One of your humble Blog Goliard’s personal categories that helps him make sense of the world is: “things that are very good, yet still wildly overrated”.

It can be a tricky category to maintain and explain. When we try to argue that something is wildly overrated, people can automatically presume that we’re saying they’re mediocre or bad. But even excellent things can be overrated and overpraised, and it can skew our perception. Absolutely anything human, from the greatest to the humblest, can be overhyped.

As a big college football fan, my current Exhibit A in this category should come as no surprise. It is none other than Florida’s Tim Tebow.

So it’s time for the coaching carousel to crank up to full speed, as the silly season in college football—full of BCS arguments and regime-change agitation—gets underway.

As the old proverb goes, “A change in rulers is the joy of fools.” Silly season never fails to provide such joy.

Some of the latest rumors surround Tommy Tuberville at Auburn, whose ten-year tenure has seen five SEC West titles; and, from his second year forward, an average of nine wins a season. That’s nothing to sniff at. Yet this season was bad, so some Auburn folks are already in search of greener pastures.

How anyone can be confident that the team would fare better than that with a new coach, however, is beyond me. Especially when no one really knows whether your new hire would be the next Saban or the next Willingham. Heck, it’s hard enough sometimes to figure out how to gauge the guy who’s already in charge of your team.

Consider, Aubies: Not long ago, you were so desperate to keep Coach Tuberville you threw a huge buyout his way; now you’re desperate enough to consider paying it. Did he change that much between then and now? Or, perhaps, have you not seen him clearly on either occasion?

And how well equipped are any of us, really, to evaluate the job that a head coach is doing? It’s not like he’s the one on the field making the plays…or, in many cases, even calling the plays.

Your humble Blog Goliard had hoped that coacholatry was due to fade, but the roaring success so far of the Saban hire in Tuscaloosa has nixed that return to sanity. We’re right back to crediting or blaming everything on the head coach, seeing him as having the power to win national championships or utterly ruin a football program, all on his lonesome.

It’s as naïve as placing the entire credit or blame for the economy on the White House, as if there were a master control panel resembling a 747 right off the Oval Office.

No wonder monarchy seemed the natural and inevitable human condition for so many centuries.

Oh that was wonderful.

Make no mistake about last night. It wasn’t just the usual USC egg-laying against inferior opposition.

No…in the first half, at least, the salient fact was that Oregon State was damn good. (In the third quarter, the two teams we expected to see showed up; but it was too late for the Trojans, especially since they couldn’t keep it up in the fourth.) This war was not lost by USC as much as it was won by Oregon State; and it was won in the trenches. (And thank God for that, since the Beaver secondary absolutely needed consistent pressure on the quarterback to survive.)

Which makes it worse for the Trojans.

There’s some comfort in being able to say “yeah, we didn’t show up to play, it was an ugly and weird contest, we’re clearly the better team but we gave the game away”. It leaves open the possibility that, on most Saturdays, you really are the #1 team in the land. You just couldn’t be bothered to act like it this time; but that shouldn’t happen again, and if it doesn’t, you’re still in the BCS hunt.

It’s a different story when you face an opponent who plays far enough out of their minds that they successfully impersonate a top-10 team for the first 30 minutes—and you’re just plain not up to the challenge that represents. It’s not that you get lazy and stupid and make mistakes and let an incompetent team stay in the game…no, you simply get dominated, on both sides of the ball.

Maybe you’re not as good as you, and everybody else, thought. Even on a good day.

Maybe that titanic Clash in the Coliseum wasn’t what we thought it was at the time—on either side of the ball.

Before that game: It’s #1 versus #5 baby! Early contender for game of the year!

After that game: The #1 team truly is awesome! In retrospect, though, it was more like #1 versus #22 out there, wasn’t it?

After last night: No, what that game in L.A. really was, was #14 blowing out an unranked opponent from a mediocre conference. Retrospective yawn.

Who are most deserving to play for the Mythical National Championship? Ohio State? LSU? Georgia? Oklahoma? Virginia Tech? Hawaii?

The bottom line is, there’s no good answer to the puzzle. Ohio State and LSU are both acceptable choices for a title game, but each has its flaws and either team might come out and lay an egg—and there are plenty of similarly-acceptable pretenders to the throne. This has been a great year of college football for so many reasons, but it is a horrible year to try to crown a national champion.

Division I-A college football is unique in American sport, in that it seeks to give the title to the team that has been the best all year long. For this to work well in a 119-team universe—no matter what permuation of the bowls/BCS system you’re working with—there needs to be a clearly dominant team. (Or, even better, two of them.) This year there was not one.

The problem disappears if you switch to a full-fledged playoff system, but then so does the sport’s character as well. It would no longer be about being the best all year long, but about getting hot and lucky at the right time for the games that really matter.

My team, Georgia, would be the perfect playoff team this year: we’ve finished strong enough to be included in even a 4-team playoff field, and are peaking at exactly the right time. But that’s not how you win a championship in college football. You win it by being the best all year long, and we stunk up the joint against South Carolina and Tennessee. As tempting as it would be to consign those losses to the memory hole, I don’t want college football to become a sport where those losses become irrelevant so long as you get the wild card.

