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BCS Ramble: The futile art of prediction

Author:   Matt Deatherage  
Posted: 11/20/01; 2:42:50 AM
Topic: BCS Ramble: The futile art of prediction
Msg #: 52 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 51/53
Reads: 3772

Indignation about hopeless officials may be found at the end of this week's ramble.

The latest 2001 BCS Rankings maintain Oklahoma as the #3 team in the nation, but not for lack of trying by the coaches and sportswriters. Oklahoma this week fell to #4 in both polls, adding another 0.50 points to the lower-is-better BCS score. Fortunately for the Sooners, this still leaves the team a full 1.82 points ahead of BCS #4 Florida, which is now #3 in both polls.

Why, you may rightfully ask? Several pundits (including Jerry Palm of CollegeBCS.com) predicted that Texas Tech would in fact beat OU, or that it would be a close game showing how weak the Sooners are. But once again, it was only close in the first half: OU won 30-13 and could have won 37-13 had Bob Stoops deemed it as important as some computer rankings do. (This is one of the real problems with using computer formulas: being ahead by only 17 points, computers would actually have rewarded OU for the poor sportsmanship of running up the score of an already-decided game.) Florida was expected to win its game, and did so -- by that intersting 37-13 score.

The difference? Florida beat Florida State, now ranked #27, an untalented team nothing like last year's national championship contenders, but the poll voters are determined to give Florida State far more than it deserves this year. At 6-4, FSU has lost to Miami, North Carolina, Florida, and North Carolina State (no, really). The Seminoles are one of only five teams with four or more losses to get any poll votes, ranking #27 in both polls. The computers put FSU at 29th, leading to an overall BCS ranking of #27. And yet, the poll voters continue to believe that Florida actually did something by beating FSU, when some of the same voters who expected Oklahoma to lose think the team accomplished nothing by winning. Welcome to the insanity that spawned the BCS in the first place.

See, here's the problem for OU. The team was underrated at the beginning of the year (#4 for returning national champions); the Sporting News even predicted Texas to win the national championship while ranking OU #4. Upon losing to Nebraska, OU only fell to #2 in the BCS rankings, but since then the team has watched its BCS score slowly slide while Miami and Nebraska fly higher. Remember, the basic BCS formula is not really hard:

average poll ranking (4) + average computer ranking (3.33) + one point for each loss (1.0) + strength of schedule ranking (0.80) - any BCS "quality of win" points (1.0 for OU's defeat of #6 Texas in October) = 8.13

What do we learn from this?

  • Every drop of one ranking in one poll translates to an additional 0.5 BCS points. When the writers or coaches go wonky and decide Florida is better for beating FSU than OU is for beating Texas Tech, it costs real points.
  • Since the computer ranking is the average of six computer systems, discarding high and low scores, any individual variance there hurts OU much less. In fact, despite the margin of victory myth, only one two computer rankings put Florida ahead of Oklahoma. One of those was discarded because it was Florida's highest ranking (#2 from the Sagarin ranking).
  • All 117 BCS-eligible teams are ranked in strength of schedule from 1-117, with the BCS "points" basically being 0.04 multiplied by your rank. OU has the 20th strongest schedule now, so the BCS adds only 0.80 points. That ranking will probably fall (and the score go up) after the Oklahoma State game, since OSU is 2-7 and didn't have a strong schedule itself (for pete's sake, they beat Baylor and Louisiana Tech!). That could add as much as half a point, but probably no more.

In other words, the polls still rule. This is why, alas, we have to root for Nebraska over Colorado. Here's the problem. If Colorado beats Nebraska on Friday, Nebraska falls in the polls from #2 -- but no one knows how far. Colorado is #15 in the BCS rankings and is no threat for the championship even if it beats Nebraska, but Colorado is not supposed to beat Nebraska. Oklahoma and Nebraska were #1 and #2 in October, so the losing team -- Oklahoma -- didn't fall far. Nebraska is clearly a good team, and if it loses a close game, it might fall from #2 to, let's say, #4.

