Relegation and College Football

This week marks a lull in Wildcat sports between the inglorious end to a surprisingly frisky basketball season and the beginning of spring football speculation, with women's lacrosse season in the midst of pre-tourney doldrums. In addition, baseball season is still a week a way, and the Bulls and Hawks are comfortably locked into a inevitably disappointing playoff berths, which means it is time for some groundless speculation on ruining sports in the sprit of previous entires on an all-Chicago prebasketball tournament and a way to liven up the NIT that potentially does not end in gruesome death for all participants.

RELEGATION

Once every two years, a major world soccer tournament rolls around and I get temporarily sucked into soccer fandom. It's easy to get sucked into international soccer because everyone cares unlike the gutless pinko heretics who decry the World Baseball Classic as a waste of time, and it is a good time to gain a dated knowledge of soccer stars who may or may not be washed up by the time the next tournament rolls around.

French midfielder Franck Ribery had a
great World Cup run in 2006, and then
disappeared from my consciousness until
he crashed the Bayern Munich team bus
in January. In the understated tradition
of the British tabloid, the website writes
that "The hotel were left fuming by the
damage and the fact that Ribery didn’t
have a bus driving licence, and
embarrassed Bayern general manager
Uli Hoeneß had to suffer the consequences
of Ribery’s prankery."

European soccer, in addition from boasting homemade stadium pyrotechnics and films about hooliganism inexplicably starring Elijah Wood, has relegation, a brilliant system that adds drama to the bottom of the table as crappy teams attempt to avoid demotion to a lower-tiered league. For example, the 2007-8 Fulham team managed to avoid relegation from the Premiership with what fans called the "Great Escape" triggering celebratory youtube tribute videos about finishing in firmly in 17th place.


Fulham were captained by U.S. soccer legend and current Fire forward Brian McBride
getting a face full of elbow from Old Robert DeNiro, who showed no remorse at the post-game
press conference

RELEGATION AND COLLEGE FOOTBALL

If there's any sport that can benefit from relegation, it is college football. Much like the English Premiership, college football is top-heavy and dominated by a few heavyweights, with lower level teams in BCS conferences and non-BCS conference teams having little to play for but berths in crappy bowl games. While BYCTOM ardently supports all crappy bowl games, this is not enough. More importantly, high-level "BCS buster" teams such as Boise State have shown that they deserve a chance to prove themselves in BCS conferences and bedevil teams with trick plays such as The Annexation of Puerto Rico.

The Annexation of Puerto Rico infuriated both Ed O'Neil and Pedro
Albizu

With the stark difference between BCS schools and mid-majors, annexation would work well for college football.

RELEGATION IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL: A PROPOSAL

This model pairs BCS conferences with mid-major conferences-- the Big Ten and the MAC, the Big 12 with the Mountain West, the SEC with the Sun Belt, and the Pac 10 with the WAC. The winner of the mid-major conference moves up to the BCS conference and the team with the worst record in the BCS conference in relegated to the mid-major conference (sorted in priority by overall record with conference wins and head-to-head as tiebreakers.) Because there are six BCS teams and only five midmajor conferences, the ACC and Big East are both associated with Conference USA. The ACC swaps with the C-USA winner, while the Big East gets the Conference USA runner up. This is not perfect, but I use those conferences because C-USA is the mid-major with the most football teams and the Big East the BCS conference with the fewest.

Fig. 1: BCS-Mid-Major conference pairings.

Using the Big Ten as an example, Indiana would be relegated to the MAC East, replacing MAC champion Buffalo. This model privileges winners of conference championship games, especially as a way to make BCS conference fans more excited about mid-major conference championships other than ESPN's insane scrolling commentary from internet users and the Lloyd Bridges Glue Sniffing Society.


