About six weeks ago my dad developed an esophageal problem on top of that. His surgery to correct it had complications and he ended up doing nine days in ICU and about five weeks total in a hospital bed. Last week he was moved to a skilled nursing facility, but he’s fucked. There’s not much left of him and, even if puts in the work to rehab successfully, he’ll be functional just in time for the cancer to ravage what’s left of him. But throughout this entire summer, my dad has been focused on one thing. I heard him say it explicitly many times: “I just want to be able to make it to the Rice season opener.”

The detailed story of how my dad couldn’t attend the game in person is pretty Hellerian. Basically it was either release my father into my care against medical advice and forfeit any future insurance coverage, or have a physician give medical clearance. Seeing how I’m not independently wealthy and lack basic equipment like the device to operate a feeding tube—my dad is currently on one—my taking him was a non-starter. As for the doctor giving him a medical release, nobody seemed to fully grasp the importance of this game to my father.

If the aim of the medical industrial complex is the care of the sick and the dying then agents at every stop here failed. Some were greater failures than others. Evelyn Huey at Memorial Hermann, fail. Freddie Green at HCR ManorCare, fail. And more than anyone else Dr. Anitha Gowda, complete and utter failure. Dr. Gowda might be the most shit sorry excuse of a professional I’ve ever come across. Most decent human beings in a situation like this would at least have the courtesy to return (or take) a phone call and speak in person with the concerned parties.

Throughout the entire process I couldn’t help but think that if this were a 13-year-old child, people would be bending over backwards to make this happen. But they weren’t. This was just another decaying 70-year-old man, one on whom they all passed the bureaucratic buck.

About 5 pm on Friday afternoon, when it was clear there was no eleventh hour stay of execution phone call coming from the governor, my dad turned to me and said, “They certainly don’t seem to care about your mental health.” I had no choice but to say maybe the saddest six words I ever said to my father: “No, it doesn’t seem they do.”

I cleared out the hospitality room at the nursing facility and at 7 pm rolled my dad in front of the flat screen to watch the game along with my brother. It was a poor substitute, and, as much as my father enjoyed the time with his family, you could read on his face the disappointment that he wasn’t at the stadium. In some ways it was worse than missing the game entirely. It forced him to realize he wasn’t well and might not be getting better.

Rice won. In fact they dismantled SMU 56-27. The Owls are usually on the butt-end of 30-point pastings, but after spotting SMU 13 points, Rice went on an improbable 56 to 7 run. It was nice to watch, but it’s not the same on TV. It just isn’t. And by not being there in person, I will forever feel like I was deprived of the last best memory to share with my father.

Sports are unimportant. Any time something truly monumental happens that interrupts the sports calendar, we get reminded of this. And I agree. Relative to things like war and disasters, sports are a total diversion. But for unimportant shit, man sports provoke the most visceral emotional reactions. For example, I hate Barry Bonds with the white hot intensity of the surface of Sirius and I’ve never even met the fucking guy. And there are only two things in this world that make me cry. One is the ending to <i>Cinema Paradiso</i>. I like to think I’m a tough guy, but that reduces me to a fucking fountain. The other: The Miracle on Ice. A bunch of college kids who had no business being on the ice with that Soviet Red Army team. They had even less business beating them.

In fact my favorite image from all of sports comes from the on-ice postgame celebration. You can see it <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRALJyv86eY”>here</a> at about the 2:41 mark. It’s the Soviet player, he’s kneeling on the ice and, with his arm draped over his stick, staring at the Americans with slackjawed jealousy. He’s not envious because the Americans won. It’s because they are celebrating with such unbridled and awkward joy. He knows that, had the Soviets won, they wouldn’t have celebrated like that. They would have merely shaken hands and skated off the ice after another methodical dismantling of an inferior opponent. You can tell in that two-and-a-half second shot that he long ago forgot what it was to play a game for the simple fucking joy in it.

There are so few moments in life like that, moments of pure, distilled joy. And so many of them for me revolve around sports. It might be kind of sad to admit that, but I’ve never been married and never had kids. So I have sports.

Yeah, it was just a football game my dad wanted to see. It wasn’t even a very good one. From a competitive standpoint it was a blowout. But it was one my dad cared deeply about. One that might have reminded him that life is worth living, that the daily struggle to rehab is worth it, that there are brief emotional respites from all the physical misery that seems to be awaiting him.

