I know I haven't posted on here for like a year and a day, but something came up on a blog that I frequent and I felt I couldn't let this go any longer.
There are certain people, people who I can only assume have some sort of issues borne out of a traumatic experience, who want to drive anyone who puts ketchup on a hot dog over a cliff, 1800's buffalo hunter style. These people think ketchup should not only be banned, it should be eliminated from existence. Ketchup is a scourge that's devouring the innocence of our children.
The above linked post, which doesn't really address ketchup in its body, has a number of comments to this effect. This is the second time in several months I have seen this sentiment. Before that, I wasn't aware that there was this much anger towards ketchup. So I decided to do some brief research.
Just performing a google search for "ketchup on hot dogs," I encountered the following things:
"It's simply wrong, and those who put ketchup on hot dogs should be scolded and shamed "
"It is taboo to put ketchup on a Chicago hot dog"
"I hate ketchup on hot dogs. "
"Amazon.com: Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog: Bob Schwartz"
Yes, that's right, the last one is an actual book, 208 pages long, about hot dog cuisine. And the title says it all.
To be fair, clicking on a few of those links, you see that a majority (not vast, by any means) actually do put ketchup on their dogs. But it's the vocal minority that is mindboggling to me.
I understand that there are people who don’t LIKE ketchup. Of course those people are out there. That’s fine; we have different tastes in condiments. I dislike mustard. Never got a taste for it. You know what? I’m okay with that. I don’t feel like my life is incomplete without mustard. I’ve tried it and I don’t like it. You do like it? Good for you! I’m glad it makes you happy. We’ll both get our separate condiments at a barbecue and move on, right?
WRONG! Unlike any other condiment, ketchup is actively campaigned against. It’s not enough to dislike ketchup – it is some people’s goals to destroy anyone who does happen to like it. Here’s an actual conversation* overheard at a stadium concession stand:
*may not be actual
Ketchup Eater: How’s it going?
Ketchup Hater: Are you putting ketchup on that hot dog?
KE: Yeah…
KH: You make me sick. All you people. You like punching babies, don’t you?
KE: Ummm, no, I…
KH: Don’t talk to me. You’re the one who ran over my puppy last week, aren’t you? I heard you laugh while you did it.
KE: I don’t even know who you are.
KH: Yeah, well, I know you. Keep your children out of our schools, freak.
And so on. Why? Why is there such a vocal populace out there against ketchup? Is it chemical imbalance? Repressed bigotry that’s trying to assert itself in a way that’s more politically correct? I don’t know, but it bothers me. I felt it was my duty to speak out against it.
We’re people too! Our love of ketchup doesn’t make us bad! It’s just something we like! Let it go!
For posterity, the perfect condiments for my ideal hot dog include the following:
Strip of ketchup along one side
Hot Sauce (preferably Tapatio or Cholula) along the other side
Onions (I prefer grilled white on my dog, but any type of onions will do, even green onions)
Jalapenos
Grilled Peppers (optional – sometimes I’m in the mood, sometimes not)
You get me a nice grilled frank with that on it and I am one happy guy.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
What to do about college football?
I love college football. It's SO much better than the NFL. Yes, I realize that the play in the NFL is at a higher level and all that. I also realize that there is a lot wrong with the way the NCAA handles things, especially the favoritism to some schools and draconian regulations regarding compensation for athletes.
But I enjoy the games so much more. Maybe it's because the players haven't "made it" yet, so there's a little bit less attitude and a little bit more effort. Maybe the idea of schools competing against each other is a little bit more appealing than faceless NFL franchises. Maybe it's the sense that in college football there are true underdogs and amazing performances, whereas in the NFL, nothing should really surprise you. My guess is that it's a combination of all these things, among others.
I had a great time watching my alma mater, Oregon, win a close game against Oklahoma St. in the Holiday Bowl this year. It was a fun and exciting game, more so because Oregon was the underdog and was somewhat disrespected because they came from the Pac 10, which was criticized for having a down year. This was kind of a rebuilding season for the Ducks, so to do as well as they did was a very pleasant surprise. As a result of the Ducks' success, I've been devouring all things college football lately and I felt it was time to weigh in on the current BCS/Playoff debate.
