With the college bowl games still fresh in our memories, and the NFL season coming to its conclusion, some sportswriters and pundits and radio talkers are still beating the drums for a college playoff. One might have thought that the topic was exhausted many weeks ago; or, failing that, one might have thought that witnessing the BCS working to perfection again this year—matching up the one undefeated BCS-conference team with its single strongest possible opponent—might have dampened the enthusiasm of playoff advocates. But some of them are so certain that a playoff system solves everything and proves everything that they soldier on regardless.

It is odd, how playoff advocates talk of “settling it on the field” to produce a “true champion”. Does college football not already settle things on the field, every week? Were Florida this year, Texas last year, USC the year before, not “true champions”? It is curious how some people are such prisoners of the basketball mentality—the mentality that gives us the come-one-come-all NCAA Tournament and NBA Playoffs—that they instinctively discount the regular season, even in a sport which has no post-season save for a constellation of holiday bowl games. They indeed seem offended that we even try to identify the best college football team in the country, based solely on regular-season performance. Their faith tells them that, in any sport, one can only crown a true champion by drawing up brackets, and then awarding the title to whoever manages to be better, or hotter, or cleverer, or luckier, two or three or four times in a row.

But that is not what college football is about. From the earliest days of the sport, it has instead been about which team is the best in the land all season long, from start to finish; and in Division I-A it continues to be so. Ever since Major League Baseball adopted divisional play, it has thus stood as the closest thing we have to pure league play in major American sports. In our day, it serves as a desperately-needed sign of contradiction, as the one bright shining monument standing against the self-evident validity falsely attributed to playoff systems.

And that self-evident validity, that metaphysical certainty that whichever team emerges from the brackets will be the true champion, is false. Forget March Madness, forget the NBA Playoffs, forget the quest for the Stanley Cup: the BCS actually does the best job of any major American sport of selecting the right two teams for the final contest.

It is so fashionable to bash the BCS, and the details of the BCS process itself so closely resemble sausage-making, that this may seem unlikely, may sound fanciful or outlandish. But consider the results. How often does the best team in America play in the BCS title game? Every year so far. How often is that team’s opponent either the second- or third-best team in the land? Every year so far. Can the NFL make the same claim for their last VIII or IX Super Bowls? No…even though the NFL has only half as many teams to choose from as the BCS. Can any other sport claim a comparable record? No. And Major League Baseball deserves special, detailed consideration here, to highlight its current wretchedness compared to the glory that is college football.

Why have fogies (old and young) like myself always scorned the “wild card” in baseball? Because they play 162 games a season, for crying out loud. If that doesn’t prove “on the field” who the best teams are, what possibly could? Yet baseball has decided that a team that won fewer games—out of, again, one hundred sixty-two—than its rival who faced the exact same schedule and won its division, may be admitted to the playoffs nonetheless; and if they have two hot starting pitchers who can carry them to eleven wins out of nineteen postseason games, they will be crowned champions of Major League Baseball, the greatest team in the land. Even though they were not necessarily the best team in their division…over a one hundred and sixty-two game schedule.

That is insanity, beside which even the unloveliest aspects of the BCS ranking system appear as exemplars of logic, right reason, and truth. It is the sort of insanity that spoils the regular season in every other sport, and would in college football too. How could it not? How could anyone devise a playoff system that would, for instance, have made UCLA’s upset of USC this past season still matter? Even in a scanty four-team playoff, USC would have had better-than-even odds of making it in—especially since, in a playoff world, Pete Carroll would not have been going for broke, would have been resting some of his starters for the next round, and the poll voters would have taken account of that. Eight teams or more in the playoff, and the Trojans laugh off the defeat. And that would be a travesty.

Nor is it right that, in the current BCS system, a team can be defeated for its conference title but still turn up in the national championship game. For a team that was second-best in its conference to be declared national champion would be nonsense, pure and simple, and the only possible way to for it make sense would be via the radical devaluation of regular season play that results from the basketball mentality. We have, thus far, been fortunate that such undeserving interlopers have gone down to ignominious defeat in the championship game; but the system needs to be changed to require a conference championship for admittance to the title game in future.

