Dubious Assertions at TMQ and Another Argument For a Playoff in College Football

I used to look forward with great anticipation to Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback. And Easterbrook is so undeniably smart and provocative that I still read his epic columns regularly. But at least three or four times in any given one of his discursive, sometimes self-indulgent Tuesday articles I practically shout at my computer screen. Let me provide a couple of examples from this week's entry. I am going to excerpt judiciously, which I know is always a fraught endeavor inasmuch as context always matters and I want to be honest in my assessments of his arguments. Please go back to the original if you want the whole of each of these sections of his article.

First I am going to start off with an aside that he makes in an argument about expanding the NFL Hall of Fame -- an argument that I fundamentally buy, but the aside embodies the Easterbrook style:

Comparisons of Canton to baseball's Cooperstown, which only admits a few per year, aren't valid owing to the larger number of players involved in football and to its status as the quintessential team sport. (Teammates matter more in football than baseball, thus more should be honored.)

Note the ipse dixit assertion: "Teammates matter more in football than baseball." Do they? In baseball, every single player is going to have his one-on-one moment where he is fully responsible for his teammates. On any given play, the ball can go anywhere on the field where the fielder will be responsible for making a play. Football players work together as units in a way that baseball players do not, to be sure. But I'm not certain how that means that teammates somehow don't matter as much in baseball. Unless, of course, easterbrook knows of a way in which it would be possible for either, say, a pitcher or catcher to function without the other. And I would never argue something so ultimately impossible to prove as that teammates matter more in baseball than in football. Doing so either way is silly, and to simply assert it as fact is fairly representative of Easterbrook's occasional assert-don't-prove writing style.

The second example reveals one of Easterbrook's other signature moves -- mocking those who disagree with one of his assertions even when his own internal logic dictates that maybe those assertions are not all that he believes that they are. In the midst of an argument that itself is full of inconsistencies and dubious assertions, Easterbrook writes the following:

At this point Appalachian State of beautifully rustic Boone, N.C., is not only good, it's the hottest team in college football at any level. Stretching back to last season, Appalachian State has won three consecutive do-or-die playoff games, then won a championship game, then defeated the nation's No. 5 team on its own turf. Short-term, no football factory school has done anything so impressive. BCS defending champion Florida beat Ohio State, but then wimped out by next scheduling Western Kentucky, a cupcake. Preseason No. 1 USC's short-term performance isn't even close to the Appalachian State run: in their three most recent outings the Trojans lost to UCLA, then won a bowl game, then faced a second-echelon team in Idaho. Appalachian State has won five consecutive max-pressure contests – the Mountaineers are the hottest team south of the NFL. And should New Orleans upset the Colts in the NFL opener, Appalachian State would become the hottest team in football, anywhere, period.

Now note that Easterbrook is celebrating Appalachian State's victory over Michigan. And yet in the same paragraph he argues that Florida "wimped out" by scheduling "Western Kentucky, a cupcake." And so on he goes, insulting the teams that the major programs schedule even while celebrating a win by Appalachian State in a game that beforehand had equal "cupcake" implications. Easterbrook clearly loves that Michigan lost a game that he believes they should never have scheduled even though without scheduling them they could have never lost.

The reality, which the Appalachian State win shows, is that the lines between the levels of college football are more blurred than most people would imagine. Appalachian State is a multi-time Division IAA national champion. In any given year I would strongly press the case that qualitatively the IAA National Champion (and a handful of other elite programs at that level) is easily as good as a large number, quite likely a majority, of IA programs (and yes, I realize the NCAA recognizes a far more cumbersome title for the former IA and IAA schools but let's stick with the old titles for simplicity's and sanity's sake). When all is said and done, Michigan may well end up as a top-25 team, probably far more than that. They have a lot less to be ashamed of than most of the college football experts would have you believe. It is possible for Michigan to be a very good football team that just happened to lose to a very good team in a lower division.

And here is another pretty important point: These small schools line up to get a shot at playing the big guys. Sometime David throws a scare into Goliath. And while this past weekend's game in the Big House marks the biggest upset, it was not the only time in recent history when a IAA team knocked off a IA team, or even a BCS conference IA team. (New Hampshire beat Northwestern a year ago, for example.)

To be sure, football probably has the biggest disparity between divisions because of the size-strength-speed-numbers factor, which creates a multiplier effect. But at all levels and across sports the little guys beat the bigger guys, and that includes DIII upstarts occasionally taking down the DI guys, especially in sports such as track and swimming, but also including basketball.

Finally, as long as there is an incentive for the big time programs to keep a pristine record for the purpose of the BCS, these seemingly lopsided matchups will characterize the early stages of the college football season. There is only one solution: A playoff system in which enough teams and conferences are represented that it does not pay off to schedule true cupcakes, but in which the little guys in the IA ranks are not kept out by virtue of the current BCS conferences refusing to play them. Make it a 16 or more team playoff in which every conference gets at least one representative, in which there will be no allowance for IA independents (join a damned conference, Notre Dame!), and that would allow for five at-large berths that would presumably go to schools from the major conferences. Until that happens, the highest level of college football, for all of its pageantry and wonder and greatness, will never really be a sport we can take fully seriously.

All that said, I love seeing TMQ if for no other reason than that it means the NFL season is upon us.