(Editor’s note: Mixed into a rambling narrative about the current state of affairs in the NFL loaded with historical and pop culture references, Mr. Brutal makes some football picks. Why does he call it the “War of 1812 Football Prognostication”? He likes history, he’s Canadian, and it probably has something to do with those two facts. That’s all we’ve got.)
Thursday, December 11, 2014
8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time
Arizona @ SAINT LOUIS (-4) 40.5
We have been holding this back all year, and we just can’t take it anymore.
Thank goodness this College Football regular season ended without any controversy and we are all singing in the streets and hailing the first “FBS” College Playoff!
Now that the Kangaroo Kollege Kourt of Chief Justice Condelezza Rice, Jeff Long & the Supreme Court Committee of Chumps have made their final four team College Football selection for the inaugural “Playoff” we can vent our oh so appreciative praise & seething disgust.
Isn’t it great when giant collegiate behemoths, corporate interests, greedy television networks & numerous other wealthy benefactors/vested interests get together and “solve” a problem of their own creation? Yes, we now have a solution to the problems inherent in the Frankenstein monster miscarriage of injustice known as the BCS.
This lovely, egalitarian, satisfying and All American “Democratic” solution is working perfectly.
Well, one out of four is true, this is truly an All American solution, the kind of solution borne of reckless greed, lust for power & wanton disregard for the human & institutional wreckage it doth wrought upon those foolish enough to not heed the dictums of the all powerful or fail to avoid the stampede of the pork belly express.
Wall Street, the Koch Brothers’ Political Philosophy and the type of Economic Trusts & Monopolies that Theodore Roosevelt fought to neuter through greater Presidential powers via anti-trust laws & regulatory control, all hail the “New All American Non-BCS Excuse for a College Playoff.”
At this point we will? will not? acknowledge the preposterous propaganda ……. take the bait & moronically debate the ridiculous arguments as to whether:
1.) Does a Head to Head match-up mean more than the total body of work?
Yes, ….No, ….. Maybe. The same result may mean yes one week & no the next week, …. in the case of Baylor over TCU probably only if no other team with more potential television ratings is not available to take one of the coveted four spots in the “Playoff.”
2.) Does the Big 12 get penalized for not having a playoff?
Absolutely! ….. How dare they not get in line like everybody else and have a single unassailable champion. Co-champions TCU & Baylor have no business in the Playoff because we don’t like breaking ties.
{ unless Texas & Oklahoma are tied as Big XII Champion, then something else would have had to been worked out.}
3.) Could an SEC West Division four loss runner-up get in over everyone else simply because everyone says the SEC is God’s gift to College Football?
…… How Patently Stupid! ……. Of course. …. If this was a totally fair process, it would only be SEC West teams in the playoff. Sure, it would seem a little incestuous, but the SEC is tough. It is so tough that they are totally justified in never playing any non conference teams of note on the road and scheduling teams like Chaminade, Western Carolina AT&T and Furman before rivalry week at the end of the year.
4.) Does beating a team that was supposed to be good early in the year hurt you if they turn out to not be so good as the year wears on?
My personal favorite. If a team you beat early in the year plays well for the rest of the year it helps your status. So if you beat a team, don’t beat them too bad, hurt any of their best players or crush their will to live. …… Also, pray that they don’t get any key injuries later in their schedule and subsequently lose games and diminish the glory of your previous win over them. Because obviously, if that happens, they were never that good in the first place.
{ unless of course you are Ohio State and you lose by double digits early in the year to probably the worst Virginia Tech team since Frank Beamer arrived in Hokieville.}
5.) The committee says that if you suffer key injuries but still have a good record, they will consider not taking you in the playoff because they can foresee with their second sight how you won’t probably be competitive.
{ unless of course you are Ohio State, playing your third string quarterback and then wax a ridiculously overrated Wisconsin from by far the worst conference in this sorry mess. The Mountain West is tougher than the Big X and so is the WAC, and they have been defunct for several years. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Wisconsin decided at halftime to “enhance” the Buckeyes’ margin of victory to make “The” Ohio State look a lot better so that they could get in the big money-grab because a lot of that moolah comes to every individual team in the Conference. Heaven knows the Big Fraud Conference needs it. }
Who on earth believes this crap and that this special committee of wizened private agenda demigods can ascertain the correct answers to fraudulent unanswerable questions borne of the systems’ own selfish design.
Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time Notes as they pertain to BCS History:
The previous National Championship determination; The iconic, Michelangelo model of perfection & already nostalgically missed “BCS” was created by design to be an imperfect method of determining a National Champion by having theoretical #1 play mythological #2 in a rotating, year to year different Bowl Game. The other top teams would play in other “BCS” games, that didn’t necessarily involve the next highest ranking teams. This was because the big schools did not want to share any of the big prize money that went with these matches.
