Jumbled college system throws up the chosen four
It’s the sporting administrator’s nightmare — you’re damned if you do and damned for all eternity if you don’t.
College Football in America is a fascinating example of a square peg bulldozing its way into a round hole. There are five major conferences (or leagues) and for the first time ever, there is a final four — semi-finals and a final to decide the overall national champion.
How is this final four decided? Understand first that the paths of these four will ideally never cross and immediately you have your first problem.
Then imagine if the English Premier League and Serie A were promised equal billing in the final analysis. The Champions League might be flawed but at least it offers a fair process, which in theory allows the cream rise to the top.
Student athletes playing football in the US might be in unimaginably good shape but they’re still students and there is a tight window in which they can be permitted to prove themselves.
So the least imperfect option is to have a committee adjudicate the best teams.
So many millions of dollars are at stake that the painstakingly arrived at opinions and analysis of this select band of observers has been the subject of unprecedented scrutiny these past few weeks.
Essentially, a 12-member committee — which, fascinatingly, includes Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State and a key figure during the 2003 invasion of Iraq — had to decide which are the best four college teams
More ancient than its professional counterpart and relatively conservative in comparison, it’s taken a long while and a fistful of dollars for the chiefs of the game to decide that the best team should be decided by a play-off.
It seems remarkable in the land where the play-off is king that America’s second most popular sport could have consistently left so much room for interpretation.
The NFL and the NBA almost invariably enjoy an equitable scenario whereby the best team maintains their dominance through to the final buzzer. That said, notable recent exceptions involving an underdog producing the goods on Super Bowl night have twice elevated the New York Giants above the New England Patriots, in 2008 and 2012.
Meanwhile, if a baseball team has dominated a regular season, you can take it as read that they won’t carry that through to the World Series, when chance and a bit of determination almost always favours whichever team suddenly pops in September and October.
Maybe there’s justice in the old College Football method. What they deal with every year is an expansive landscape of talented teams wherein the best outfits would never play each other when it really matters. That led to a system of rankings which amounted to little more than an argument at a bar but one which had real world consequences.
On Sunday, the seventh rankings meeting of Ms Rice and her cohorts — a table of men, mostly the heads of sports at a variety of educational institutions — decided that Alabama, Oregon, Florida State and Ohio State would have the honour of taking part in this new system which is sure to expand next season.
As usual, television wins, and ratings will be phenomenal. As one observer put it, the gap between the difference between fourth and fifth is more painful than in any other sport. Texas Christian University (TCU) did all they could be expected to and were ranked third going into the weekend. Ohio State probably did a little more, and that’s where the support went.
Meanwhile, a couple of shades clearer was the Major League Soccer win for Robbie Keane and his LA Galaxy. Not a lot more can be said about Keane but it would be wrong to ignore what he has done.
I still think it was the wrong decision for his Republic of Ireland obligations. No amount of success for him in establishing himself as a darling of Southern California will hide the fact that this is a weaker league and he resorted to the obvious temptations two years too early.
He was dropped away to Scotland for tactical reasons but it would have been hard to drop him if he was at a lower rung Premier League club where the defenders he would have been facing would have been that much sharper.
But so would the rain, and there’s not a lot of that where he moved to. His personal and his club aspirations have certainly been satisfied with this success — not to mention his own personal player of the year award. Who can argue with a man who wants to enjoy his profession as much as he can if the opportunity presents itself?
Contact: johnwriordan@gmail.com
Twitter: JohnWRiordan