So if our healthcare system is going to tell me that sports isn’t therapy, sports isn’t rehab, sports isn’t reason to let someone out of their deathbed to go see a football game, then I’ll tell you our healthcare system is more fucked than I could ever imagine.

I imagine you worry about who or what your trigger happy manager might go off on next, or maybe that the 38-year-old you just traded for will get hurt (may or may not have already have happened). But you shouldn’t trifle over such trivialities.

Instead you should be worried about me because I can control the fate of the Chicago White Sox.

Don’t laugh.

I have picked up three White Sox players this season in my fantasy league and my doing so caused them to start sucking harder and faster than a pornstar facing a penis covered in coke and cash.

Don’t believe me? I have photographic evidence here, here, and here [Okay, link coming]. But that’s me, the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers and I am killing your players.

Exhibit A: In Week 8 (May 19, 2008), I picked up A.J. Pierzynski. I think I had drafted Ivan Rodriguez but failed to account for him being old. So I needed a replacement. Pierzynski was available and was hitting .308 entering the week. When I was done with him six days later—our scoring periods are one week and the South Siders had off that Monday—he was hitting .283 and his OPS had plummeted almost 70 points.

During the time I had him, Pierzynski went 1 for 20. Yes, he hit .050. After I dropped him and he went 4 for his next 10 (.400) and 13 for his next 40 (.325)

Exhibit B: Week 11. Jose Contreras. On straight fantasy points he looks like he did okay. But he was a two start pitcher and almost half of the total—8 of his 16.17—came by virtue of his picking up a quality start. Looking at the pitching numbers it’s less good.Far less good. Contreras went 0-2 with a 6.93 ERA.

Like with A.J., this was a huge drop as, before I acquired him, Contreras was borderline dominant. In his previous 7 appearances he was 4-1 with an ERA of 1.98 and 34Ks in 50 IP. His previous 6 appearances were all quality starts in which he posted a cumulative 1.47 ERA. Then I added him to my roster.

Exhibit C: Mark Buehrle. Again picked up as a two-start pitcher for this week (July something through August 3), Buehrle had also been cruising before donning a LLUA shirt. Going back to June 1, he was 6-2 with a 1.99 ERA in 10 starts with all but one of those being a quality start.

I add him to my roster and he goes 0-2 with an 11.58 ERA. He didn’t make it past the 5th in either outing and gave up 22 hits while allowing more HRs (4) than he had Ks (3). Saturday against the lowly Royals he had his worst outing of the season.

For the week I got less than 1 point from Buerhle. By comparison, a QS in our league is usually worth at least 16 points and up to over 25 (complete game shut outs go for upwards of 35). So, based on his last 10 starts, my minimum expected value from Buehrle this week was 28.8 points (or .9*(16+16)). Again, he didn’t even give me a single point, just fractions thereof.

One is an accident. Two is a trend. Three is metaphysical certainty. And these are the only three Sox I’ve had on my team at any point this season. With a few clicks of the mouse, I can wreck anyone on the South Side.

So, Mr. Williams, pay me. And pay me some serious money. I’m thinking like low seven figures. Or else.

Or else I’l trade Josh Hamilton for Carlos Quentin straight up. I’ll move Tim Lincecum for John Danks. Non-closers have almost no value in our league, so it’s no problem to go grab Linebrink and Dotel. Boom goes the bullpen.

I’m not joking Kenny, my next fantasy moves could see Comisculllar empty by September 1.

Oh, and other GMs in the Central, I’m also open to straight bribes. Basically, I’m now a whore to the highest bidder.

And I’m okay with that because I’ve never had this kind of power before.

Clearly, me neither.

Anyway, most of the reactions were telegraphed with blogs defending blogging, basically claiming that many old guard writers, like Bissinger, were scared or threatened.

Really?

Bissinger is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Friday Night Lights—widely regarded as one of the better sports books ever written—was made into a movie, as was his Vanity Fair account of Stephen Glass’ downfall. Universal Pictures recently optioned the rights to another Vanity Fair piece he did, “Gone With the Wind” about—God help us—Barbaro (appropriate because Bissinger is also a horse fucker). And if his wikipedia page is to be believed, he’s pocketed enough dough to lead a bi-coastal life.

So, what exactly would Bissinger, or any of his ilk, be afraid of? That blogs are going to render him irrelevant and he’ll have no place to ply his trade? Uh, the printing press has been around since the 1400s, blogs for about a decade or so. And I haven’t seen Michael Wilbon pulled from PTI and replaced with “Big Daddy Balls.”

