Tag: "NCAA football"

Cats and Dogs, Living Together…

Frankly, I blame the Democrats.

Also, given that I’m thus far 2-5, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to blame my Bowl Mania failure on the fact that I misunderstood the instructions.

Oh, Glorious Day!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you 2008 Washington Huskies football:

On Having the Game Pass You By

While watching Penn State destroy Michigan State yesterday, it occurred to me that we aren’t hearing much this year about how Joe Paterno is a coach lost in another era, the “game having passed him by”. It also occurred to me that we would be hearing quite a lot about how Tom Osborne, Don James, Bo Schembechler, and Lou Holtz were being “passed by” if any of them had possessed Joe’s longevity, assuming that the disasters their teams have endured as of late ensued on their watch. Although I suppose that there’s some question as to how much control JoePa still has over the team, the lesson would seem to be that even elite college football teams are subject to cycles of success and failure. The relatively weak performance of Penn State from 2000-2004 is best interpreted as part of such a cycle, rather than as evidence of JoePa’s creeping dementia.

Playoff

Obama deserves to be crowned Jesus if he can pull this off:

I think any sensible person would say that if you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there’s no clear decisive winner that we should be creating a playoff system.

Eight teams. That would be three rounds, to determine a national champion. It would it would add three extra weeks to the season. You could trim back on the regular season. I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So, I’m gonna throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.

Listen Here, Harvard Boy…

I trust that Yglesias is employing what the kids these days call “sarcasm”…

For instance, assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college football game, vandalism increases by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%. We also find evidence that upsets result in larger increases in crime than games that do not produce an upset. For instance, an upset loss at home is associated with a 112% increase in assaults and a 61% increase in vandalism. We discuss these results in the context of psychological theories of fan aggression.

Strange but, it seems, true.

…although you can never be sure with these Ivy League types. Anyway, the study falls firmly within a category I call “establishing the banal in a methodologically rigorous fashion”, which seems to constitute about 85% of basic social science research.