Bring Me The Head Of Jim Haugh

Since 1976, Lake Superior State University has been collecting and publishing annual lists of words that are, by their proclamation, banished from the English language for “misuse, overuse, and general uselessness.” This year’s winners include “post-9/11″, “under the bus”, “perfect storm”, “webinar”, and “back in the day.” Apparently the problem with that last one is that “back in the day” can now refer to a time when people used Blackberries without Bluetooth. That’s not an overused phrase, that’s an unwillingness to accept one’s own aging. But for the most part, the good people at Lake Superior State do a fine job of identifying the worst grammatical offenders of the past year.

The daily banter of college football is chock full of phrases that are misused, overused, and generally useless. In hopes of making next season slightly less nausea-inducing, I hereby offer The Banished Words List For The 2008 College Football Season.

In no particular order:

RUN THE TABLE. For the love of God, Corso, find another way to say “Win the rest of your games.” And then use it sparingly. And change it after a year or two. And the rest of you idiots in Bristol, don’t use it just because Corso thought it up and it sounded cool.

PLAY ON SUNDAYS or PLAY AT THE NEXT LEVEL. Why can’t announcers in a college game say the letters N-F-L when it comes to a player that has pro potential? It’s what every college football player aspires to. The NCAA’s role as the NFL’s free farm system is acknowledged by all. Why the euphemism?

THEY DIDN’T WIN THEIR DIVISION. You heard this about Georgia and Kansas in 2006, and about Nebraska’s national title loser in 2001. You may be surprised to hear this, but these teams actually did win their division. I know this because I checked the standings, and they all had the best record in their division. The problem is that another team also had the best record, and these teams lost a tiebreaker which prevented them from playing in the conference championship game. These teams can call rightfully themselves “co-champions”; in fact, most conferences without divisions have by-laws that allow this. Problem is, only one team can play in the conference championship game, so being a co-division champion is pretty meaningless. Just another example of the “everything is a means to our end” mentality the BCS has wreaked upon college football; I’ll get to that in a bit.

Yes, I know the tiebreaker in question was a head-to-head matchup with the other team in the tie. Missouri beat Kansas, Tennessee beat Georgia, and Colorado beat Nebraska in 2001. But this isn’t the NFL, where everybody plays twice home-and-away. Mizzou-Kansas was a neutral site game, and the other two were road games. If we’re going to celebrate two-loss national champions, let’s not be so quick to rule a team out because they lost a road game to a team of equal strength.

RESTORING THE GLORY TO SMU. Every time this school hires a new coach, or loses slightly fewer games than they did the year before, we’re all treated to a puke-inducing We Are The 80s-esque recapitulation of SMU’s heady days of excess, downfall, and its desire to return to the lofty place it once held in college football. Here’s an example from just a couple days ago.

Folks, there’s no glory left for SMU to return to. SMU’s 20 years of post-death penalty failure have seen not only the have-have not world of the BCS, but go back far enough to include the dissolution of the Southwest Conference. The continents have shifted, and SMU is a melting ice floe adrift off Antarctica. I know SMU was huge in 1984, but so was Bananarama. It’s a lazy angle and it’s time to give it a rest. The 1990s and 2000s have shown that anybody can rise, anybody can fall, and it doesn’t take half as long as SMU has been floundering around.

SMU’s national relevance wasn’t killed by the death penalty; it died of old age. Let’s give it a dignified burial alongside tie games, Grantland Rice, the 10-game regular season, Notre Dame’s refusal to play bowl games, and Army and Navy as national powers. Then let’s update the thesaurus to include “SMU” as synonym for “Tulane” and get on with things.

GREAT FACILITIES. Saying your college has great athletic facilities is a little bit like saying your girlfriend has a vagina. Practically every major football school has now invested millions into extravagant athletic facilities. Nowadays it’s only relevant when your school doesn’t have such facilities. Like Hawaii, to give a recent example.

This is that college athletics “arms race” that inspires so much hand-wringing, but which nobody does anything about. If some school builds a locker room with solid gold toilet stalls, their rival’s going to have to build solid gold toilet stalls to stay even, and before long every school in America will have solid gold toilet stalls. And it’ll probably be Oklahoma State or Florida Atlantic that starts it. This is the sort of thing the NCAA ought to be policing, but they’re too busy going over Tim Tebow’s cell phone records.

CONTRACT EXTENSION. Like Will Smith’s police experience in Men In Black, contract extensions for college football head coaches mean precisely dick.

Here are some of the major coaches who were fired this past offseason, and the contract extensions they had recently been given:

Bill Callahan: three-year extension through 2011, received September 2007
Chan Gailey: automatic one-year extension for 2011, received after 2006 season
Ed Orgeron: two-year extension through 2010, received after 2006 season
Phil Bennett: one-year extension for 2009, received after 2005 season
Houston Nutt: one-year extension for the 2011 season, received in 2005
Bill Doba: five-year extension through 2010, received 2005
Karl Dorrell: two-year extension through 2010, received December 2004
So all seven of these guys got extensions for years they were not kept around for. Six of them were fired within two years of being extended. When a coach is fired with years left on his contract, schools have to pay the coach hundreds of thousands of dollars in buyouts. What brought on this madness?