In fact, I agree with many of the old men shaking their typewriter ribbons and shouting, “Hey kids, get off of my media” that many blogs are awful, unreadably so. But I also think that the market solves this problem. Amazingly, people are smart enough to discern bad (and untrustworthy) writing from good (as well as bad TV from good).

And because I can do the same, why the fuck would I want to read Jay Mariotti when there are thousands of more thoughtful and thought-provoking people available with the click of a mouse? I wouldn’t.

I’m not here to defend Bissinger. Instead I’d like to suggest a different interpretation to all this. Maybe Buzz Bissinger is just a dick.

Seriously? Who gets that worked up about writing—and I’m going to guess writing he doesn’t even consume much of (blogs) as he thinks they are “dedicated to cruelty”—to take it out on someone with such vitriol, especially another writer, on TV as Bissinger did on Costas? What? Did he think he was going to extinguish the entire Internet with one stomp of his self-important rhetorical shoe?

But it wasn’t just the TV appearance. Bissinger has been a complete dick in other media. Unfortunately, Exhibit 2 is going to be hard to share with you because, well, it’s been taken down.

There was an audio clip of Bissinger appearing on the Boog Sciambi show on 790 the Ticket in Miami.

I swear, this isn’t shoddy journalism, but the clip that was there on May 1, 2008 is now gone (after having been there for quite some time as the interview was apparently conducted in June of 2007). Anyway, proof that other people saw (or heard it) can be found here, here, here, and here at Fire Joe Morgan where I fist came across it.

[Ed Note: See, I wasn't lying. Either the clip is back or my browser was just being retarded for a while (probably the latter). If the original isn't available above, I archived it here (mp3 link).]

Basically, in the interview Bissinger is talking about an article he wrote for the New York Times Play magazine detailing how pitchers are no longer getting enough innings in the minors before being called up and it’s killing their careers.

Sciambi said, more or less, what’s great about stats is that you can look these things up and tell whether they are valid or not (and if you click on the Fire Joe Morgan link, you’ll see they aren’t and that Bissinger was either being lazy or stupid enough to take Tony LaRussa at this word).

Bissinger first responded by saying something like (paraphrasing) “Well for every study that says one thing there are 14 others that say something else…”

Then when pressed more by Sciambi—because how many innings a pitcher logged in the minors isn’t a “study” so much as a fact—Bissinger went insta-prick, changed the subject and started to badmouth another host who has a show on that station, like he hadn’t progressed beyond a 3rd grade level of debate. Sciambi, somewhat justifiably, hung up on Bissinger at that point.

It’s too bad the clip is gone, because it’s really quality stuff. And it does support the thesis here, namely that Bissinger isn’t scared of blogs so much as he’s just a dick. Now, I’ve never met Bissinger, maybe he’s Mother Theresa and Lady Di all rolled into one (only without two vaginas). But in the only two appearances of him I’ve come across, he’s swung and missed on both, and I think he knows enough about baseball, even without having to look anything up, to figure out that you don’t get too many more strikes than that.

As for Costas’ inability to distinguish posts from comments, that’s another post.

At one point last night my “team”—yes, I realize it’s a fake team playing fake games, but one thing I like about fantasy baseball is that it lets me see some things statistically that I might not otherwise notice—was a fierce 3-24. I think Kotchman got a hit in his last a bat to raise the batting average to .160 (with 8 K’s to boot).

And these aren’t bottom of the order guys. Kotchman is hitting .340 on the season. Rafael Furcal, Josh Hamilton, Matt Holliday, Aramis Ramirez, Connor Jackson, these are all guys hitting about .300 or better. Shit Furcal is hitting .370!

How do so many good hitters uniformly suck so badly on one day, the same day? Well yesterday was getaway day, the last day of the series before the team hops a plane to get to the next city for its next series (although teams on home stands aren’t traveling).

It’s not just that there is travel looming, but getaway day games are often day games after night games. So there is the looming prospect of hitting the road compounded with probably less rest than a player would ideally like. Is that enough to drop batting averages?

It was just one day, and it’s entirely possible that it only seems like it’s happening every week where there is at least one day where hitters don’t hit, but the numbers suggest something might be amiss: Are batters really worse on getaway days?

