NFL Lineal Title

A new set of college football rankings for us to play with!

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That feeling is in the air… it’s college football time again, and with it comes the return of all-out obsessive coverage on Da Blog. Both lineal titles (college and NFL) have been belatedly updated, including the new 2009 Boise State title and Super Bowl XLIV title. (I’ll have a post on the new holder of 2006 Boise State coming soon.) Although my Da Blog Poll came out to two votes to keep the College Football Schedule to one to junk it, I’m getting rid of it anyway. I need all the free time I can get to work on other things, and along with the College Football Rankings, starting Week 3 I’ll be premiering a new college football concept that has a lot more reason to premiere at the point any two teams can be connected to one another through a series of games… and one that could prove to be a lot more time-consuming than the Schedule ever was.

I started thinking about this with regards to combat sports like boxing and MMA, which I may extend this concept to eventually. If any sport has a more confusing title situation than college football, it’s those two (and horse racing), with all the different weight classes, not to mention all the different sanctioning bodies in the former. But for all the confusion over who the champ is, how the champ is determined is fairly straightforward: to be the man, you have to beat the man. So long as the champion does not lose, that person will remain the champion. This is taken to the point where lists of rankings will actually separate out the champion from the ranked fighters. No matter how strong a record you may rack up, to be the man, you have to beat the man. The championship system in combat sports is predicated on the notion that the result of a single fight is representative of which fighter is better overall. The same principle should be in play for ranking fighters below the champion.

Now, in what other sport is this the case? I don’t just ask this rhetorical question because I already created the college football lineal title on the same notion. You regularly hear the argument that Team A is better than Team B because Team A beat Team B, even if it was by one point in overtime at home. In a sense, this is the philosophy behind the BCS Title Game, as well as, to a lesser extent, the Super Bowl. (In most other sports a series of games determines the champion, removing some of the uncertainty and ambiguity of a single game.) You take what you think is the top two teams, pit them against each other, and the winner is the champion, as well as considered “better”.  As I pointed out last year, 2005 USC may well have been as good as ESPN said they were when they infamously started comparing the Trojans to all the great teams of the past, but we take it as given that Texas was the better team, because they beat USC. And BCS arguments are regularly settled by comparing whether one of the teams under discussion beat the other.

So I’m introducing what I call the line-of-sight rankings, to bring if not objectivity, at least consistency to the criteria we already use to argue about college football. Every team is situated below all the teams it lost to and above all the teams it beat. Obviously, there will be contradictions in the rankings, and in those cases we’ll have to throw out some games. We’ll determine what games to throw out in this order:

  • If two or more different contradictions can be resolved by throwing out a single game, throw out that game. Throw out the game that resolves the most contradictions, except that if a game is the most recent game for at least one team, it is considered to resolve one fewer contradiction than it actually does.
  • Otherwise, always eliminate home-team victories before neutral-site games, and neutral-site games before road-team victories.
  • Among games of similar siting, for every full 10 points of the margin of victory, add one to the week number. Then eliminate the game with the lowest week number, but do not eliminate a team’s most recent game. In event of a tie, eliminate the game with the smaller margin of victory. If there is still a tie, add the total number of losses for the winning team to the total number of wins by the losing team, and eliminate the game where that number is higher. If there is still a tie, remove the prohibition on eliminating a team’s most recent game, and if that does not help, subtract the losing team’s C Rating from the winning team’s C Rating, and eliminate the game where that number is lower.

Because every team doesn’t play every other team in college football, there will still be ambiguity in the rankings. If a team’s worst relevant loss is to the team, and their best relevant win is to the team, where between those two numbers is the team itself ranked? I settle these situations as follows:

  • If there is a “pod” of only one team as described above, including undefeated teams, rank the team directly ahead of the best team beaten in a relevant win. Winless teams are ranked directly behind their worst relevant loss. The team in question will have the rank of their worst relevant loss in parenthesis or, if undefeated in relevant games but not , have their entry boldfaced.
  • If there are two or more “pods” of multiple teams each that can be ranked a certain way between any two teams (or at the top or bottom of the rankings), or if there are two individual teams that can be ranked between another two teams but whose ranking vis-a-vis one another is unclear, break them up and rank them separately, within their own pods. Each team’s rank is listed as their best possible ranking except at the top of the rankings, when it is their worst possible ranking. In the case of the individual teams, they are listed as tied and in C Rating order unless one has a lineal title.

I’ll whip out the first rankings Week 3, when they become meaningful, and we’ll see how they play themselves out over the course of the season, and how much work they add to my already heavy workload.

Not that they care about this, but…

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This is what NBC had in mind when they picked up the new Sunday Night Football contract. NBC hasn’t always gotten the biggest games, and they typically only get them when their importance comes before the schedule is announced, like the opener at Cowboys Stadium.