With baseball having sold its soul for a wild card, Division I-A now stands alone. Long may it do so. There are reasons that I watch vastly more college football than NFL football, and the supremacy of the regular season is chief among them.

Your humble Blog Goliard does much of his finest thinking in the shower, and this particular morning his thoughts turned to college football; in particular, to how one might best protect and improve this finest of collegiate sports. The following would be a good start:

1. The first official poll should be held following the third week of games, and no sooner. This would prevent the experts’ pre-season hunches (e.g. that Michigan is a top-5 team) from outweighing games that are actually played in the opening weeks. The need for pre-season speculation and discussion and prediction can still be filled by any number of unofficial polls.

2. No more games between Division I-A and Division I-AA. If you can’t find an opening-day patsy from among the 120 schools in the Division Formerly Known By A Name Everyone Knew, then either your athletic director is outstandingly incompetent, or you are the patsy and should simply get ready to take your medicine.

3. Every conference should adopt the new Pac 10 model of round-robin play. Forget the divisions and championship games—those gewgaws are strictly for professional leagues. Pare down each conference to ten or eleven teams (sorry, Vanderbilt; but I promise you’ll be happier in the ACC in the end) and have every team play every other team every year. That’s kinda the point of having a conference, y’know. And it would still leave two or three Saturdays free each season for traditional rivals, warm-up patsies, and the occasional intersectional adventure.

4. The BCS national championship game may be kept—even though it sometimes prevents the Pac 10 and Big Ten champions from playing in the Rose Bowl as God intended—so long as two rules are adopted. First, if you’re not a conference champion, you can’t be the national champion. (Why does this even have to be said? I mean, talk about your self-evident truths.) Second, since all sensible persons are agreed that the SEC is the strongest conference, the SEC champion must be invited to the championship game every year, unless there are at least two undefeated teams from BCS conferences, and the winner of the SEC is not one of them.

That’ll do for today; more decrees shall be issued anon.

Your humble Blog Goliard has been slacking on his obsessive news-and-politics web reading in recent weeks, and may even manage to be more scarce than usual this season here on his own blog. The reason? Simple. College football has got to be about the most glorious, crazy, funny, gripping distractions ever devised by the mind of man.

I’ve been under the weather this week and am plenty tired and cranky, so that’s about all I have to say about that. Except for: Go Dawgs!

(This week, they’d better go for a thousand yards.)

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.

A sense of disbelieving euphoria still lingers among the Georgia faithful after the big win last Saturday down on the Plains. Amazing, isn’t it, how one game can totally change the look of a football season. But really, this Georgia season has been a close-run thing all along. The team is 7-4 at the moment…but consider how easily it could have swung three games either direction.

Suppose Vanderbilt misses that game-winning field goal with two seconds remaining; that Kentucky’s final game-winning drive is stopped short of the needed touchdown; and that Georgia either a) succeeds in taking the air out of the ball in the second half against Tennessee, and holds on for the win instead of coughing up an incredible 27 points in the fourth quarter, or b) Georgia turns the ball over less than five times against Florida, taking away the touchdown that the Bulldogs handed them at the start of the second half, and adding at least another field goal to their tally. Four plays, going the other way at the exact right time, could well have been enough to boost Georgia to 10-1, preserve their national ranking, and send them back to the SEC Championship game—leaving them one big win in Atlanta away from a BCS bowl, and even inclusion at the fringes of the national championship discussion.

Now suppose, on the other hand, that Martrez Milner drops the touchdown pass with 46 seconds remaining that allowed Georgia to edge past Colorado; that instead of stripping the ball, the Bulldog defense yields those last 20-odd yards to the Bizarro Bulldogs, letting them complete their game-winning drive just like Vanderbilt and Kentucky; and that either: a) Georgia fails to come from behind to beat Ole Miss in Oxford, or b) Brandon Cox decides not to have the worst game of his career last Saturday, and the Bulldogs get shellacked by Auburn as everyone had expected. That would leave Georiga at 4-7, with an inconceivable 2-6 record in SEC play, in a year when Georgia had the weakest possible lineup against the Western division (with LSU, Arkansas, and Alabama off the schedule); and instead of being talked about at the edges of the national championship picture, Georgia would be showing up on the list of doubtful-yet-still-possible coaching changes.

What a weird year. What a string of strange performances. What a puzzling set of outcomes. And how very different the picture looks today than it did a week ago.

But if they didn’t intend for strange things to happen, they would have never made the ball such a funny shape in the first place, would they?

So I was watching a fight last night, and a soccer game broke out…

Yes, I’m talking about the battle royal between Portugal and the Netherlands yesterday. As the perspicacious twohundredpercent notes under the subdued headline “Fight Fight Fight Fight Fight!”, it was awful, shameful, horrid…and vastly entertaining.