I’m certain this is something that sabermetricians have already established (or debunked) elsewhere; and I might go look it up after I get done writing this, but I’ve already done the math and don’t want to find I totally wasted my time. Anyway, the total BA for the players in my 10-team league was .252 (or 51-202).

Okay, that doesn’t seem too bad, right. That’s basically 1-4.

Well, it was worse (.237) at one point until the late slugfest in Anaheim (20 hits for Oakland, 30 hits for the 2 teams combined) skewed things upward, but you can’t arbitrarily throw that game out. Although it is worth nothing that it wasn’t a day game after a night game and it featured a pitcher for Anaheim making his first ever start (curiously though he only gave up 3 hits even though he only lasted 2 innings… it was the pen that really got pounded).

Anyway, all of the players on the ten fantasy teams combined hit about .250, that’s not awful. But those same guys on the season are collectively hitting .276 (or 1589-5763). That’s about a 25 point difference.

And it might be a couple of points higher if Dustin Pedroia weren’t 2 for his last 30 (Dick, you’re killing me this week). Again, 25 points doesn’t seem that large does it?

Well consider this: in order for those guys to drop their collective averages 25 points from today, they would have to go 0 for their next 534. That’s just a little over 20 straight hitless games.

Again, I’m sure someone has done a more thorough analysis of this elsewhere, and this is just one day’s worth of data (combined with some vague notion that it seems to be a weekly occurrence).

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just a one-day statistical quirk. It’s not like there was a dearth of offense yesterday. Of the 10 games yesterday, in all but 2 the teams combined for at least 12 hits, and three of the games had more than 20 hits.

Still, 20 hitless games is, technically speaking, a fuckload.

1) Nobody cares about your fantasy team. While in this case “your” means “my,” it’s true for everybody. The only person who cares about your team, who you drafted, and what trades you made, is you. Even the people you might be playing in your head-to-head league don’t care, or they only care inasmuch as you suck that week.

2) I realize there has only been one week played in the MLB season.

But that’s not going to stop from proclaiming that my team might be the worst ever. At least offensively.

Of nine position players, I have only 2 hitting over .300, while 5 of my players are hitting at .200 or worse. That’s right, over half my line-up is below the Mendoza line.

That doesn’t sound that bad for week one, but remember this is fantasy. I’m in a 10-team league, so it’s not like we’re having to load roasters up with Adam Everetts and Chris Burkes.

Here’s what the worst fantasy line-up in the world actually looks like (Name, current BA, (2007 BA), difference):

Travis Hafner .261 (.266) -.005
Aramis Ramirez .211 (.310) -.099
Ivan Rodriguez .200 (.281) -.081
Carl Crawford .167 (.315) -.148
Matt Holliday .143 (.340) -.197
Eric Byrnes .125 (.286) -.161
Placido Polanco .087 (.341) -.254

The lot is collectively batting .135 points below their 2007 averages. That is awful.

Okay, it’s only a partial list as the Dodgers have been downright competent. In fact if my two Dodgers—James Loney .386 (.331) and Rafael Frucal .429 (.270)—continue at anything near those paces, I’ll turn cartwheels naked in October. But for now, they have simply saved me from being embarrassingly bad in the opening week (Actually because of my pitching I still had a chance to pull one of my two match-ups out, but the points I didn’t get because Erik Bedard was scratched from his second start Sunday pretty much killed me).

The best of that bunch (and ‘best’ here meaning ‘worst’) might look like Polanco. But he’s actually put good wood on the stick in most of his at bats. He just can’t hit ‘em where they ain’t. No, Matt Holliday has been the biggest Week 1 bed shitter given his 2007 season. So far Holliday has 7 K’s in 21 AB’s, including a golden sombrero in midweek. That’s Adam Dunn-esque. Actually it’s even a slightly higher clip than Sr. K who averaged just under a 1-in-3 clip in 2007.

Here’s a partial list of people whose better is better than Matt Holiday’s better after week one of the MLB season (nice commercial, moron).

Randy Winn
Carlos Quentin
Adam Jones
Jeff Salazar
Paul McAnulty
Brian Barton
Alfredo Amezaga
Skip Schumaker
Chris Burke
Brett Carroll
Jayson Werth
Gabe Gross
Nyjer Morgan
Mike Morse
Nathan Haynes
Emil Brown

Provided that Adam Jones isn’t the same guy known as Pac Man and who plays in the NFL, that’s 9 guys I’ve never even heard of, and that makes for one shitastic week, Matt.