Ah, but now that Oklahoma is #4 and has lost to Nebraska, NU might stay ahead of OU in the polls (just as OU has stayed ahead of Texas and Miami stayed ahead of FSU last year). Miami moves to #1, losing at least a point off its BCS score. If Oklahoma falls to #5 in the polls, Nebraska gets two points over OU, offset by one point for its first loss. NU also gets the quality-of-win bonus for beating OU in October, at least 1.3 points as it is now. Nebraska would wind up with something like 8.5 BCS points. Right now, OU has 8.13 points with the Texas win and with a #4 poll position.

If OU falls any more, or if Texas falls too much (like if A&M wins the annual matchup), OU's score goes up. If Colorado beats Nebraska, OU doesn't get the chance to play Nebraska again and get another quality-of-win bonus for beating a good team; Colorado may be ranked as high as #10 but that would give OU only 0.6 points for beating the Buffs in such a theoretical Big XII championship. Falling just one rank in one poll would offset that gain.

In other words, it would be close -- too close for my comfort. OU's strongest chance is to play and beat Nebraska in the Big XII Championship. If OU plays Colorado, the pollsters may like Nebraska so much that OU gets pushed out of the Rose Bowl even as a Big XII Champion. The good news there is that OU would go to the Fiesta Bowl for winning the conference but not finishing #1 or #2. The bad news is that it's not the Rose Bowl.

You also have to ask yourself the serious question: does OU deserve the national championship again if it can't beat Nebraska? I think the Sooners can beat the vegetable peelers on a neutral field, I'm not sure the Peelers can beat the Sooners in the same situation.

Speaking of bowl predictions, Jerry Palm has gone seriously nutty in the Big XII. He now predicts that OU will go to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. He believes Nebraska is headed to the Rose Bowl, so he thinks Nebraska wins out. He thinks OU losing either to OSU or Nebraska puts them out of BCS at-large consideration, so he has Texas going to the Sugar Bowl instead of OU going to one of the big four. The next bowl to get dibs on a Big XII team is the Cotton Bowl, but now Palm believes the Cotton Bowl would pick Colorado instead of Oklahoma. Perhaps that's because Colorado would bring more tourists for longer stays, or because Dallas wouldn't want to host OU against the SEC runner-up. However, I think he's missing a major point. If OU loses the Big XII championship and Florida wins the SEC, picking Oklahoma as an at-large team would create that intensely fascinating OU-Florida match in the Sugar Bowl: Bob Stoops against his mentor Steve Spurrier. OU fans would stay in New Orleans for a while, the game would be great, and have a lot more meaning than Florida-Texas. I'm not ready to say OU would be kept out of the Sugar Bowl in favor of the Steers.

However you view it, OU can't look ahead. OSU plays OU hard every year, keeping the national champions to a 12-7 win in Stillwater last year. There's no such thing as an automatic win over OSU, and Stoops is steeped in tradition enough to know it, which is highly encouraging. And as much as I hate it, Nebraska has to beat Colorado and Texas has to beat the Aggies for OU's BCS score to remain as strong as possible.

On the bright side, it doesn't hurt OU at all if Miami loses. Even if Miami only falls to #2 in the polls, the computers would punish it quite a bit for losing to either Washington (this weekend) or Virginia Tech (next weekend). Miami could still squeak into the Rose Bowl after losing a game, but doing so doesn't hurt OU's position. If Nebraska loses and doesn't get to lose to OU in the championship, it could seriously hurt OU.

Dream scenario: VA Tech beats Miami and OU beats Nebraska on December 1. That rockets OU up in the polls (though maybe not to #1) and in the computers, gives OU a big quality-of-win, and knocks Miami down with no remaining games to rehabilitate itself. That puts OU in the Rose Bowl against an opponent to be named: maybe Miami, maybe Nebraska, maybe Florida. But OU would be the #1 BCS team. That's nice to ponder.

Root against Florida? If you want, but OU-Florida is a game I'd like to see, and Florida only has Tennessee (#7) left, so if Tennessee wins it may enter the top 5. Oregon losing would help clarify the top 5 in OU's favor, but all Oregon has left is Oregon State -- a bedlam game that might be closer than ranks would indicate but where the Ducks are still heavily favored. And Texas needs to win, the classless cows.