College football needs a playoff. It's that simple. I watched USC pound a Big 10 school for the 24th time in a row on New Year's Day and lamented that they wouldn't have a chance to play for a title. I saw Utah go undefeated by beating a top tier SEC program and realized that Utah, strictly in terms of wins and losses, played perfectly and never had a chance at a championship. Texas, because of the rules of its own conference, doesn't have a chance to show it's the national champion. None of these things seem right to me. And it's not like this is reactionary - there has been crazy stuff going on with the BCS since it came into being. Some years have been more clearcut than others (Texas vs. USC a few years ago comes to mind), but there are always problems.
So how would it work? There are lots of ideas floating around out there, so I'm not going to claim this as original, but I didn't steal it from anyone in particular. This is just my logical conclusion from knowing how college football works.
First of all, my playoff would NOT eliminate other bowl games. Any team with a winning record would still be eligible for the GMAC Bowl and the Chick-a-dee Bowl and the SolutionsForRectalBleeding.Com Bowl, etc. Whatever teams don't make into the playoff bracket would still play in those other bowls. I don't buy the argument that a playoff would diminish the luster of those other bowls. As it stands right now, who the crap cares about the Emerald Bowl? The two teams playing in it, their fans, and die-hard college football fans who root for Stanford and therefore don't have a bowl game to watch anyway. So other teams can continue doing their thing at their other bowls. It gets the schools and the conferences money, it's fun for fans, it helps with recruiting... Why mess with the one part of this system that isn't broken?
Second of all, get rid of conference championship games. They are stupid. There's nothing wrong with conferences trying to make money, but these are ridiculous cash grabs that wind up hurting their schools (in terms of BCS placement) rather than helping them (see Alabama and Ball St.). Ideally, all conferences would be like the Pac 10 (bias alert!) where each team plays each other team (and yes, I realize that this wasn't the case in the Pac 10 until just recently). How can there be a dispute about who the best team is when each team has had a chance to beat the others? Yes, occasionally you'll wind up with a situation like in the Big 12 where Texas, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma all end the season tied. In that case, you can use tie-breakers like the Pac 10 uses (record versus the next best team in the conference) or you can use the point spread in the games versus the teams you're tied with. No, this does NOT encourage running up the score because you are only looking at point spread against other teams that are supposedly good (these teams being tied for first place and all).
Unless some serious realignment takes place (which wouldn't be a bad thing, IMO - put Iowa St in the Big 10, move Baylor or Colorado into the MWC, and make a new conference out of Penn St., Purdue, two schools from the ACC (BC and Wake Forest?), two schools from the SEC (Kentucky and Vanderbilt?), and two other schools from small conferences (Ball St. and East Carolina?) to make a new conference. In fact, I'd go so far as to make 12 conferences of 10 teams each (or 10 conferences of 10, 2 conferences of 8 and 4 independents, if Notre Dame wants to be stupid about it - yes, this would mean adding one FCS school to the FBS). This is sheer insanity, I know, but I dare you to make a legitimate argument as to why it makes sense that the schools in each conference don't play all the other schools in that conference), then this isn't going to happen. But no more conf. champ games, period. Schedule one more in-conference or out-of-conference game and be done with it.
Give teams a choice to start their season on the last weekend in August and have two bye weeks, or start on the first weekend in September and have one bye week. This ensures that every team is done by the last weekend in November, since there are 14 weekends in this span and each team plays 12 games.
Here's where my plan deviates. If we're going to do the 12 conference realignment thing (highly unlikely), then I propose you take each of the 12 conference winners plus 4 at-large teams and make a 16 team tournament with the first round played the first weekend in December. The conference champions would ONLY be eligible to make the tournament if they were ranked in the top 25 in the final BCS standings. This would keep a mediocre conference champion who went 6 - 3 in a weak conference from making the tournament (Troy or East Carolina, for example). If there were conference champions who didn't qualify, the next two top-ranked at-large teams would make the tourney.
