The NCAA is back in the news once again for a potentially monumental mistake on their part. However, the newest topic of discussion regarding the governing body of collegiate athletics is much more than a mere tournament snub (a yearly occurrence), recruiting violation (again, an annual thing nowadays), or a player overconsumption-of-food violation (#pastagate, never forget), but rather the awarding of a recent national championship trophy to the wrong team. It’s hard to imagine anybody, even the notoriously inept NCAA, bungling something high profile. But as emerging data from the highly credible people at MyTeamIsBetterThanYourTeam.com suggests, the BCS championship’s crystal football trophy should actually be on display not at Florida State University but right here in Golden at the Colorado School of Mines.
‘How could that be?’ one might ask, as the Seminoles capped off a perfect 14-0 season competing in college football’s highest level, while the Orediggers posted a respectable, though not spectacular, 8-3 mark in Division II. A valid question, but the methodology of the folks at MTIBTYT.com uses logic implying that final records might not be everything. More importantly, their algorithm for crowning a potential champion places heavy on the quality of a team’s competition, namely: 1) who a team has beaten, 2) who those defeated teams have beaten, and in the case of FSU not 3) how teams have fared against similar opponents. Each individual game in this successive chain of ‘Team A beat Team B, who beat Team C…’ etc., known as ’rounds’, is assigned a ‘score’ relative to the final scores of these games in question. These individual scores are then combined and compared vs. any other team in the NCAA (in this case Florida State).
Now that the methodological background has been put into place, all one needs to do is apply it to the 2013-14 football season to see that CSM does in fact merit some consideration in a hypothetical re-crowning of the seasons football champion, as the Orediggers actually best the Seminoles in 15 rounds by a combined score of 582-427.
***NOTE: accompanying .jpg table needed to give the above score context, please don’t print this line***
*Table credit to MyTeamIsBetterThanYourTeam.com
But while the evidence is great and the claim is legitimate, CSM can talk and lobby and protest all it wants and it is virtually guaranteed that nothing will come of it. The NCAA never likes to admit that it can be wrong and rarely does, so this debate will more than likely end up being one more that is swept under their rug and never spoken of again. So move over 2003 Southern California, 2004 Auburn, 2008 Utah, and 2010 TCU. Make room for the 2013 Orediggers at the table of recent teams that were robbed of a shot at the football national title.
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