If Ohio State and Michigan play each other on the last day of the season

And Ohio State and Michigan are ranked #1 and #2 when they play, then why isn't that the game to decide the National Champion?

It's the end of the season (because college football shouldn't be played after Thanksgiving, and at least the Big Ten knows that).

It's the #1 and #2 teams against each other, putting it all on the line for the title of best team in the nation.

It's mythical anyway, so why not this game rather than another mythical game two months later?

None of the other options — neither the Big East undefeated that isn't yet nor the one-loss teams that are clearly not as good as whomever beat them already — are as good as Michigan or Ohio State.

So why isn't the national champion going to be crowned on Nov. 18th?

(This is also known as, "How the BCS fucked up college football again.")

Sagarin scares me

In both his ELO-Chess and Predictor ratings, Sagarin has us in the top three -- #3 in the ELO-Chess, #2 in the Predictor. The only team Sagarin thinks we'd lose to is Ohio State. Good thing they're not going to the Rose Bowl.

Even More on Massey (and Weis' complaints)

60 Minutes Charlie was complaining last week that Notre Dame didn't move in the polls despite winning (and were passed by idle Florida); this week, they were leapfrogged by an idle Cal.

Good thing Charlie doesn't know about Massey's comparative rankings, because Cal is #4, according to a consensus of 58 rankings systems.

Notre Dame? #12.

[Note: I don't buy that we're the fourth best team in the country, but I do think we're better than Notre Dame.]

Complicated Permutations

Everyone's been talking about the various ways Cal can get to a bowl game, and which bowl game is most likely. The two most talked about games are the Rose Bowl and the National Championship Game (strictly speaking, not a bowl at all).

However, all the complicated scenarios are entirely too much to think about when the situation is still to easy: win, and we have nothing to worry about. Lose, and we probably deserve the Holiday Bowl.

It's not that tough after all.

Breaking News!

Temple won!

TEMPLE WON!!

28-14 over Bowling Green (4-5).

And now... Stanford has the 2nd longest losing streak in the country, because Temple won!

My other favorite team

Someone else likes Rutgers!

I wouldn't say that they're on the national radar just yet, but there are some indications the team has started to attract boosters outside its own zip code. For instance, the last time they were ranked as high as 16th in the Associated Press poll, college football had only 13 teams. ESPN has snared broadcast rights to a bunch of Rutgers games away from camcorder-crazed players' fathers. Somebody from Sports Illustrated called the athletic director's office looking for directions, or it might just have been a pizza delivery guy who got lost.

In re: next week's game against UCLA

The UCLA game is the Joe Roth Memorial Game.

Mike Silver of Sports Illustrated (formerly of the Daily Cal) interviewed Marshawn Lynch and Robert Jordan last week during Cal's bye, and during the conversation, the Oregon yellow-on-blue uniform came up.

Silver noted, "I think we should go with black-and-gold, like the old California license plate," and Marshawn replied, "That'd be nice. What I really want is to wear those Joe Roth (era, circa 1975) jerseys -- the royal blue with the bear stickers on the helmet."

Jon Carroll on Marlon Wood

Jon Carroll, colunist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is not a sports fan. However, he had reason to comment on two catches made last week.

The other catch was not particularly athletic, although it did require calm under pressure. It happened at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, home of the Play, the five-lateral end-of-game miracle play that allowed Cal to beat Stanford, an event that always makes God smile. This time it was Cal's opponent, the University of Washington, that was momentarily visited by the triumph fairy.

Last play of the game: Washington, down a touchdown, 40 yards from the goal line. Washington quarterback Carl Bonnell threw it high and far; three athletic Cal defenders rose to intercept it. It bounced off all 30 outstretched fingers and fell into the hands of a lightly regarded Washington receiver named Marlon Wood.

He could have dropped it; no one would have blamed him if he had dropped it. No one expected that the play would be successful. But he caught it, turned and struggled an additional 2 yards for the touchdown. Cal won in overtime, so Wood's catch became a footnote. Yet it's something that he'll have forever. In Seattle, it'll be, "Marlon Wood? Say, aren't you the guy ..." "Yup, that's me. I caught that ball."

Berkeley, Police, and fraught relationships.

Pat Forde thinks Tedford is the highest ranking college coach who is not escorted by a police force of some sort.

The Pac-10 and WAC aren't as into the police presence/college worship that the south is (especially the SEC and Big XII), but I would imagine even if the rest of the coaches in the Pac-10 wanted, Tedford being escorted anywhere by the police wouldn't really fly in Berkeley — even if it was the UC Police.

Police escort means something different here.