But not only is Cowboys-Eagles now the game of the week as a battle for the division lead in the superstar NFC East and possibly the chance to call yourself the third-best team in the NFC as superstar quarterbacks Tony Romo and Donovan McNabb square off…

…the NFL Lineal Title will be on the line as well.

Hmm. Speaking of Sunday Night, I should be doing the Flex Schedule Watch soon…

Three of… well, the more interesting games of the weekend

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Interestingly, both of my lineal title games are among the more interesting games in college football this coming weekend. Florida will be facing Georgia, while USC plays Oregon in what could be an effective Pac-10 title game, even if it has minimal national title implications.

In the NFL, if, as I’ve heard, we’re now going to start seeing Miles Austin double-covered, will that mean Roy Williams will now have a chance to show Jerry Jones didn’t completely waste his money on him? (Yeah right, like the stinky Seahawks will have any effect on them.)

Now that we’ve completely buried the sport of football, let’s talk some football!

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I’ve updated the lineal titles on the site, and if Jerry Jones cared about a piece of complete wankery only I care about, he’d be loving the Falcons win over the Bears. For the first time, the lineal title will be defended in The New Greatest Stadium in the History of History, aka Jerryworld, aka Cowboy Stadium.

I’m aiming for CFB rankings Tuesday, CFB schedule Wednesday, SNF Flex Sked Thursday, and RID Friday. I think this year I’m pretty much committed to doing the SNF Flex Sked Watch on Thursday at least through the end of college football season.

The October of Bye Weeks

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Florida had a bye this week.

The Bears have a bye this coming week, after which they play the Falcons, who had a bye this past week.

Oregon doesn’t have a bye this week but does have one next week.

And the lineal title updates are probably among the worst, most boring posts I make all week if not all year. I’d roll them up with the rankings if that worked for the NFL title, and I’d rather not contaminate the SNF watch with that sort of wankery. (That the Bears blew out a team as boring and mediocre as the Lions doesn’t help.) I’m considering moving notices of lineal title updates almost entirely to Twitter.

Umm… if you believe the hype, Florida-LSU is the best hope for a Princeton-Yale title change until the SEC Championship Game?

Some idle football thoughts

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What does losing Tim Tebow really mean for the Gators considering what they did to Kentucky regardless? What does Oregon’s win over Cal mean for how good Boise State really is and how good the Ducks could have been if LeGarrette Blount hadn’t become me a few years ago? What does it mean that the Bears could very easily be 3-1 after the game with the Lions? What does it mean that a Lions team that just picked up its first win in over a year could hold the NFL Lineal Title a week later?

Well, actually, very little. But lineal title wankery isn’t the only thing I do involving the NFL. Tune in after the close of games for one of the earliest traffic drivers to my blog back in 2007, the Sunday Night Football Flexible Scheduling Watch, my attempt to determine which games are moving to primetime in the last eight weeks of the season.

Henceforth, my weekly schedule, sports-wise, is likely to be something along the lines of: college football rankings Monday or Tuesday, flex scheduling watch Monday through Wednesday, and college football schedule Tuesday through Thursday. As for this week, expect the college football rankings and schedule sometime over the next two days.

This Week In Lineal Titles

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What’s more fun than having Final Four-style brackets for everything? Having boxing-style heavyweight champions for everything! Hence, my college football and NFL lineal titles, and this was a surprisingly eventful week for them.

Florida was the only champion to hold on to its title this week, although it came away with a narrow escape against Tennessee that suggests they may not be as dominant as everyone thinks. This week they go on the road to play a Kentucky team that, while not Top 25, seems to generally be considered better at this point.

I ended last season thinking the 2006 Boise State title was a “mid-major” title, to counteract Princeton-Yale’s BCS-team ownership, but a look at its actual history shows a lot of Pac-10 teams holding it. Oregon’s upset of Utah puts the title in the hands of a team that lost perhaps its best player to an outburst following an embarrassing loss to the title’s namesake. Now Cal comes to Autzen Stadium for a game that, with the USC loss, could have Rose Bowl implications.

How about Da Bears pulling off a last-second win over the Steelers? I doubt many people thought the defending Super Bowl champions would lose this early in the season, especially with the Bears losing Brian Urlacher. Now maybe the Vikings have a rougher road to the NFC North than a lot of people thought. Now they go to Seattle to take on a Seahawks squad that’s ailing and reeling. Yes, that’s my hometown team, folks. Hey, remember when the Seahawks were actually in the Super Bowl?

These changes have all been duly noted, and I’m thinking the first edition of my college football rankings will come out tomorrow.

Three Questions for Three Football Games This Week

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The Pittsburgh Steelers eked out a win in a hard-fought game against the Titans in the NFL’s Kickoff Game, but lost Troy Polamalu for several weeks; in a battle of defenses against the Bears this week, how far back could that set the Steelers?