This would be a seeded tournament based on final BCS rank. The #1 seed would play #16, #2 vs. #15, etc., even if those seedings create in-conference matchups (the rationale being, if you were good enough to beat them the first time, you should be good enough to beat them again, so why mess with the rankings unnecessarily?). The location for the games could be determined either by playing the game at the home stadium of the team with the higher seed, or at pre-determined neutral sites. Again there's a choice here: you could assign stadiums to each matchup (e.g. the Rose Bowl would host the #3 vs. #14 matchup no matter who those teams are), or you could pick 8 stadiums and allow the top-seeded teams, beginning with the #1 seed, to pick their preferred site. So if #1 was USC, they could pick the Rose Bowl as the site of their game, while the #2 seed, Florida, could pick the Orange Bowl, etc. I think the last option is the most interesting, and would make the most sense from a home-team advantage, logistical, and money-making standpoint, the latter two of which don't necessarily matter to me, but do matter to the people who make decisions about these things.
Since the realignment thing probably will never happen, here's the other option: a twelve team tournament similar to the NFL's playoffs. In this case, you take the 6 major conference champions (as long as those champions were ranked in the top 18 of the final BCS standings), and then 6 at-larges. Again, you seed the 12 teams based on the BCS standings, regardless of whether or not those teams were conference champs. The top 4 teams get a bye and the remaining 8 play the first round the first weekend of December. The bracket this year would have looked like this:
#1 Oklahoma
vs
Bye
#8 Penn St.
vs.
#9 Boise St.
#5 USC
vs
#12 Cincinnati
#4 Alabama
vs
Bye
#3 Texas
vs
Bye
#6 Utah
vs
#11 TCU
#7 Texas Tech
vs
#10 Ohio St.
#2 Florida
vs
Bye
In this scenario, Virginia Tech loses its automatic bid to TCU because it ended up 19th in the final standings, so we wind up with a bracket that uses the top 12 teams in the country. "But wait!" you may say, "How do we know we really wind up with the best twelve teams?" We may not, but we can be fairly certain that we're going to wind up with the best 8 and probably 12 of the best 16 or 18. That's pretty dang good.
"And why does TCU get to go but Oklahoma St. doesn't? Aren't we still making arbitrary cutoff points?" Well, the beauty of a playoff is that we're just giving teams a legitimate chance to play for the national championship. We're expanding the pool from the two it's currently at to 12 or 16. If you can't establish yourself as at least a top 16 team, then I'm sorry, but you don't deserve the chance to play for the championship. You have to make the cutoff somewhere, and 12 or 16 seems like a good enough point. That would still be only 10 or 13% of the 119 FBS teams that make the playoffs. Compare that to the NFL (38%), MLB (27%), or the NHL (53%) and you're still keeping the regular season VERY meaningful while giving teams like Utah, Boise St., or even Texas and USC this year a chance to play for the title rather than just having to gripe about not getting an opportunity because of a flawed ranking system.
To continue on with my proposed playoff system, after the first round you would be down to 8 teams, regardless of whether or not you started with 12 or 16. (Also note that teams that lose in the first round would be allowed to accept berths to other bowl games) You would move two of the minor bowls up to the major bowl echelon (maybe the Cotton Bowl and the Capital One Bowl or Holiday Bowl) so you have your six bowls (adding the Rose, Sugar, Orange, and Fiesta). You rotate these six between the quarterfinals and semifinals each year and play the national championship game at one of the quarterfinal bowls. You would play the quarters the week of Christmas, the semifinals on New Year's Day, and the Championship on the 8th, as it's done now.
There is one glaring flaw with this plan - it's a LOT of games. Say you're Utah this year. You would play TCU on December 6th - a team you already beat. Let's say you beat them again, this time at a neutral site. Now you know you're going to play Texas at the Cotton Bowl on December 26th. That's not too bad, you can probably get fans to travel for that game since they have several weeks to book reservations and make plans. Let's say you beat Texas. Now you're going to play Florida at the Sugar Bowl in less than a week. How many fans do you think will go to that game? Maybe some fans will have held out in case that happened, but probably not many. And the number will be even less if you beat Florida and go to Orange Bowl for the National Championship the week after that! Not to mention that it will be the 16th game these guys have played this season. That would be hard.