[Ed. Note: This list is now wrong as I started this post as the Rockies were entering the late innings in their Sunday afternoon tilt against the Diamondbacks. Holliday hit a bottom of the 9th HR to tie the game and make his first week look far less awful. But A) I'm feeling too lazy to change the numbers and B) it doesn't help much as it's too little too late and I still opened 0-2 (and the Rockies still lost.]

Maybe you shouldn’t have been working in the meth lab during the game. You know, take a break. Somebody must have not, otherwise I’m at a loss to explain the following.

Let me be clear that I didn’t actually check the exact time that the Orange Bowl ended, but I’d bet this morning’s yet-to-be eaten breakfast that this comment found my inbox within 15 minutes of the final gun of KU’s 24 – 21 highly unlikely victory over Virginia Tech.

Really, that’s your first impulse? Post a comment on that relatively small blog that claimed Kansas had an easy schedule? You sure you don’t want to find an over-excited and over-served coed? This might be your best chance all year. Nope.

Instead…

I get the following pia.

A new comment on the post #62 “Mark Mangino’s Shape Is Not Funny… Not Unless You Think Round Is Funny” is waiting for your approval
http://kermittheblog.wordpress.com/2007/06/16/mark-manginos-shape-is-not-funny-not-unless-you-think-round-is-funny/Author : GingerTPLC (IP: 24.116.23.18 , 24-116-23-18.cpe.cableone.net)
E-mail : gingerl@essdack.org
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=24.116.23.18
Comment:
Yah, so I’m guessing that this blog is kinda just hot air after KU just won the Orange Bowl tonite and um, ran a 12-1 game?

yah.

Be cautious of your predictions…

Rock Chalk Jayhawk, KAAAAA UUUUUU!

Okay, does all of Kansas score incredibly low in reading comprehension? This is like the 4th time I’ve had to make this clarification. Hopefully I’ve tagged them all so that someone less lazy than I can find them all easily. The fact that Kansas went 12-1 doesn’t mean they didn’t play a cake as fuck schedule. They did.

Even after winning the Orange Bowl, 10 or 11 of their opponents were still weak. Beating Virginia Tech didn’t suddenly make Toledo and FIU daunting opponents. And in conference, they still missed OU, Texas, and, Tech (Okay, so I was horribly wrrong about Nebraska being good, but who wasn’t?). Kansas played 2 quality teams and went 1-1 in those games.

I don’t understand why this is so hard for Kansas to understand.

And I’m not even anti-Kansas. I’m possibly pro-Mangino. Sure I’ve made as much fun as anybody of his ability to warp time with the gravitational pull of his mass, but I’ve also made the argument that UCLA, A&M, Michigan, etc. were fucking nuts for not picking up the phone and calling when they had a head coach opening.

The man took Kansas to a BCS game. What more evidence do you need he can coach? None, for me. So, calm down. And celebrate. Don’t post comments saying I’m a moron. I already know that.

See that? That’s Niklas Bendtner. And he’s white. And the Tottenham defense—cough*oxymoron*cough—has managed to make him look like the Michael Jordan of Denmark (Yes, it’s Engligh football, but Arsenal’s Bendtner is Danish).

Really, has anyone of Danish origin ever gotten that much air?

Answer: Probably not.

Checking the high jump results of every Olympics since the War, not a single Danish person, male or female, has ever sniffed the podium. There have been a couple of Swedes and a Norwegian (and even an American whose name was actually John Rambo) but no Danes. So this is not a country of jumpers we’re talking about. Ski jumpers, maybe, but the shoes on Bendtner’s feet are about 2 meters too short to qualify. And the grass at the Emirates is, well, grass and not snow.

Still there he is. If Spurs midfielder Jamie O’Hara wants to shove his head up Bendtner’s ass, all he has to do is take about half a step forward and wait for gravity to do the rest.

Even better, this is Bendtner’s first touch of the match. Oh, and what you can’t tell from this picture is that the ball ends up in the back of the net. It’s the deciding goal in Gunners’ 2-1 win. So Bendtner spent the previous 75 minutes collecting splinters on his ass—nice Recaro splinters, sure—then needed all of about 20 seconds to make Arsene Wenger look like a genius and make Tottenham look like, well, Tottenham.

Because what you also can’t tell from this picture is that Robbie Keane missed a PK for Spurs just a couple of minutes before Bendtner’s Darrel Griffith impersonation. So Tottenham again snatched zero points from the jaws of three.

