THANK GOD FOR THE BCS

THANK GOD FOR THE BCS!!

This past weekend, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament field was condensed to the beautifully trademarked “Final Four.”  Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) will attempt to out-Cinderella last year’s fairy tale team, Butler, in one semi-final while perennial top-tier schools Connecticut (UConn) and Kentucky will face off in the other.  The victors will meet in the National Championship Game on April 4^th.  (As an aside, with March Madness ending in April, I won’t feel as stupid watching the World Series end in November.)

But seriously, whichever team wins the basketball championship will not be the “best team in the country.”  In fact, few will even argue them to be such.  The best team should show sustained brilliance throughout the year, and these four teams have not.  They have had excellent tournaments for sure, but not necessarily great seasons.  I understand that this is an unusual year for the tourney and, in most years, a couple of top seeds would still be involved, which is how it should be.  I like Cinderella stories to a point, but in the end excellence should be rewarded.  The mere fact that a Final Four like this is possible should lead to talk of a different format for crowning a national champion.  The fact that this Final Four is actually happening should spark widespread reforms and debates among the highest of intellects!!  I am, of course, being facetious, but it brings me to my point about the BCS. 

Sports fans, broadcasters, and even the President of the United States have spouted off about the shortcomings of that system.  What it boils down to, though, is the fact that the best teams always get rewarded.  One could make (mostly emotion-fuelled) arguments about why one of the top 5 or 6 teams don’t get to play for the national championship any given year, but it’s near impossible to argue that the winner of the BCS is undeserving of the title of Best Team in the Country.  The BCS Champion has played a regular season and conference championship against top competition, usually flawlessly, and then defeated another equally talented and deserving team on the field.  Excellence has been rewarded. 

People will always argue the BCS system because we are taught early and often, by media and otherwise, that underdogs should win and that great teams are evil and shouldn’t be cheered for (unless you were born a Yankees fan.)  If VCU or Butler somehow wins a National Championship in basketball, plenty of fans will love it and think all is right with the world.  I did some research and found one ranking system that had Butler and VCU ranked #43 and #78 respectively in pre-tournament rankings.  Would any of those same happy fans be so over-the-moon ecstatic if Northern Illinois (ranked #43 last year in football by the same system) or Virginia (ironically, #78) were to play in the BCS Championship Game?  I’d wager that most of them would think it was a travesty.  Even UConn and Kentucky, using the same ranking system were the equivalent to South Carolina and Arkansas.  Good teams, but neither a serious contender for Best Team in the Country last season.

In the end, the BCS may not be perfect, but it does reward excellence and that’s all you can ask for when determining a champion.                 

WAXING NOSTALGIC…

NOSTALGIA? IT’S IN THE CARDS!!

I was cleaning on the weekend and found an old, forgotten shoebox.  I opened it and found some of the innocence of my youth.  The box was full of hockey, baseball, and football cards from as far back as the 1970s.  I uncovered rookie cards, cards of Hall of Famers, even cards that were “holograms” (sort of…but it was cutting edge technology for 1986!!)  I spent an hour or so looking through some of them and thanked myself for hanging on to them all these years.

I vaguely remember going through these same cards during my university days (most all my memories from then are vague) and again about eight years later when I relocated to a new city, but there was urgency then.  I didn’t enjoy them, and I inevitably threw away far more cards than I kept.  This weekend, however, I took some time to actually look at the cards and remember why I kept them at all.  Some of the cards I kept, I presume, are somewhat valuable.  I have a Mario Lemieux rookie card and several old Gretzky, Paul Coffey, and Mark Messier cards also.  Even further back in time, I found a Mike Bossy rookie card that, unfortunately, looks exactly like it’s been in a shoebox for over a decade.  It was neat to see hockey cards from different eras also.  I unearthed some Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull cards, along with later cards of their NHL sons.  I met Bobby Hull a few years ago at a Belleville Bulls OHL game and can say he’s hardly changed from 1975, with the exception of getting rid of his grotesquely long sideburns that I can only assume were in style back then!!

More enjoyable was finding any card touting a “future star” or “top prospect.”  For every Juan Gonzalez (2-time MVP), there were twenty Pat Kellys or Gary Scotts who never quite panned out.  I’m guilty of buying into false prospects myself as I found about ten Eric Anthony cards from 1990.  I was sure this power threat was going to the Hall of Fame, but a .231 lifetime average won’t get you enshrined in Cooperstown.  It also won’t get me rich hoarding his rookie cards!!

There are literally hundreds of other cards I haven’t had time to look at yet, but my favourite discovery so far is a team set of the 1986 Toronto Blue Jays sponsored by the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs.  I don’t think they were made readily available outside the Toronto area, and for that the players should be thankful.  The set is hilarious for fans, though.  The polyester skin-tight uniforms would be a laughingstock today (or trendy retro??), and roughly 92% of the players had cheesy moustaches, if you count the wispy hairs above Tony Fernandez’s lip.  Oh, the memories!!

While reminiscing about retired journeymen athletes like Alex Molden, Kurt Stillwell, and Melido Perez (who also sported a Fernandez-style ‘stache) may not exactly set the memory ablaze, it does remind one of how sports were simpler (I’m not saying better) before 24/7 media coverage invaded the arena.  Sure, athletes cheated and drank and caroused back then and everyone knew it…but no one KNEW it.  We didn’t have every last detail of their debauchery, and we didn’t want it.  They were our heroes because of what they did on their respective fields, period.  And, if we wanted to look up their stats, we needed our trading cards.  There were almost no other ways of easily finding out how many homers Claudell Washington hit in 1982 (16) or where Todd Benzinger was born (Dayton, Kentucky) before the internet.

The best memory I took away from all these cards, though, was the waiting.  My friends and I bought packs and packs of cards over the course of the season, trying to search for our favourite players.  For the fifty or so early Fred McGriff cards I held on to, how many other major leaguers were thrown away or traded?  Now, (if kids these days still actually collect cards) people need only look at eBay to find exactly what they want.  Convenient yes, but hardly as satisfying.  But, now that I think about it, I wonder how much one of them might spend for a Ken Griffey, Jr. rookie???