I could see changing it to an 8 team tournament and bumping everything up (playing the quarters on Dec 5th, the semis on Jan 1st, and the NCG on the 8th and again allowing the teams that lost in the quarters to accept bids to other bowls), but I think limiting it to 8 still runs the risk of leaving out teams like Boise St. (9th in the final BCS) who play in a weak conference. It's not easy to schedule 2 or 3 tough out of conference games every season and it's not really Boise St.'s fault it plays in a crappy conference. Sometimes, even when you do schedule tough games, the schedule just works out poorly. If Boise St. had beat Oregon on the road at the end of the season rather than at the beginning, would they have played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl instead of Utah? Increasing the tournament to 12 would eliminate these unfair omissions while still keeping the regular season meaningful (only two 2-loss teams would have made the tournament this year).
College football is a great sport the way it is, but it's a travesty the way the champion is decided. It needs to change. I understand that adding more games makes it tough to keep a college atmosphere - one of the best things about college athletics is that you get droves of rabid fans from crazy places (how many people in Eugene, OR care passionately about an NFL team? I don't know but it's a tiny fraction of the number that care passionately about the Ducks). There's nothing like attending a college football game. Adding these extra games would definitely decrease some of that atmosphere. That doesn't matter much to me, since I can't afford to go to the one bowl game a year the Ducks make it to anyway. I'd love this system because I could watch it all on TV. But I know that these things matter to some people and they would create problems.
The question is whether or not having an actual national champion and adding several more exciting college football matchups is worth the price of those problems. In my opinion, it is.
But I enjoy the games so much more. Maybe it's because the players haven't "made it" yet, so there's a little bit less attitude and a little bit more effort. Maybe the idea of schools competing against each other is a little bit more appealing than faceless NFL franchises. Maybe it's the sense that in college football there are true underdogs and amazing performances, whereas in the NFL, nothing should really surprise you. My guess is that it's a combination of all these things, among others.
I had a great time watching my alma mater, Oregon, win a close game against Oklahoma St. in the Holiday Bowl this year. It was a fun and exciting game, more so because Oregon was the underdog and was somewhat disrespected because they came from the Pac 10, which was criticized for having a down year. This was kind of a rebuilding season for the Ducks, so to do as well as they did was a very pleasant surprise. As a result of the Ducks' success, I've been devouring all things college football lately and I felt it was time to weigh in on the current BCS/Playoff debate.
College football needs a playoff. It's that simple. I watched USC pound a Big 10 school for the 24th time in a row on New Year's Day and lamented that they wouldn't have a chance to play for a title. I saw Utah go undefeated by beating a top tier SEC program and realized that Utah, strictly in terms of wins and losses, played perfectly and never had a chance at a championship. Texas, because of the rules of its own conference, doesn't have a chance to show it's the national champion. None of these things seem right to me. And it's not like this is reactionary - there has been crazy stuff going on with the BCS since it came into being. Some years have been more clearcut than others (Texas vs. USC a few years ago comes to mind), but there are always problems.
So how would it work? There are lots of ideas floating around out there, so I'm not going to claim this as original, but I didn't steal it from anyone in particular. This is just my logical conclusion from knowing how college football works.
First of all, my playoff would NOT eliminate other bowl games. Any team with a winning record would still be eligible for the GMAC Bowl and the Chick-a-dee Bowl and the SolutionsForRectalBleeding.Com Bowl, etc. Whatever teams don't make into the playoff bracket would still play in those other bowls. I don't buy the argument that a playoff would diminish the luster of those other bowls. As it stands right now, who the crap cares about the Emerald Bowl? The two teams playing in it, their fans, and die-hard college football fans who root for Stanford and therefore don't have a bowl game to watch anyway. So other teams can continue doing their thing at their other bowls. It gets the schools and the conferences money, it's fun for fans, it helps with recruiting... Why mess with the one part of this system that isn't broken?
