he told his teammates that “we are already in the playoffs.” Then he opened the floor for what he called a “positive” discussion on why they were losing to the pathetic likes of Cleveland and Detroit with a roster that has the talent to do much better.
“There’s still a heartbeat with this team, and we know that nobody put us in this position but us, and that we can’t afford to lose any more after using up all of our nine lives,” said Milloy, an 11-year veteran who was acquired before this season after a career that included two trips to the Super Bowl with the New England Patriots. He has been involved with “maybe five or six” of these types of meetings. The last came with the Patriots at the beginning of the 2001 season.
Said Milloy, smiling, “At that point, which was after the second game, the players decided to take over the team, and you know the rest of the story.”
The Patriots won the Super Bowl. Which means what for the Falcons?
Well, not that.
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