Sunday, August 30, 2009

Everybody Misses The Point On Lou Holtz

There's been a lot of buzz on the internet about Lou Holtz's prediction that Notre Dame will play in the BCS Championship Game this season. An example of the video is here (fastforward to around the 1:30 mark). Holtz is getting a ton of attention on the internet for this because it's an example of his epic homer-ism. Notre Dame stinks!... or so people argue. Honestly, I don't care either way: I don't analyze college football games or match-ups on this blog. What I'm amazed at is that the most ridiculous thing that Holtz said in this clip didn't get a single mention on any sports blog I visited:

I've talked many, many, many times about how the Top 25 polls don't rank the 25 best teams. Pollsters follow an arcane formula where teams that win move up and teams that lose move down. Rarely is a thought ever given to whether a team is better or worse than another team. And yet these polls are used as a proxy for team rankings - we rate "upsets" by how high a team was ranked, and we pick favorites and expectations based on these polls. We saw this in college basketball last season when North Carolina spent much of the second half of the year out of the #1 ranking position, despite the fact that absolutely everybody who knew anything about the game knew that they were the best team in the land. I never dropped them from the #1 spot in the BP65 all season because it was obvious to me. I especially enjoyed watching the guys on the ESPN College Gameday say things like "North Carolina is definitely the best team in the nation... but they lost, so they can't be #1".

And so Lou Holtz repeats that here: he even clearly states that he doesn't think Notre Dame is or will be the second best team in the nation. But he argues that they have a horrendously easy schedule and they'll beat all of these bad teams, and so they'll keep moving up the polls each week as they win and teams above them lose, and eventually they'll end up at the #2 spot even though they won't be the second best team in the nation.

Why does this not upset people? Why does nobody notice how silly this is?

The people that we should be upset at are the pollsters: by allowing this to be the case, and by allowing coaches and administrators to understand that this is the case, they encourage easy schedules. Why shouldn't Notre Dame line up a whole bunch of joke opponents when the pollsters will reward them by continuing to move them up in the polls? This is why I've argued for a more computer-based BCS system, to wean college football fans, analysts and pollsters off of the idea that teams should be rewarded for easy schedules. Teams should have to schedule tough teams - and beat them - to prove that they're one of the top two teams in the nation, and not just the two teams that did the best job of beating the flawed system.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I have mixed feelings on this. I completely agree with the philosophy that teams should be rewarded for playing a tough schedule and punished for playing a weak schedule. I believe this is especially true for a team's non-conference schedule, as those are the teams that you chose to play. For a team like Notre Dame who could attract any opponents they wanted for their televised games, it's inexcusable to schedule patsies every year. In essence, they play in the armed forces conference every year, which mean they don't really play BCS level competition.

However, I don't feel this way when it comes to schools from the smaller conferences, because they don't have those choices. A good non-BCS team has real trouble putting together a tough non-conference schedule, and an even tougher time when they are forced to play the good teams that will face them on the road. Teams like Fresno State, Boise State and Utah have no chance at a top bowl unless they start the year with a solid ranking, no matter how good they really are. They can win out and still get stiffed.

I'm not sure how you come up with a system that handles both Utah and Notre Dame fairly. Not without a full blown playoff. And even then you have the issues of who gets in, unless you're starting with 16 or more teams.

Jeff said...

Well Devon, I think that's another issue. I'm not talking about how the postseason should be structured.

What's not a question is that the ranking system is screwed up - we should either start ranking the teams by how good they are, or drop the pretense that this is a ranking system based on team quality and performance and instead admit that we're using a points-based system like the ATP, PGA Tour and NASCAR use.


As for how to actually resolve the national champion once you've got a proper ranking system? That's a really difficult question. This is something I do kind of want to get into at some point... maybe I'll put something together this fall at some point. Definitely can't get too far into it in a post comment...

Jeff said...

Ironically, if you recall, Notre Dame used to schedule insanely tough schedules every year. They were famous for that. It's only over the last 5-10 years that Notre Dame has scheduled patsies - when it became abundantly clear that the current BCS system rewards teams that play easier schedules.