Second of all, get rid of conference championship games. They are stupid. There's nothing wrong with conferences trying to make money, but these are ridiculous cash grabs that wind up hurting their schools (in terms of BCS placement) rather than helping them (see Alabama and Ball St.). Ideally, all conferences would be like the Pac 10 (bias alert!) where each team plays each other team (and yes, I realize that this wasn't the case in the Pac 10 until just recently). How can there be a dispute about who the best team is when each team has had a chance to beat the others? Yes, occasionally you'll wind up with a situation like in the Big 12 where Texas, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma all end the season tied. In that case, you can use tie-breakers like the Pac 10 uses (record versus the next best team in the conference) or you can use the point spread in the games versus the teams you're tied with. No, this does NOT encourage running up the score because you are only looking at point spread against other teams that are supposedly good (these teams being tied for first place and all).
Unless some serious realignment takes place (which wouldn't be a bad thing, IMO - put Iowa St in the Big 10, move Baylor or Colorado into the MWC, and make a new conference out of Penn St., Purdue, two schools from the ACC (BC and Wake Forest?), two schools from the SEC (Kentucky and Vanderbilt?), and two other schools from small conferences (Ball St. and East Carolina?) to make a new conference. In fact, I'd go so far as to make 12 conferences of 10 teams each (or 10 conferences of 10, 2 conferences of 8 and 4 independents, if Notre Dame wants to be stupid about it - yes, this would mean adding one FCS school to the FBS). This is sheer insanity, I know, but I dare you to make a legitimate argument as to why it makes sense that the schools in each conference don't play all the other schools in that conference), then this isn't going to happen. But no more conf. champ games, period. Schedule one more in-conference or out-of-conference game and be done with it.
Give teams a choice to start their season on the last weekend in August and have two bye weeks, or start on the first weekend in September and have one bye week. This ensures that every team is done by the last weekend in November, since there are 14 weekends in this span and each team plays 12 games.
Here's where my plan deviates. If we're going to do the 12 conference realignment thing (highly unlikely), then I propose you take each of the 12 conference winners plus 4 at-large teams and make a 16 team tournament with the first round played the first weekend in December. The conference champions would ONLY be eligible to make the tournament if they were ranked in the top 25 in the final BCS standings. This would keep a mediocre conference champion who went 6 - 3 in a weak conference from making the tournament (Troy or East Carolina, for example). If there were conference champions who didn't qualify, the next two top-ranked at-large teams would make the tourney.
This would be a seeded tournament based on final BCS rank. The #1 seed would play #16, #2 vs. #15, etc., even if those seedings create in-conference matchups (the rationale being, if you were good enough to beat them the first time, you should be good enough to beat them again, so why mess with the rankings unnecessarily?). The location for the games could be determined either by playing the game at the home stadium of the team with the higher seed, or at pre-determined neutral sites. Again there's a choice here: you could assign stadiums to each matchup (e.g. the Rose Bowl would host the #3 vs. #14 matchup no matter who those teams are), or you could pick 8 stadiums and allow the top-seeded teams, beginning with the #1 seed, to pick their preferred site. So if #1 was USC, they could pick the Rose Bowl as the site of their game, while the #2 seed, Florida, could pick the Orange Bowl, etc. I think the last option is the most interesting, and would make the most sense from a home-team advantage, logistical, and money-making standpoint, the latter two of which don't necessarily matter to me, but do matter to the people who make decisions about these things.
Since the realignment thing probably will never happen, here's the other option: a twelve team tournament similar to the NFL's playoffs. In this case, you take the 6 major conference champions (as long as those champions were ranked in the top 18 of the final BCS standings), and then 6 at-larges. Again, you seed the 12 teams based on the BCS standings, regardless of whether or not those teams were conference champs. The top 4 teams get a bye and the remaining 8 play the first round the first weekend of December. The bracket this year would have looked like this:
#1 Oklahoma
vs
Bye
#8 Penn St.
vs.
#9 Boise St.
#5 USC
vs
#12 Cincinnati
#4 Alabama
vs
Bye
#3 Texas
vs
Bye
#6 Utah
vs
#11 TCU
#7 Texas Tech
vs
#10 Ohio St.