Florida showed it could knock around an FBS team the same way they could knock around an FCS team. Now, what about a BCS team? They take on Tennessee in the Picking A Fight With Urban Meyer Bowl.

It took until the fourth quarter for Utah to pull away from San Jose State – is that cause for concern, especially with BYU wowing the nation? With Oregon coming off a win, will a trip to Autzen Stadium treat the Utes as kindly as it did Boise State last year?

All three of those teams hold one of my football lineal titles, and will be defending them this week. The requisite categories on my web site have now been updated.

The closest I’m going to come to an NFL season preview

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I mentioned my college football lineal titles last week and again in today’s Part I on the college football playoff debate. Well, I’ve also exhaustively researched an NFL lineal title. The NFL lineal title only splits when the current title holder doesn’t make the playoffs, and with the NFL’s balanced schedule, splits are rare. The Steelers are the only holder of an NFL Lineal Title, and I’ll keep track of it from here.

Also, the college football titles are completely updated with the new challenges for Florida and Utah.

Quick thoughts on the Super Bowl

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  • If I were putting together NBC’s opening sequence, I would have made a few more changes to the opening song. For example, instead of “waiting all day”, how about “waiting all year”? And how can you pass up the fact that “forty-three” rhymes with “NBC” and so could have been inserted into the song with few other changes? You won’t get anything like this until Super Bowl 70!
  • I hate to disagree with Roger Goodell, but this game did not top last year’s game. This game does have the advantage over Super Bowl XLII, and XXXVIII, that the first half was not boring as hell. But while this game did produce some landmark, all-time Super Bowl plays, those individual marks can’t really compare with a great game – this game was just like any other Super Bowl from a pre-game angle standpoint, unlike XLII, and the Cinderella team didn’t win, which hurts its standing – in fact I was rooting for Pittsburgh to pull out the win just because it would have been too bizarre otherwise. There are in fact some similarities with XXXVIII, another game people wondered about being the best Super Bowl ever. One of these days I need to go over the game film, or at least the NFL Films distillations, or even compact game stories, of every Super Bowl and rank the greatest ever. FSN’s “The Sports List” did a ranking probably around the time of XL, maybe even before XXXVIII. Obviously, that list needs a serious update.
  • Is it too early to start talking about Ben Roethlisberger’s Hall of Fame credentials? Remember, in the lead-up to the Super Bowl people were talking about Kurt Warner’s Hall of Fame credentials now that he had reached three Super Bowls with two different teams. Now Roethlisberger has been to one fewer Super Bowl and won two, becoming just the tenth QB in NFL history to do so, and not completely throwing up in the second. Not to mention his leadership in the regular season. If there’s a knock against him it’s that he’s leading a team composed of a bunch of parts that might win Super Bowls without him, but then again that was the knock against Tom Brady for a while as well. If he so far as makes one more Super Bowl, is he a shoo-in for the Hall? And is it possible that his final drive in this game, which had Steve Young positively salivating on ESPN’s NFL Primetime, is the one that puts him in the Hall?
  • Speaking of ESPN, and lists, about your “Top 10” Super Bowl plays: Your own analysts, who clamored for Manning-to-Tyree to beat out Roethlisberger-to-Holmes for , are correct. What you should have done was rank the Harrison INT return significantly further back, in the middle or even near the back, since it was one of those sideshow gimmicky plays that come out of the blue every once in a while in the Super Bowl. By ranking it , you forced the Holmes play to to avoid consecutive plays from the same game. Probably the main reason you rated the Holmes play was because it actually scored the game-winning TD, but it arguably makes Manning-to-Tyree greater that it attained such greatness without actually scoring. (Incidentially, initially I rendered “Holmes” as “Burress”. What does that tell you?)
  • Am I the only one who noticed that the clock briefly stopped at two minutes left in the game when Roethlisberger barely got a play off, then started again as the clock operator realized there was a play going on, and the discrepancy was never corrected? How might that have influenced Arizona’s final drive? The game-ending fumble would have only occured with two seconds or so left on the clock! You think Arizona would be working a bit quicker? And am I the only one who thinks that on the play to the 5 on Pittsburgh’s final drive, the main reason the Steelers called a timeout was that the receiver (I think it was Holmes) was a little lazy getting back to the line of scrimmage, as though he didn’t quite realize the situation? The Steelers might have needed that timeout to set up a field goal with a few seconds left on the clock if the Cardinals had been able to get a stop. I think there was one other “Am I the only one who noticed that” in there, but damned if I can remember it now.

I have plenty to say about the ads in a later post, where I hope to hand out awards for the ads, and some comments on NBC’s modified banner for the game, which is also an opportunity to talk about ESPN’s new tennis banner it broke out at the Aussie Open. There were a LOT of great ads in the second half of this game. Lineal titles updated for the offseason.