ProFootballWeekly.com
asks personnel expert Joel Buchsbaum for his thoughts on the hottest topics in
football.
BCS changes negate benefits of running up score
The BCS has decided to eliminate the margin of victory calculation from the computer
rankings portion of its standings to determine a national champion. The move was designed
to discourage teams from running up the score to improve their standing in the BCS.
Buchsbaum: Once again, college football is tweaking its formula for picking the teams
that play for the national championship and once again, the formula is still very much
flawed. The only real way is to have a playoff series, but since that appears to be out,
there’s got to be a better way to come up with the final two teams to end the year.
The idea of weighing how much a team won by was a bad idea because it doesn’t take
into account what really happened in the game. A couple years ago, Penn State had a huge
lead over a team, then they gave up two very late touchdowns in garbage time, and the
final score with the other team scoring at the gun ended up a seven- or eight-point
difference. That cost Penn State dearly.
On the other hand, some teams will play a very competitive game for three and a half
quarters, then when they get the other team down late in the fourth quarter, they’ll
start running up the score. That doesn’t indicate how the game went either.
The only way to make it fair is to have a board of experts who pick the teams and watch
the games individually on tape to determine the quality of victory each team had by
watching the game. There’s no way to do it by reading scores or watching highlights
on Saturday night and Sunday morning. You really have to see the game and study the game
to give an honest opinion of what happened. There doesn’t need to be that many
experts to do it. If there is one in each section of the country crosschecking the facts,
there is a chance it can get done that way.
In other words, invite the best national college football reporters, former scouts,
former coaches and let them do it. Don’t rely on newspaper writers, and don’t
rely on computers.
Title IX expands beyond original focus
Title IX, the law that prohibits discrimination based on gender in academics and
athletics, celebrated its 30th anniversary on June 23. The number of women
participating in intercollegiate sports has gone from about 30,000 to more than 150,000
during that time span. Before Title IX, there were two established professional sports
outlets for women — tennis and golf. Now, there are also professional leagues
for basketball, soccer, volleyball and bowling.
Buchsbaum: Overall, Title IX was created to have fairness throughout education. In
other words, it was to make sure that women who wanted to become doctors or lawyers or who
wanted to have athletic careers would not be discriminated against. However, what it has
evolved into is not something that Richard Nixon envisioned when he signed the legislation
in the early 1970s in the pre-Watergate era.
What we have now is something where equity is supposedly determined by the number of
scholarships and people playing. That’s not what the intention was. The intention was
for women to get a fair shake. Not for women to get the money or the number of
scholarships that men’s sports which produce revenue, like football and basketball,
provide. Those sports should be put off on a different board and everything else should be
measured on what the women at each school want to have fair representation in athletics
and activities. Even if it means setting up major intramural programs for the women who
want to play but really are not good enough to deserve scholarships. |