I think it’s the belief that recruiting suffers if a head coach is on an expiring contract. The recruit-o-dorks have been pushing this idea for awhile, and America’s athletic directors seem to be buying it. A contract extension is no longer a sign that a school wants to keep a coach that is doing a good job. Like solid gold toilet stalls, expensive long-term extensions for mediocre coaches is the cost of doing business. It’s a sunk cost schools seem willing to accept to create the illusion of coaching stability. In fact, a lot of contracts have automatic one-year extensions, so the coach is always working on a four- or five-year deal. Chan Gailey’s contract with Georgia Tech seems to have been like that.

And if you’ll notice, schools don’t bat an eye when it comes to paying these buyouts. (Other than the Rich Rodriguez soap opera, but that’s clearly not about money.) Texas A&M gladly paid Dennis Franchione $4.4 million not to coach football when his secret newsletter fiasco gave them a legitimate reason to fire him.

BOWL-ELIGIBLE. The Lake Superior State list admonishes words that are “misused, overused, and generally useless.” This one is all three. It’s misused, because the chuckleheads at ESPN don’t know or care when being bowl-eligible actually matters; they just cheerily point out that Northwestern is now bowl-eligible, and never get around to explaining what bowl they went to. It’s useless because it provides no meaningful context: Ball State and LSU were both bowl eligible. And it’s overused.

The “celebrating mediocrity” angle gets worked a lot in the CFB press, so I won’t recover that ground. But consider this: “bowl eligible” has, quite sneakily, given us a one-size-fits-all level of success for everyone between 6-6 and 11-2. The powers-that-be spend so much time positioning the BCS as the gold standard that the rest of the bowls seem to have coagulated into a mishmash of merely above-average-ness, where there’s no difference between the Cotton Bowl and the PapaJohns.com bowl. Even New Year’s Day, which used to be the gold standard, is meaningless.

Which brings me to:

BCS. I’m sure you knew this one was coming. But it’s not for the reasons you think. Forget the national championship game, forget the formulas, forget the contrived controversy, forget all the normal reasons people hate the BCS. I want to talk about the more insidious damage the BCS has done to the sport of college football.

It all occurred to me at the end of the 2005 season. I was watching Penn State win the Big Ten by beating Michigan State in the final game of the regular season. The announcers of that game, and the talking heads in the studio shows later that night, all described the victory and its implications the exact same way: “Penn State is making its first ever trip to the BCS!” As if this were the first meaningful thing Penn State had ever accomplished. Not once did anybody point out that Penn State had won the Big Ten conference. Call me old-fashioned, but winning the conference used to mean something. In fact, it used to mean everything; a bowl game was just a reward for an excellent season. Now a conference championship is a meaningless preliminary phase, like winning the AFC Central.

That’s one way the BCS smears its salty Tostitos-sponsored feces all over college football: by making itself the only worthwhile objective in the sport. The devaluation of non-BCS bowl games, as discussed in the previous item, is another. Here’s a third:

One of the blog entries I want to do during the upcoming season is called “Time To Fail.” I’m going to record televised college football games and calculate how long it takes for the announcing team to say the letters B-C-S. I’m betting it’s not very long.

Why is the BCS the ubiquitous, unanimous, continual topic of conversation in college football? You can’t watch a quarter of a college football game without being reminded of it. Yes, I realize that the national championship and the major bowl games are the culmination of the season, just like the World Series is the culmination of the baseball season, or the Super Bowl is the culmination of the NFL season. But I can actually watch a fuckin’ MLB or NFL game without semi-hourly reminders on what the formula is, who the contenders are, the pundits’ opinions of the contenders, which upcoming games will determine it, why some people don’t like it, and the merits of alternative systems.

And some of these twits pimp the BCS like they get paid a nickel everytime they mention it. The ESPN Gameday hosts in particular sound like Billy Mays pitching a new miracle cleaner after doing a speedball.

Really, why do they have to talk about the BCS so goddamn much? There’s just not that much to know. There’s a complicated formula. Every week it spits out a set of rankings. We look at the rankings and make some educated guesses how the rankings might change after this week’s games. Rinse and repeat. You can cover the whole thing in two minutes.

As college football fans go, I’m a casual fan. I’m a proud alumni and I support the South Florida Bulls to the end, but I’m not a fanatic. I don’t break things when we lose. I simply enjoy the drama, excitement, tension, and camaraderie that is inherent to college football. I often watch games I have no personal rooting stake in, just because I enjoy seeing different fan bases and different parts of the country. And you know what? This fuckin’ BCS shit is just sucking the joy out of it. I can’t sit down and enjoy a televised college football game anymore, because the minute it gets interesting, Rain Man is going to show up and demand to talk about Judge Wopner for the seventh time today.

And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider this: one Tuesday night, I’m flipping channels and discovered a MAC game I didn’t know was on. At that moment, there was a player with a phone number tattooed on his arm, and a gigantic afro, with a tube in his belly like he was getting an ultrasound. Now, wouldn’t you like to know what the hell that was about? Me too. But I never found out, because the ESPN announcing crew used this injury time to have a six-minute discussion of the latest BCS rankings.

Have you ever known an Issues? A person with a pet cause who is incapable of having a conversation about anything else? Watching college football anymore is like being in a room full of these people. Some of them seem unaware that there’s an actual sporting event going on. Listening to them talk about college football is like going to a Bible Codes convention for obsessive-compulsives.

But at least, we may have discovered the real reason most of the chuckleheads at ESPN and other college football talking heads support the BCS: without it, they’d have to find something interesting to talk about.