For connoisseurs of slow-motion train-wrecks, it was truly Must See TV. My favorite bit was when Univision’s Pablo Ramírez and Jesús Bracamontes jokingly reassured viewers that they weren’t tuned into the wrong channel—that this was not, in fact, the lucha libre over on Galavision, however much it might seem like it at first glance. What a way to finish off the weekend.

I have also been able to stay amused, even during the duller matches, keeping my eyes peeled for lookalikes. The coaches have been especially good fodder for this. Keith Olbermann’s twin somehow wound up coaching Iran; Luiz Felipe Scolari seems to me like a cross between Gene Hackman and Gerald McRaney; and while I can’t put my finger exactly on who Ricardo Lavolpe reminds me of, I’m sure he must have played a villain in one of the second-tier spaghetti westerns.

Yesterday, I was also able to spot among the luchadores a long-lost Osmond brother, going under the name of Cristian Ronaldo; and several World Cup bloggers have already remarked on the resemblance between yesterday’s overworked referee Valentin Ivanov and “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” fixture Ryan Stiles.

Good times, good times.

Oh, and for those of you who care about it, there was some pretty good soccer played here and there too. Though not in the England match. If Sven’s men sneak into the final it’ll be mostly on account of their ability to make opponents, as well as spectators, lose their will to live. And that would be my explanation of why the Ecuadorans showed no sense of urgency whatsoever yesterday despite being behind, even when it got to the 80th minute…or the 85th…or the 88th…

The quality of the 2006 edition of the World Cup has been generally excellent. There have been fine examples of offensive soccer (particularly prized for those of us who remember suffering through Italia ’90); some hard-fought matches full of incident, including even one or two of the scoreless draws; delicious minutes of unbearable tension, such as during the incredible—and bizarre—Australia v. Croatia match last night; and much more.

The quality of the officiating, however, only continues to grow as a concern. For the first week or so of this World Cup, the main worries were the quantity of yellow cards, the refusal to grant penalties even in the most flagrant circumstances, and some iffy performances from linesmen. Worrisome, but at least survivable.

But then things started to get much more bizarre and strange. Even more bookings than before, including some straight-up red cards; hence matches finishing up with only nineteen men on the pitch. A sudden rash of iffy penalties. Goals that went over the line but didn’t count; and offside goals that did.

And then last night, a World Cup first: Three yellow cards for a single player, in the same game. (They’re supposed to be sent off after their second.) That’s about as egregious an error as I can imagine. The reason they call it a “booking”, after all, is that after the referee shows the player the card, he writes it down in his book.

Okay, maybe that referee—one Graham Poll, from England—just has a little trouble reading his own handwriting. But there were four other officials on duty, yet none of them seems to have noticed anything either; or if they did, they didn’t say anything. Including the reserve referee, who had nothing else to do but sit on the sidelines and watch the game on a television monitor.

It’s just flabbergasting. When was the last time a college basketball player was erroneously left in a Final Four game for ten minutes after picking up his fifth foul? Seems inconceivable to me; but then the NCAA has never been run by a Eurocrat.

I suppose the one saving grace in all this is that, most of the time, the officiating insanity has cut both ways. (Though not always when Team USA was on the pitch…but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?) So in that sense, contrary to the headline above, it hasn’t been Super Bowl XL all over again. But it still has to stop.

I have three recommendations for addressing the situation. First, there should be more communication amongst the officials. In American football, the officials always conference before making a decision on a penalty. So why haven’t the World Cup referees been chatting with their colleagues on their little headset thingies before deciding whether to issue a card, or grant a penalty, or such? If nothing else, it would give some of the more hot-headed officials the opportunity to cool off for a second before booking a player for ordinary dissent or some other marginal-yet-visceral insult to their authority.

Second, start seriously considering instant replay. As I mentioned before, there’s already a spare official sitting there watching the game on a monitor. So for the absolutely most critical questions—such as whether a ball went over the goal-line, or whether a goal-scorer was clearly offsides—why not use him? Fans of American football already know, all too well, how instant replay can be fallible in its own right; but it can help if used sparingly and under proper guidelines. With every single goal being so incredibly important in soccer, surely it would be worth the effort to correct even two or three of the worst officiating blunders of each World Cup. Imagine a world where the “Mano de Dios” goal had never counted…

Third, make the referees’ jobs easier by attacking the epidemic of diving, play-acting, protesting players. This is admittedly a tall order; but I have a modest proposal for a first step: A new award, to be given out at every future World Cup, for the player who most valiantly stays on his feet and plays on after receiving the hardest of fouls.

The award should be given a name that evokes machismo, or nobility, or preferably both. I can’t think of anything super-terrific off the top of my head, so for now I’ll just call it the “Tough Man Trophy”. (Hmm…perhaps Ford would be interested in sponsoring it. Do they sell “Built Ford Tough” trucks in Europe? In South America?)

The winner would be given a nice trophy…and a cool €1,000,000. Suppose that would be enough to keep the odd Italian on his feet?

Mmm…now that is a poser…