March Madness and College Football alike routinely face scrutiny for whether or not their approaches to crowning champions will select the "best team."
What you are describing for college football probably applies to everything in life. We have this human need to know the best.
How do professional schools select from a large pool of applicants? A standardized test, GPA, an interview, “activities”? Probably doesn’t even choose the best students, much less the best doctor, lawyer, business administrator, etc.
Google “the best” for anything…the best place to retire, the best movie, the best hospital, the best green beans…and you get lists in rank order from various sources.
All of these involve subjective choices made by a group of people. Even if criteria are defined in advance and the best simply falling out of that filter, the criteria were chosen by people. Why would the best high school recruits or the best team be any different?
Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” We could substitute “there is ‘no best’, only trade-offs”.
Totally spot on - and while basketball, just by its nature, will have some "fluke" wins/losses the team that wins the championship must really really good because you can't win six straight games spread over three weeks against the best teams in the country unless you are really really good. (Which is why FDU/Princeton won't win it all.) The best basketball team(s) have the ability to somehow avoid losing when they don't have their "A" game - it's part of being "the best". Purdue didn't have that this year.
The complaint really falls flat on that level. Whoever wins is going to have done something very impressive and been a very good team. So whoever you feel was "best" that didn't make it because of a bad bounce or whatever isn't going to ultimately be passed over for the belt by a team that wasn't very good.
The same will be true of the expanded college football playoff. Or last year, if TCU had won no one would say they weren't a true champion even though they'd lost their conference title to Kansas State.
Of course as it happens, that loss to K-State really stings because they had such a low chance of winning the playoffs and it would have been nice to have some hardware for their great season.
So true - people would have viewed TCU as a Cinderella but still seen them as a true champion (albeit NOT the 'best' team). I think that's because people see the odds of a physically outmanned team 'getting hot' and winning multiple football games as a lot less likely than the same phenomenon happening in basketball.
All of which ties back into your analysis of whether the expanded football format will actually result in a wider group of teams winning the championship or just result in some 'fluky' wins here and there (TCU over Michigan) but the same powerhouses still win it.
Nice job, again.
What you are describing for college football probably applies to everything in life. We have this human need to know the best.
How do professional schools select from a large pool of applicants? A standardized test, GPA, an interview, “activities”? Probably doesn’t even choose the best students, much less the best doctor, lawyer, business administrator, etc.
Google “the best” for anything…the best place to retire, the best movie, the best hospital, the best green beans…and you get lists in rank order from various sources.
All of these involve subjective choices made by a group of people. Even if criteria are defined in advance and the best simply falling out of that filter, the criteria were chosen by people. Why would the best high school recruits or the best team be any different?
Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” We could substitute “there is ‘no best’, only trade-offs”.
Go Knights!
IAN….I love the statement….”Complaining is for the losers”!!
Totally spot on - and while basketball, just by its nature, will have some "fluke" wins/losses the team that wins the championship must really really good because you can't win six straight games spread over three weeks against the best teams in the country unless you are really really good. (Which is why FDU/Princeton won't win it all.) The best basketball team(s) have the ability to somehow avoid losing when they don't have their "A" game - it's part of being "the best". Purdue didn't have that this year.
The complaint really falls flat on that level. Whoever wins is going to have done something very impressive and been a very good team. So whoever you feel was "best" that didn't make it because of a bad bounce or whatever isn't going to ultimately be passed over for the belt by a team that wasn't very good.
The same will be true of the expanded college football playoff. Or last year, if TCU had won no one would say they weren't a true champion even though they'd lost their conference title to Kansas State.
Of course as it happens, that loss to K-State really stings because they had such a low chance of winning the playoffs and it would have been nice to have some hardware for their great season.
So true - people would have viewed TCU as a Cinderella but still seen them as a true champion (albeit NOT the 'best' team). I think that's because people see the odds of a physically outmanned team 'getting hot' and winning multiple football games as a lot less likely than the same phenomenon happening in basketball.
All of which ties back into your analysis of whether the expanded football format will actually result in a wider group of teams winning the championship or just result in some 'fluky' wins here and there (TCU over Michigan) but the same powerhouses still win it.