But I think the more important factor is the same reason that Cal fans have been bemoaning the lack of sell-outs, the low attendance, the lack of enthusiasm generally for college football in the Bay Area: it's just not that important out here.

We have other things to think about, other interests, other concerns — and not just the NFL. As Forde notes,

Actually, it's only theoretically about safety. In reality, trooper presence is partly about ease of movement through fired-up (or liquored-up) crowds. And it's mostly about status -- for the coach and for the cops, who seem to excel at working their way into the background of TV shots.

Our crowds aren't usually that fired up (too many people have theater tickets on Saturday night, or a concert to get to, or dinner reservations), and we certainly aren't about to accord any sort of celebrity status to our coaches.

(On the anniversay of the Oakland Firestorm, we'd love to give celebrity status to our firemen and police officers, but that would be for doing their jobs, not for escorting coaches.)

An explanation for why Texas is ranked 9th in the BCS

The computers think Texas is, on average, the 15th best team in the country. Why?

Stewart Mandel might have one reason:

Here's an interesting little factoid for you: Texas has played seven games this season without leaving its home state. Furthermore, the 'Horns have yet to face an opposing team in its home stadium, having played five home games, a neutral-site game against Oklahoma (Dallas) and a "road" game against Rice at Houston's Reliant Stadium.

Every single computer ranking takes into account the location of a game: home games are easier to win than road games, and neutral games are somewhere in between. If Texas hasn't left the state yet, and their wins are over teams with a combined record of 18-21, then all those 42-14 games aren't actually that impressive to the computers.

Maps + College Football = awesome!

I just found this via The Wizard of Odds: MapGameDay.

This is fantastic, and it includes a nation-wide map of the teams in the top-25 polls (like this one for the Sagarin rankings).

the best poll ever

19. Rutgers - I'm starting to get pretty scared that Rutgers will accidentally make it into the National Championship Game.

(In other news: 8. Auburn - Auburn's victory over Florida is making Arkansas' victory over Auburn look extra good, thus making USC's victory over Arkansas look really extra good, thus ruining Auburn's BCS ranking. The Tigers really dropped the ball on that one.)

Rankings, again....

This week's Massey comparison
[Note: the verticle is the consensus, and the horizontal is the correlation: that is, the rankings on the far left are the ones that are most correlated to the set of rankings as a whole; the larger the standard deviation across your top-25, the farther to the right on the layout you are.]

Three of the five least corrolary rankings this week? In order, AP (5th least corrolary), Harris (4th), and USA Today/Coaches (3rd).

Out of the 95 rankings taken into account this week, Massey's number indicate that the three most influential rankings are three of the least correlary to the way the rest of the country sees college football.

But at least everyone agrees about the top three teams.

More Slingbox info -- it turns out this was a big deal

Nobody from Sling Media scored a touchdown or picked off any passes for the California Golden Bears on Saturday, but more than 3,000 football fans were rooting for the company just the same.

I have an entirely understandable fondness for teams that are historically awful

BRAD EDWARDS, ESPN Research:

When Vanderbilt kicked a field goal in the final seconds to beat No. 16 Georgia, it was more than just a rare SEC road win for the Commodores. It was the end of the longest losing streak against ranked teams in the history of the AP poll, which has been around since 1936. Entering Saturday, Vanderbilt had lost 54 straight games to AP-ranked teams -- a drought that began in 1992 -- and had not beaten a ranked team on the road since knocking off Alabama in Mobile on Oct. 7, 1950. To top it all off, it was Vanderbilt's first win in school history on the campus of a ranked opponent.

Cal-WSU isn't on TV, but...

The co-founder of the company that makes the Slingbox, Jason Krikorian, is a Cal grad. So when he heard that the Cal-WSU game wasn't going to be televised (after the Cal-OSU game wasn't televised, either), he offered his company's product to Cal so fans could watch the game.

The school will be using Sling Media's Slingbox device to stream the scoreboard feed from WSU's Martin Stadium over the Internet back to Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, where Cal fans will be able to watch the game on the scoreboard, free of charge.

Broadcasting and Cable, a television industry journal, thinks that this might revolutionize the industry.

Cal has two Fine Arts (Art Practice) majors on the team

Only one of Cal's two art practice majors is starting.

CBS did a special segment on the two, starting CB (and many people's informal pre- and mid-season All-American) Daymeion Hughes and LB Greg Van Hoesen.

Heismans? In Berkeley? Moooooooo!

Cal has what some people are calling a legitimate Heisman candidate, and it's not Marshawn Lynch (605 yards on 86 carries with 4 rushing TDs; his 7.0 yards per carry is 7th in the country, and his 605 rushing yards are 14th nationwide).