Also, the shady promoters of Bowl Games & the Television Networks refused to allow themselves to be forced to take teams that they didn’t think would draw people or ratings. So deserving sides missed out. Undefeated teams like Boise State, Hawaii, Marshall, Bowling Green or even Utah and TCU before they were promoted from the kid’s living room card table to the adult Thanksgiving dining room table of the “Superlative Six”
Later it was good-bye Big East Conference & the one year contractual survivor All American Conference replacement and the “Elite” devolved into the “Power Five” through hostile takeovers, fascist annexation & adaptation of a Jim Crow system of rejection of the great unwashed smaller conferences.
The BCS rankings that determined the big booty payouts to the selected teams & all the other loser members of their conferences were determined by a bureaucratic boondoggle more illogical, compromised & conveniently bias than a Warsaw Pact Nation’s Soviet sponsored Constitution during the Cold War.
These rankings involved an ever evolving undecipherable mix of a half dozen polls that were picked by:
1.) Journalists who covered college football and felt pressured to vote for their home teams and other teams from their conference while in the process not seeing or bothering to watch many of the other teams actually play.
2.) Coaches who never saw many of these teams ever play either since they were busy coaching on Saturday, or had their athletic directors, public relations reps, ball boys, girlfriends, pet dogs, unpaid interns or ex-wives fill out the ballot on a weekly basis.
3.) Jeff Sagarin & his Cray super computer whose theoretical statistical analysis led us to Cybermetrics, Moneyball and a generation of geeks who think they can determine the date of the next alien space ship landing on earth as well as the best teams in college football through a “Distillation of Chaos Theory” app on their i-phone that involves triangulation with the Sun and Mars during a rare Penumbra lunar eclipse.
Through bad public relations & outcry from fans the slime that created this system started adding games and then allowed one team from the “Separate but Unequal” conferences to play, usually drawing the worst of the automatic BCS qualifiers who unluckily were forced to share their toys with others and often lost the actual game, hurting the “Superiority” myth they & the 75 football experts under salary at ESPN all endlessly espoused.
This sharing was done more for legal considerations than magnanimous philanthropy. The NCAA & BCS scumbags were terrified that they would lose any lawsuit that questioned their hoarding of Division One Football television revenues by denying access completely through their rigged ball game.
That is why this present committee has again been forced by their lawyers to give one bid to “the untouchable caste” under this new system as well. As a result Boise State from the Mountain West gets a sleazy, low ranking of # 20 but does get to play #9 Arizona in a Bowl.
Marshall, who won the Conference USA title last week, fell right out of the rankings all together this week. Yes, this new committee of fair minded pigskin geniuses didn’t even rank any teams from outside the “Privileged Quintet” till three weeks ago, but they only allowed Boise & Marshall to dwell among the final three spots. Boise State is now the only one left.
Strange, because even in the past, under the previously rigged system, …… usually at least four or five “Non Automatic Qualifiers” got ranked in the top 25 by the end of the season, and Boise even hit the top four.
This is by design. Condy & the “Convocation of the Infallible” includes virtually nobody from the smaller conferences & that is how they like it. By denying them even token rankings, coupled with the big boys’ eventual future plans to reward financial compensation to players, reduce academic entry requirements, expand rosters & allow only “Power Five” teams to transfer players without penalty amongst each other, ….. these monopolists hope to strangle the other FBS teams while professing ignorance and claiming everything is being done for the good of the game and fans.
So with these progressive measures squeezing the smaller schools & literally no “Playoff Poll” ranking by the committee, they hope to hurt their recruiting efforts so that any athlete of note that they don’t already have will be enticed to come to their university, be parked on the big school expanded scholarship roster of 120 something football players and will probably never, ever play football in an actual game.
So thank you Condy Rice & your coadjutant bagmen for happily engaging in this dirty groundwork. ….. You sat on this panel, accepting compensation & making selections based on all sorts of problematic criteria and corrupted dispositions. …. You are at best conveniently naive, and at worst enthusiastic enablers.
Just another historically forgettable, fraudulent coterie of humanoid tools helping to lay the groundwork for the future “Brave New World” of even more exclusionary Division One College Football, smilingly complicit in their role as coadjutant bagmen.
Last Sunday before the game in Washington DC the St. Louis Rams again showed civilian disobedience by wearing t-shirts that read “I can’t breathe” in sympathy with the police killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island. This follows their “Hands up” protest two weeks ago in St. Louis before the Raiders’ match in sympathy with the events in nearby Ferguson, Missouri.
In the two games, they have won by a collective score of 76-0.
They should continue to voice these protests for the rest of the year so they will easily slide into the playoffs.
The Cardinals got a much needed win last week at home over the Chiefs. QB Drew Stanton actually completed some key passes & the Chiefs lost a questionable turnover overturn ruling late in the game that stopped Kansas City from winning. The Chiefs also continued their year long streak of not completing a TD pass to a wide receiver.
Short week, at home against a team that is more challenged offensively than even the Rams. St. Louis should roll.
Hope to see more Rams’ civil disobedience displays on Thursday, hopefully with an even expanded focus. It is refreshing to see athletes adopt some form of social awareness and responsibility in an era of rampant non participation in social causes.
“Free Leonard Peltier”
Pick: RAMS (-4)
Bob: RAMS -4