Well played, gents. It’s like Martin Jol never left.

Doesn’t one of the sides have to win every now and then for something to be considered a rivalry? Tottenham is working on an 0-fer-20 overall and an 0-fer-14 streak between Highbury and the Emirates.

A friend with a graduate degree in philology assures me that the word “Tottenham” comes from the Middle English as translates roughly as “will never see the Champions League.” I don’t even know what philology is, so I’m more inclined to think that “Tottenham” is English for “Buffalo” and “Bendtner” is Danish for “Watch me get my genitals up to Berbatov’s eye level.”

For all the ephemeral one-day bluster it caused—Timmy Kurkjian is still voting for Bonds and Clemens for the Hall after all—the report itself is amazingly thin.

Well, not in a literal sense. It tips the scales at over 400 pages and it probably wiped out a small section of the rainforest when it set off an armada of company printers upon its afternoon release.

But having actually read the whole thing (What? I’m stuck in Houston) it kind of has that feel of your junior year term paper that you set in courier font just so that the text would make it to a fourth page.

If you haven’t read it, here’s the recap: Clemens, Pettitte, Tejada, Gagne.

And Mitchell, in all of his investigative brilliance, was hand-delivered those names by a couple of guys—former Mets clubhouse employee Kirk Radomski and former Yankee and Blue Jays strength and conditioning coach Brian McNamee—who were being compelled to talk because the feds had gotten to them first.

Yep, $20 million and the only things of interest were dropped into their laps by people with, you know, skills. And it’s not like anyone with any reasonable cognative abilitied wasn’t a little suspicious of most of these guys anyway. Really, a power pitcher gets stronger as he gets older? Oh, totally.

Everything else pretty much came from ‘Game of Shadows’ and Jose Conseco’s ‘Juiced’ book. Just typing ‘Canseco’ into the ‘Find’ field of my PDF yields 105 matches. If I’m Mark Fainaru-Wada, I’m fucking pissed if a Fed Ex full of cash from DLA Piper isn’t sitting on my porch within the next week.

Really, I could have found a few bloggers to put this thing together for a couple cases of beer* and maybe some new curtains to replace the American flag draped over the basement window. And they could have delivered in significantly less time. Throw in a couple of strippers as part of the payment and the press conference for its release wouldn’t have been so epically dull either.

Having actually talked to a couple of the guys working under Mitchell, the quality and depth of the report has a surprise quotient of zero. I think I agreed not to mention the contents of the conversation, but I don’t think I ever agreed to saying that a conversation never took place.

It wasn’t that I had dirt on anyone. I don’t. But it was clear from the five minutes we spent on the phone that these people had no idea how to proceed. The mere fact that they were talking to me was enough to iterate that point. The actual conversation itself, was just a reiteration.

So, hizzah, Bud. You get to put Clemens’ name out there with almost no finger-pointing culpability on your hands.

But I doubt I’ll be buying the MLB Extra Innings Package next year. And I’ll probably pass on tickets to games as well. I’m not put off by the report. Personally, I think all cheats should be thrown out of the game and their records expunged. But that’s a different post.

But if I buy a ticket, I’m sure a few pennies of that has to go back to MLB, and if this is how MLB spends its money, then I am condoning this type of stupidity, if only tacitly.

(*Provided the feds gave the bloggers access to the same guys singing)

It was awesome.

Okay, now you can revert to your Edvard Munch face.

Yes, the BCS has left us with Cheaty McSweatervest vs. Talky McLoudcoach. God what a dream.

That is if your dreams include getting sucker punched in the nuts. But hey, somebody’s gotta live in Columbus.

Really, the BCS has sucked the lifeforce out of me. I can barely make a dick joke when talking about it. Still, I feel compelled to take a couple of jabs at the cocksure kids in Columbus and Red Stick.

Yes, you won the sweepstakes. Do you deserve it? Not really. Not that anybody else did. Save for Hawaii everyone’s got one big strike against them. Some have two.

Here’s the basic argument pro-tOSU: They won their conference and they had only one loss.

And here’s the ridiculously long rebuttal.

First, they played a weak schedule. And that’s putting it generously. The Buckeye’s non-conference schedule was a pansy tour of Ohio as they played Youngstown State (99), Akron (118), and Kent State (132). Those are the Sagarin ratings in parenthesis by the way.

