OldTrader/Bill: nice to hear from you...It sounds like you've made a good move over in the transportation segment. Right now I'm out of DELL and all my relatives have sold the stock too...IMO, Michael Dell should look at what happened when the founder returned to Apple and took over as CEO...The very bright MSD should take over DELL again and become FULLY ENGAGED in managing the company...That might give DELL the best chance to re-focus and become a market leader that out-performs for ALL the stakeholders.
-s2/Scott
btw, It's too bad some of the BCS voters didn't have the balls to allow Michigan to have a re-match against Ohio State for the national title...here's an interesting article on the controversy...
Old bowl system beat the BCS
By Michael Rosenberg
Columnist
The Detroit Free Press
Posted on Mon, Dec. 04, 2006
Michigan should face Florida on the field.
No, not in a playoff. Florida should head to the Sugar Bowl as the Southeastern Conference champion. Michigan should go there as the best available at-large team.
Ohio State? The Buckeyes should fly out to the Rose Bowl, as the Big Ten champ, to face Pac-10 champion Southern Cal.
If the Buckeyes beat USC, they would be undisputed national champions. If they lost, the door would be open for the Michigan-Florida winner.
That is how college football worked for a few decades before people decided to look out for No. 1 and only No. 1. Conference champions went to specific bowls - everybody else went to the best bowl they could find.
The sport wasn't perfect. Last year's USC-Texas matchup never would have happened under the old system.
But it was better than the Bowl Championship Series because teams got what they earned, and the system never claimed to be something it wasn't.
The polls? They were just opinions about the games. They didn't determine who played in the games.
There was always debate about who was the best team. That was part of the fun. But since the system was not constructed to produce a single national champion, the national championship was only part of the story.
The BCS was supposed to take the debate out of the system.
Instead, now the debate is the system. And that is the ultimate failure of the BCS.
For all the discussion about Michigan and Florida, let's not pretend this is a slam-dunk choice. If Michigan had just finished an 11-1 season by beating a top-10 Ohio State team, only to get boxed out of the national-title game so 12-1 Florida could have a rematch with, say, Florida State . . . well, Wolverines fans would go nuts, right? So at least admit that Florida has a case.
The problem is not that Florida got the bid. It is how Florida got the bid. Urban Meyer and his PR flacks at CBS convinced enough people that the Wolverines "had their shot" (Meyer's words) and the SEC is the greatest conference ever, and all Michigan had going for it was "style points" (Meyer's words again).
Meyer is a veteran BCS politician. Two years ago, when he coached Utah, he campaigned vigorously (and successfully) for a bid.
"A bunch of those BCS schools are not very good," Meyer told the Tampa Tribune then. "In fact, they're really, really bad. We would wipe those teams out. We would crush them."
It's bad enough that Meyer thinks public universities pay him to talk trash. Worse is his hypocrisy when he coached Utah, Meyer played up his team's margin of victory and ridiculed the big BCS schools. Now that he coaches in the SEC, he says conference strength matters and margin of victory does not.
But the worst part of Meyer's lobbying is that it worked.
Michigan's Lloyd Carr remained silent - he probably should have said something , but I can't imagine him stooping to Meyer's level. (Incidentally, Meyer has irritated Carr before. When Meyer coached at Utah, he had a clause in his contract that enabled him to leave without penalty for Michigan, Ohio State or Notre Dame. Carr said that was a pretty sneaky way for a coach to advertise which jobs he wanted.)
Meyer's campaign worked. And some voters didn't need influencing. Birmingham News columnist Ray Melick put Michigan fourth on his Harris Poll ballot - behind Louisville, of all teams.
His reasoning? Louisville won its conference.
Apparently Melick was really impressed by the third overtime of Saturday's Rutgers-West Virginia game, which clinched the Big East for Louisville.
Melick is entitled to his opinion, however idiotic I may find it. But in 1992, it would have been just an opinion. In 2006, it helps determine the most important bowl matchups.
This is probably all leading to a playoff, which is a shame. With an eight-team playoff, the epic USC-UCLA duel last week would have meant very little. With a four-team playoff, the magnificent Michigan-Ohio State game in Columbus would have been just a fun prelude to the postseason. The beauty of college football is the tension from August to January.
People keep saying they want a better system.
I think we had one.
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© 2006, Detroit Free Press. |