#2 Florida
vs
Bye
In this scenario, Virginia Tech loses its automatic bid to TCU because it ended up 19th in the final standings, so we wind up with a bracket that uses the top 12 teams in the country. "But wait!" you may say, "How do we know we really wind up with the best twelve teams?" We may not, but we can be fairly certain that we're going to wind up with the best 8 and probably 12 of the best 16 or 18. That's pretty dang good.
"And why does TCU get to go but Oklahoma St. doesn't? Aren't we still making arbitrary cutoff points?" Well, the beauty of a playoff is that we're just giving teams a legitimate chance to play for the national championship. We're expanding the pool from the two it's currently at to 12 or 16. If you can't establish yourself as at least a top 16 team, then I'm sorry, but you don't deserve the chance to play for the championship. You have to make the cutoff somewhere, and 12 or 16 seems like a good enough point. That would still be only 10 or 13% of the 119 FBS teams that make the playoffs. Compare that to the NFL (38%), MLB (27%), or the NHL (53%) and you're still keeping the regular season VERY meaningful while giving teams like Utah, Boise St., or even Texas and USC this year a chance to play for the title rather than just having to gripe about not getting an opportunity because of a flawed ranking system.
To continue on with my proposed playoff system, after the first round you would be down to 8 teams, regardless of whether or not you started with 12 or 16. (Also note that teams that lose in the first round would be allowed to accept berths to other bowl games) You would move two of the minor bowls up to the major bowl echelon (maybe the Cotton Bowl and the Capital One Bowl or Holiday Bowl) so you have your six bowls (adding the Rose, Sugar, Orange, and Fiesta). You rotate these six between the quarterfinals and semifinals each year and play the national championship game at one of the quarterfinal bowls. You would play the quarters the week of Christmas, the semifinals on New Year's Day, and the Championship on the 8th, as it's done now.
There is one glaring flaw with this plan - it's a LOT of games. Say you're Utah this year. You would play TCU on December 6th - a team you already beat. Let's say you beat them again, this time at a neutral site. Now you know you're going to play Texas at the Cotton Bowl on December 26th. That's not too bad, you can probably get fans to travel for that game since they have several weeks to book reservations and make plans. Let's say you beat Texas. Now you're going to play Florida at the Sugar Bowl in less than a week. How many fans do you think will go to that game? Maybe some fans will have held out in case that happened, but probably not many. And the number will be even less if you beat Florida and go to Orange Bowl for the National Championship the week after that! Not to mention that it will be the 16th game these guys have played this season. That would be hard.
I could see changing it to an 8 team tournament and bumping everything up (playing the quarters on Dec 5th, the semis on Jan 1st, and the NCG on the 8th and again allowing the teams that lost in the quarters to accept bids to other bowls), but I think limiting it to 8 still runs the risk of leaving out teams like Boise St. (9th in the final BCS) who play in a weak conference. It's not easy to schedule 2 or 3 tough out of conference games every season and it's not really Boise St.'s fault it plays in a crappy conference. Sometimes, even when you do schedule tough games, the schedule just works out poorly. If Boise St. had beat Oregon on the road at the end of the season rather than at the beginning, would they have played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl instead of Utah? Increasing the tournament to 12 would eliminate these unfair omissions while still keeping the regular season meaningful (only two 2-loss teams would have made the tournament this year).
College football is a great sport the way it is, but it's a travesty the way the champion is decided. It needs to change. I understand that adding more games makes it tough to keep a college atmosphere - one of the best things about college athletics is that you get droves of rabid fans from crazy places (how many people in Eugene, OR care passionately about an NFL team? I don't know but it's a tiny fraction of the number that care passionately about the Ducks). There's nothing like attending a college football game. Adding these extra games would definitely decrease some of that atmosphere. That doesn't matter much to me, since I can't afford to go to the one bowl game a year the Ducks make it to anyway. I'd love this system because I could watch it all on TV. But I know that these things matter to some people and they would create problems.
The question is whether or not having an actual national champion and adding several more exciting college football matchups is worth the price of those problems. In my opinion, it is.
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