the tindog coffeehouse

I just fixed the college football conference realignment mess.

You’re welcome.

Actually, to be fair most of the work was already done. TCU is already set to move the Big East next year, Texas A&M is still hoping to go to the SEC, and today the ACC officially announced that Pitt and Syracuse are moving over from the Big East. The rest is just details.

Under my plan, the six BCS automatic qualifying conferences are reduced to five, each with 14 teams. Yes, I know people keep talking about 16-team superconferences, but my plan gives you six extra teams, and if nothing else, I’m all about extra value.

So here goes:

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How many teams does the Big 12 Conference have to lose before it stops being the Big “12″? And when exactly is it no longer considered “Big”? We may find out pretty soon now that Texas A&M has officially declared they’re packing up their marbles and leaving the Big 12 for a shot at the bottom of the SEC.

The Aggies apparently weren’t too keen on their intrastate rival Longhorns getting their own television network, despite the fact that the Longhorn Network will be available to exactly seven households in America, none of which are in Austin. But logic has never been A&M’s strong suit, so they’ve chosen to abandon 100+ years of tradition and possibly as much as $30 million in exit fees in hopes that the SEC will let them in to their exclusive club. Yeah, good luck with that. Let’s see, how many Big 12 football titles has A&M won? How many BCS games have they gone to? How many National Championships have they won since the rise of the BCS? Zero. And yet they really expect to do better against the likes of Auburn, Florida, Alabama, and LSU?

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On Monday, Ohio State coach and sweater vest aficionado Jim Tressel was forced to resign as a Sports Illustrated exposé revealed that the recent scandal concerning football players trading Buckeye memorabilia for tattoos, money, and possibly drugs actually went much further than originally reported. According to SI, such NCAA violations stretched back all the way to his days as coach at Youngstown State in the mid ’90s. Any time a player violation was exposed, SI argues, Tressel would claim he didn’t know anything about it. Yet the pattern was so widespread and so ingrained into the culture of both schools, that it would be virtually impossible for the head coach to be completely ignorant of them. And emails obtained by The Columbus Dispatch prove that he did at least know about the latest violations concerning quarterback Terrelle Pryor and others but never notified the university or the NCAA.

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Alright, boys and girls. It’s time once again to dust off your NCAA Tournament brackets and pretend to know who will win every single one of the next 67 college basketball games. Odds that you’ll get them all right? About 1 in, well, a lot.

But here’s what I came up with. As always, I highly recommend not taking any of my advice, as I’m almost certainly wrong about 90% of these games. Consider yourself warned.

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Here we go again.

Every year before, during, and after college football season, the anti-BCS crowd (which is legion) trots out to exclaim how evil the Bowl Championship Series is and how only a true playoff system would right its many wrongs. All in the name of fairness, they cry. And I suppose I’m a member of that crowd, having written at length about the current system’s lack of fairness and underlying motive to generate as much money as possible (see here, here, here, here, here, aaand… here).

But I don’t think anyone outside of BCS corporate headquarters really questions the unfair nature of the current bowl system. I mean, all anyone has to do is look at this year’s season to see that using polls and computers to choose a national champion is a joke. Auburn, Oregon, and TCU all finished the regular season undefeated, yet TCU was shut out of a chance to play for the title. Why? Because the voters and computers decided it was so.

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The last four months have just been weird. Ever since I broke my leg in July, things have been off-kilter. Including this blog, I guess. I haven’t been as regular with my blog posts as I’d like to be, but I’m totally fine with that. I don’t need to post something every day or even every week. If you’re really that concerned about my day-to-day happenings, you can follow me on Twitter. Or marry me. Except I’m already married, so that’s probably not an option for most people.

Anyway, I didn’t really have anything in particular to blog about, so I thought I’d throw a bunch of random things into one big post and let you pick out the stuff you’re mildly interested in.

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