The shocking news is that it isn't DeSean Jackson, either, he of the eight-game TD reception streak dating back to last year and 8 receiving TDs in six games so far this year (and oh, yeah, two gorgeous punt returns for touchdowns so far).

Nope, the shocker is that Gene Menez thinks Nate Longshore, even after his abysmal game at Tennessee, is a contender. And the stats back him up: 102-157 for 1410 yards, 17 TDs and 5 INTs. The guy is a first-year starter (the best thing he had to say about the Minnesota game was that it was "fun" to finally play in the fourth quarter of a game: he broke his ankle in the first half of the opener last year, and was pulled at Tennessee), and looks like a #1 draft pick.

More on Massey

The consensus across 68 rankings is that Cal is the #7 team in the nation.

I think that's a little generous, but it's also pretty satisfying.

For the record at the halfway point, my top 25 looks something like this (in alphabetical order, because until they play each other or numerous of the same teams, it's hard to tell who's better than whom):

First tier:

Boise State
Florida
Louisville
Michigan
Ohio State
USC
West Virginia

Second Tier:

Cal
Iowa
Missouri
Notre Dame
Tennessee
Texas
Wisconsin
Georgia Tech

Third Tier:

Arkansas
Auburn
Boston College
Clemson
LSU
Navy
Oregon
Rutgers
Tulsa
Washington

The first of the five things Stewart Mandel learned this weekend

1) That the national title race is down to nine contenders. They are: Ohio State, USC, Michigan, Florida, West Virginia, Texas, Louisville, Tennessee and Cal.

?!

Putting Tennessee in perspective

Thirteen different Golden Bears have earned their first career starts in the first four games this year. Redshirt freshmen Cameron Morrah (TE) and Syd'Quan Thompson (CB) were both starters in their first collegiate games at Tennessee, while sophomore Alex Mack (C), senior Bryan Deemer (OG), junior Justin Moye (LB), junior Brandon Hampton (ROV) and junior Thomas DeCoud (FS) also had starting debuts against the Volunteers.

So: three of our four defensive backs were starting their first game in Neyland stadium, and two of our offensive linemen were as well. Which were the worst parts of our team that day? The secondary and the offensive line play.

I suppose people can keep asking questions about that game, as long as they actually listen to the answers.

Some very impressive stats from the last game...

Category:	Cal	Oregon
First Half Plays:	26	44
First Half Time of Possession:	10:45	19:15
First Half Score:	28	10
Second Half Plays:	42	21
Second Half Time of Possession:	22:42	7:18
Final Score:	45	24

That's pretty impressive ball control — both quick strike control and grind it out control.

Wishful thinking?

A little bit of wishful thinking from the Washington State athletic Department in its press release for this weekend's game: "The WSU Cougars 4-2 overall and 2-1 in Pacific-10 Conference play, host the California Bears, 5-2, 3-1, Saturday in a 2 p.m. at Martin Stadium."

Cal is, of course, 5-1, 3-0 in the Pac-10.

Things people thought before Saturday

Last week in response to Oregon Head Coach Mike Bellotti feeling a little unloved now that Cal Head Coach Jeff Tedford has been anointed quarterback guru of the millennium, Rod Gilmore wrote, "Saturday, you can judge for yourself as to which quarterback guru should get the credit for Oregon's rich tradition of developing quarterbacks."

I guess that question has been answered.

[Dixon: 20-35 for 263, 2TD, 3INT; Longshore: 14-26 for 189, 3TD, 1INT. But at the half, the numbers were Dixon 10-18 for 94, 0TDs, 2INTs (77.2 passing efficiency) and Longshore 4-11 69 yards, 2TDs, 1INT (130.9 passing efficiency). And Longshore was playing abysmally all game.]

The only poll you need to know

Kenneth Massey provides rankings for the BCS based on a computer model. He also provides something much more useful: a ranking comparison based on over 50 different rankings that provides a meta-ranking analysis based on the consensus value of their ranked positions.

He notes,

The ranking comparison gladly accepts any ranking that results from:

* A human poll conducted by a major publication or group (e.g. the AP)
* An advanced computer rating.
* A mathematically based sequential rating (e.g. Elo's update formula)
* Publicly well-known systems (e.g. the RPI)

(FYI --

The plain text version sorts the teams by consensus ranking vertically, and sorts the ranking systems by correlation horizontally. Team names are listed at regular intervals so that they will always be visible. The high (red) and low (blue) rankings for each team are highlighted.)

The comparison is updated every week after the new rankings come out, and while it's fun to argue about single polls (like the AP or Sagarin), this type of meta-analysis and the development of a consensus across more than 50 different polls is enlightening.