Their marquee non-conference match-up? That would be 4-9 Washington. The Huskies were actually leading that game at half 7-3 and were poised to up the lead on the first possession of the second half when the Buckeyes blocked a 46 yard field goal attempt. Two plays later tOSU hit a 68 yard TD pass, seized all momentum, killed the crowd and cruised to victory. So while it was a relatively easy win on the score sheet, the Buckeyes got all they wanted from a 4-9 team for two and a half quarters.

Yes, the Buckeyes won the Big Ten.

Yeah? And? So?

The Big Ten is the sixth strongest conference by the Sagarin ratings this season, above the Mountain West and below the ACC.

That’s on paper.

On grass, the conference doesn’t have a single signature non-conference win. Maybe the closest to such a thing the conference can point to is a Wisconsin victory over 5-7 Washington State.

Yes, 10 of the 11 teams in the Big Ten are bowl eligible, but those win totals are inflated by those suspect non-conference schedules. Most teams came out of their non-conference schedules either 3-1 or 4-0 meaning they just needed to pick up a couple of conference wins to make it to bowl eligibility. Even Northwestern, which lost to lowly Duke and at home no less, made it to six wins. That’s how weak the Big Ten was this year.

If you need it spelled out more explicitly, here’s are the Big Ten’s non-conference games (wins in bold)

Northwestern: Northeastern, Nevada, Duke, Eastern Michigan
Minnesota: Bowling Green, Miami (OH), Florida Atlantic, North Dakota State
Purdue: Eastern Illinois, Toledo, Central Michigan, Notre Dame
Michigan State: UAB, Bowling Green, Pitt, Notre Dame
Penn State: Temple, Florida International, Buffalo, Notre Dame
Wisconsin: Washington State, UNLV, Citadel, Northern Illinois
Illinois: Missouri, Western Illinois, Syracuse, Ball State
Michigan: Appalachian State, Oregon, Notre Dame, Eastern Michigan
Indiana: Indiana State, Western Michigan, Akron, Ball State
Iowa: Northern Illinois, Syracuse, Iowa State, Western Michigan

That’s more cream puffs than in Charlie Weis’ pantry.

Minnesota at 1-3, and Michigan and Iowa at 2-2 were the only Big Ten schools to not go at least 3-1 non-conference. Michigan suffered the fate of being the first D-1 school to lose to a D-1AA when they got nicked at home by App State. And the entire conference suffered by Notre Dame sucking. But the Irish sucked. That was a 3-9 team that lost back-to-back games to two academies, so beating them wasn’t much of an accomplishment this year.

In fact by the Sagarin ratings the biggest win wasn’t even the Wisco-WSU (62) tilt, but was Michigan State beating Pittsburgh (59). So, it’s actually trading one 5-7 team for another. But just eyeballing it, the average Sagarin rating of all those Big Ten non-conference opponents is easily over 100. Easily.

That is your 2007 Big Ten. And that is what tOSU were the champions of, kind of like Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles. Hey, somebody’s gotta be king of the dipshits.

If you’re a Buckeye homer and you are going to discount the cake schedule and you are going to say that 1 loss necessarily means you are better or more deserving that any 2-loss team (not true), then you should argue that Hawaii belongs in the national championship game.

Follow? You can’t bag on them for the easy schedule; and if 1 is better than 2, then 0 is better than 1.

Finally, you lost your last home game. This should be called the Precious Roy Bitterness Criteria and should auto-disqualify you. Basically the PRBC says you cannot lose your last home game and win a national championship.

Why? Well, it’s a long explanation but basically in 1993 ND finished #2 in the nation behind Florida State. But the two teams had played in the regular season and the #2 Irish had beaten the #1 ‘Noles. How can you possibly rank 1-loss ND behind 1-loss FSU when they played head to head and the Irish won? Basically any pundit with a pen had written, “Well, you can’t lose your last home game and be #1.” There’s a little more to this, but not much. It was crap. But I’m petty and spiteful and can’t let go.

So with their short memories and arbitrary criteria, voters are definitely hypocrites, possibly douchebags, and certainly dicks. And I’m keeping the PRBC as gospel.

So Ohio State, yeah, not as obviously ‘deserving’ as it might seem.

As for LSU, here’s their argument. They won the SEC and, well, that’s about it. They’ve also got a used car salescoach that people seem smitten by. Why I have no idea.