During the OU-Texas Tech game, a Texas Tech reciever caught a pass, took three steps, and dropped the pass. An OU defender picked it up, but the officials said it was an incomplete pass, which it was not -- another blown call.

This raised the question for the ABC-TV broadcasters of the previous week's OU-Texas A&M game, in which A&M's only touchdown came from a defensive play. An OU receiver (I don't remember which one) caught a pass and was tackled. The ball came out, an A&M defender picked it up, and ran it in about 20 yards for a touchdown. I was sitting about 30 yards away from the action on field and I thought it was an incomplete pass. I may have been wrong; it seems now that it was a completion but that the ground knocked the ball loose. As every amateur football fan knows, "the ground can't cause a fumble."

It's bad enough that the officials blew this call and gave A&M a touchdown that led to a tie game at halftime. But it wasn't until ABC-TV showed the coach's game film of that play that the truly horrific nature of what happened reached me. Background: The coach's film is taken from the press box and shows the whole field of play, sideline to sideline. According to the NCAA football rules, rule 11-5/Article 2.a, the line judge is positioned on the press box sideline in the neutral zone on normal scrimmage plays (in other words, not kicks).

When the pass play ended and the OU receiver went down, the line judge blew his whistle and ran towards the play from his position on the home sideline, waving his hands above his head to stop the clock, clearly indicating that the play was dead. Even if it was a fumble, and even if A&M had recovered by that point, the ball could not be advanced, but the official's signals indicated that the receiver was down and that there was no fumble. Normal instant replay didn't show this, but the coach's film clearly shows the line judge killing the play.

This is what had the OU coaches so incensed about the play, and now that I see it, they had every right to be. The OU players, closer to the press box sideline, heard the play blown dead and stopped playing. After the A&M defender ran into the end zone, there was an official's conference to determine what happened. Given that the line judge had clearly blown the play dead, whether he intended to or not, there are only two possibilities for what happened in that conference:

  • The line judge told the referee that he had blown the play dead, but the referee chose to allow the A&M player to pick up a dead ball and score with it. If that's what happened, the referee deserves to be fired. Officials do not ignore each other because they feel like it -- a dead ball is a dead ball.
  • The line judge did not tell the referee he blew the play dead because he was embarassed to have blown the whistle inadvertently and cut off a good defensive play for A&M. If that is what happened, the line judge should be dismissed. Referees blow calls and stop plays early sometimes, and the game has to continue with those errors. When players have heard and seen a clear signal that the play is dead, it's dead, whether it should have been killed or not. Those are the rules.

Either way, an inexcusable lapse in Big XII officiating put a touchdown on the scoreboard that shouldn't have been there. It is in no way the fault of either Texas A&M or Oklahoma; the players were just doing what they should do. A Big XII official (either the line judge or the referee) knew the play was dead and allowed a defender to advance the ball for a touchdown after the play was dead. Whichever official decided that does not deserve to referee major college football.

This is hard for me to say, because I've winced for years at continued Sooner fan assertions that the referees are "out to get" OU, an attitude tacitly encouraged by Barry Switzer's long-running "it was someone else's fault that we lost" attitude. By and large, Sooner fans scream for "interference" that is just good defense, complain about assessed penalties that are clearly deserved, and otherwise feel put upon when the players make the mistakes that happen to all teams. This year, even I have to face that the Sooners have been on the wrong end of some key calls, mostly concerning pass receptions: a long Nebraska touchdown when the player's foot was on the sideline; a Texas A&M touchdown on a dead pass play, a fumble recovery against Tech taken away by declaring a completed pass to be an incompletion. And let's not forget Nebraska's game-sealing touchdown on first down, the play after the Sooners stopped the Peelers on third down but got a 15-yard "face mask" penalty for tackling Eric Crouch by his jersey.

Officials are human, they blow calls. These just seem to be pretty big ones. Why can't these guys go work Miami games?


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