I’m sure that’s more than enough from me on this subject, so I will leave the last word to the legendary Larry Munson, who said the following in his daily radio commentary right after Florida clobbered Ohio State in the BCS title game:

…the trouble-makers–and that includes a hundred people or so–need to shut our mouth and let college football alone. It is so close to perfection it is mind-boggling.

Amen.

I’ve been softening on the issue of capital punishment as of late, but that has done little to dampen my enthusiasm for a plan I came up with a short time ago to deal with spammers, phishers, 419 scammers, and the more malicious breed of hackers. To wit: I propose that a group of wealthy tech people get together to establish, and generously fund, a secret international hit squad tasked with taking down these bad actors, who threaten to make e-mail—and the Internet more broadly—all but unusable.

The proposition may seem somewhat drastic, but one must realize that an increasing proportion of the malefactors operate outside of the tidier and more law-abiding jurisdictions; to this Blog Goliard’s mind, that leaves extrajudicial assassination as the only real option.

And the faint of heart should be consoled by the knowledge that not all of them—not even near all of them—would have to be liquidated. Making an example of a relatively small number of egregious offenders should have a robust deterrent effect on the rest, since most of this behavior proliferates not because the benefits are all that great, but because the costs are nearly non-existent.

Introducing the risk of sudden, violent death would go very far in balancing out the equation.

John Derbyshire over at The Corner takes note of the following passage in the President’s speech last night:

Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria.

He asks, incredulously, “We haven’t been doing this? We haven’t been doing this?”

Exactly. What the Bush Doctrine has lacked from the start is an appreciation for the fine art of the ultimatum, and an understanding of what an act of war really means.

Here’s what I mean. The Bush Doctrine states that if you materially aid terrorists, you are an enemy of the United States. Which means that material aid to terrorists—especially those who have designs on America and its allies—is nothing less than an act of war against the United States.

What happens when you catch an enemy engaging in an act of war against you? At the very least, you use whatever force is necessary, wherever necessary, to stop them. (We haven’t been doing this?)

If they persist, you issue an ultimatum. You demand that they stop, within x number of hours or days, or else you will declare war upon them.

The problem here, though, is that you can’t engage in more than one such war in a generation, if you commit yourself to staying after the war, and teaching the art of living together peacefully in a democracy to a tribal and sectarian population, whose most fervent desires are to kill you and each other (not necessarily in that order). And that’s precisely how today’s American way of war makes the whole Bush Doctrine collapse.

It has long been a pet theory of mine (pet theory #322, if I recall correctly) that people today, especially Baby Boomers, have come to believe that if they do everything perfectly—perfect diet, perfect exercise regimen, perfect use of all safety devices, perfect medical care, perfect precautions taken in response to every scare that comes down the pike—they will not die. Or even grow old and sick and frail. But above all, not die. Because death is a mistake, not part of life.

But last I checked, the mortality rate was still holding steady at 100%. Yes, if you try to live sensibly and make good decisions and take care of yourself, you can increase your odds of having a longer and healthier life, and not going before your time. (Inner peace has physical benefits too, I believe.) But your time will come. As will your parents’, and your children’s, and everyone else’s.

Be sensible, be good to yourself, take good care of those in your charge. Enjoy the time that you have and the moments you spend with loved ones. Know that everything comes to an end, but don’t let that knowledge crush you. Above all, nolite timere: be not afraid.

We take risks, tremendous risks, when we dare to love, to form families, to make babies and welcome them into this world. We have every hope for happiness and joy, but accept that some sorrow is inevitable, and a whole lot of sorrow is quite possible. We take those risks anyway, whether out of love or naïvete or some mixture of the two. We take them because we are human, and because deep down we realize that, regardless of the outcome, our lives would be much poorer without them.

Nolite timere. Be not afraid.