I’m not sure how you beat a 3-loss team by 7 after only scoring one offensive touchdown in the process then suddenly jump from 7 to 2 in one of the polls but this is America where strange voting is becoming a way of life.

Fortunate to beat Alabama. Fortunate to beat Auburn. If the Gators had stopped the Tigers on any one of three or four fourth down conversions that’s a loss. So Les Miles might trot out this “We were undefeated in regulation” mumbo and/or jumbo, but they were also three plays away from being a 5-loss team.

Yeah, yeah. “If, if, if… ” They didn’t lose those games, they won them. And they won their conference. But I would argue that LSU got worse as the season went along.

In its first five games the Tigers average margin of victory was 33.4 points. In its last five? 15.2.

“Well, the beginning of the season is when you play all of those crappy non-conference teams.” Not true in LSU’s case. They opened with a conference game against Mississippi State. And that five game stretch also included run-ins with ranked opponents Virginia Tech and South Carolina.

The stretch of the last five games would be deflated by stronger conference games then, right? Not really, the end of season stretch included non-conference Louisiana Tech and SEC West conference doormat Mississippi.

So yeah, like tOSU, LSU did when their conference and unlike tOSU they won probably the best conference in football, but they were fortunate to play a weak Tennessee team instead of Georgia in the championship game and they looked anything but impressive in doing so.

But if you think LSU is playing the best football of any of the two-loss teams at season’s end: 1) Remember they also lost their last home game, and lost it to a team whose best quarterback was actually a running back. So they should also be auto-DQ’ed by the PRBC. 2) Consider…

USC: Won its last four, all against teams at .500 or better and by a combined score of 116-51.

Georgia: Won its last six, including three to ranked opponents (and the destruction of the defending national champion, Florida) and their rival Georgia Tech.

OU: 7-1 in its last eight and its only loss was a road game when their QB got concussed and had to sit out. They beat their two biggest rivals by a combined 77-41 and handed the #1 team in the nation a three TD defeat in its last game.

LSU finished out by, again, losing its last home game then beating a team that was lucky to beat Vandy. And for all the talk of the mighty SEC, that other team in the championship game, Tennessee, they got handled easily by a 6-6 middling Pac 10 team in Cal.

So yeah USC lost to Stanford and yeah Georgia didn’t win its conference (which by the way is an arbitrary criterion and doesn’t exist as part of the BCS formula for determining the top two teams) and some other team had a bad loss to a weaker team, and some team has a fat coach whose mom is mean, etc.

This post isn’t really about those teams. This is about tOSU and LSU and how if you think they are clearly the two most deserving teams, you are wrong.

Really, just plain ol’ wrong.

Sorry to break it to you, but it’s probably not the first time.

Sorry to break that to you, too. But not as much.

Useless information is after the jump.

Alabama +7 over Auburn

I believe in the South, they call this playing “possum.” Seriously, even their quaintness sounds trashy. Yeah, the Crimson Tide’s loss to one of the Louisianas last week was just a deke. Saban knew the season was done in that they weren’t even going to compete for much beyond a shot at the Seattle Bowl or some shit like that. So he tanks a game. Now Auburn is overconfiden and primed for the upset. Saban beats the rival and he goes from goat back to savior in seven days’ time.

Missouri pick ‘em over Kansas

Did you see Holtz’s pep talk for Kansas? Holy shit that thing was awesome. I was ready to go pick up a gun and start offing people from Missouri (those bastards) and I’m a pacifist. Still, I would have gone broke betting against the Fat Man, but Holtz is 0-2 in Big 12 pep talks, his only two losses. The trend is my friend.

Texas -6 over Texas A&M

This one opened at nine. Yeah, if you get more than seven for the home team in a rivalry game, take it. But I can’t get nine anymore. So six? No. Why? Because Fran is an idiot. Yes, he”s the same idiot that came into Austin last year and won. And he’s got the same main skill guys (Bennett, Lane, Goodson) from that game, but he’s still an idiot. Mack and the Horns just need to burn the crappy A&M secondary a couple of times deep and the Farmers lose playing from behind. But if we’re lucky the Ags keep it close enough so that there are copious sideline shots of Mack doing his “This game is so tight I need to take a shit” pose that he defaults to in a tight spot.

Boise State +3.5 over Hawaii

Sorry, Hawaii. In a cruel twist of fairy tale fate, last year’s Cinderella jams a bunch of glass shards into your unshod foot. What happens to a dream deferred indeed. Yeah, Langston Hughes, bitches.