Monday, September 19, 2005

USC Still Blows

A couple of things, in case anyone is new to reading this. (Ha ha, like anyone is reading this.)

1) USC did not win the national title two years ago. They did not win "half" of the national title. They were national title non-winners. The reason for this is that their nonconference schedule consists of playing, last I checked, me and six of my friends. And while we're hung over. This is not helped by their conference schedule being against the biggest powderpuff conference outside of the totally misnamed Big East. In the past two years, they've had three games: Two years ago, they played Michigan and last year they played Oklahoma and Cal. Every other game was against, at best, a very low-ranked (though in most cases unranked, sub-.500) team. The fact that they're considered anywhere near on par with the "greatest teams of all time" is laughable. This year, the USC fellatio train has started again, with the Trojans running up the score against terrible teams. They managed to trounce Arkansas this week whose only win is against Missouri (no, not Mississippi) State. They lost to Vanderbilt. Sorry, but I don't buy the hype and even if they go on to "win" a national title this year, they will have done it playing damn near nobody. Again.

2) USC's ranking this year as #1 is based totally on last year's success. If you really want to have objective rankings, who has proven the most so far? I'd take Florida (beating #5 ranked Tennessee), Florida State (beating top-10 Miami and top-20 BC), or, of course, Texas (who only beat Ohio State AT OSU, and managed the same "run up the score against bad teams" thing in their other games).

Even if USC goes through this whole season undefeated, faces Texas in the national championship and wins 500-0, they'll have done it without proving anything. This stupid fetishization of numerical dominance (500 yards against Hawaii is hardly better than, say, 250 yards against OSU) and the fact that sports writers don't WATCH the goddamn games leads to a huge incentive for BCS conference teams to load up on the SMUs of the world to boost their rankings. And the fact that all the sports writers in the universe seem to be idiotic hyporcites when it comes even to remaining consistent between their various pet issues just makes it harder to take them seriously when they whine about transparency in coach's polls and so on.

cranked out at 8:32 AM | |