Fig. 2: Relegation in the Big Ten. Note that Indiana is relegated due to
conference losses, although alternate models may invoke the Michigan
Relegation Schadenfreude Clause which allows Michigan to be relegated
whenever vaguely plausible in order to bring delight to college football
fans across the Midwest

Imagine how great college football would be with relegation. The Sweet Sioux Rivalry would have had serious ramifications in the last decade. UCONN and Duke would regularly play meaningful games in November. Programs like Boise State and Utah could get into BCS bowls without questions about their schedules. Imagine the joy at watching Michigan fighting to avoid playing in the MAC East for the next year, or a team like Buffalo coming out of nowhere to get a chance to play in the Big Ten. Imagine coaches of relegated SEC teams not only get fired, but also thrown into a moat filled with alligators that travels from SEC school to SEC school on the back of a flatbed truck to placate legions disappointed overall enthusiasts.


Actual Auburn booster Jimmy "Yella Fella" Rane expresses his
displeasure with an inexplicably grizzled Tommy Tuberville

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

The last post ended with a possibly spurious claim that the Harmonicats are the greatest all-Harmonica band of all time. Recently, I have discovered a potential challenger with a band called the Philharmonicas, who gain bonus points for performing Raymond Scott's Powerhouse.


I don't know if the Philharmonicas and the Harmonicats ever met, but my guess that it would look like a tiny version of the end of Desperado.

NIT Analysis

A disappointing week for sports as Northwestern ended its season in Tulsa in the first round of the NIT, the Honkballers fell to the U.S. in the World Baseball Classic, in the U.S. fell to Japan in the quarterfinals.

NIT WRAP-UP

The 'Cats lost another winnable game as they folded down the stretch and Tulsa's Uzoh and Jordan took over in the second half. They got into some turnover trouble and could not handle the intense, bug-eyed leer of Tulsa head coach Doug Wojcik who looks like his pre-game ritual involves taking piles of trucker-approved amphetamines and putting his forehead through various objects.

Wojcik springs into action after
spotting a pledge pin on a uniform

Wildcat fans also got short shrift, as we got stuck watching a double-overtime Duqesne-Viriginia Tech game that took up most of the first half and would have been thrilling if it didn't happen during the NIT or prevent me from watching Kevin Coble throw down off-balance one legged lefty scoop shots. We also got announcer Dickey Simpkins who spent the entire game shouting meaningless basketball cliches instead of using the broadcast to spout a venomous string of uncalled-for personal attacks on Jud Buechler from their days of battling to be the last guy on the Bulls' playoff roster during the second Three-Peat run.

The Buechler-Simpkins rivalry was the most compelling
subplot of the Bulls' second dynasty fuelled mainly by
Buechler's refusal to teach Simpkins how to fly up and
down the court on an invisible surfboard

Dickey Simpkins actually started on those abysmal 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 Bulls teams, and his Basketball Reference Page also reveals that his full name is the unparalleled LuBara Dixon Simpkins. Simpkins also now runs a training center in the Chicago suburbs, and his page includes a tremendous highlight reel as well as a fantastic demonstration of defense and offense.

FIXING THE NIT

The end of the 'Cats season is somewhat disappointing, although losing in the NIT is a less bitter pill than falling off the bubble for the NCAA tourney. Making the postseason was an important step, and frankly, performance in the NIT is essentially irrelevant. Having the NIT and other second-tier tournaments at the same time as the NCAA essentially kills all interest in them once the Madness starts up. The NIT has the right idea by kicking off on Wednesday to snag those who cannot wait one more day for their basketball fix, but after that, the tournament vanishes into background like another drunkard in Hogarth's Gin Lane lithograph.

Gin? What do I look like, a pox-ridden baby tosser?

If they want to make the NIT a ratings winner, they should condense the tournament into a single day on Wednesday by having the winners immediately play their next games with no break until only one team remains standing. They can start at 5:00 in the morning and crown the champion sometime early Thursday, with the exhausted champions carried out off the court onto a waiting parade float. It will give terrified walk-ons a chance to get some tournament experience sometime in the third or fourth consecutive game, and would definitely be a compelling lead-in to the NCAA tournament. Richard Dawson can host the whole thing, and they can get 500 people to shake money during the entire time.

A few minor changes make the NIT a must-watch
tournament, another sensible idea from BYCTOM

LET'S GO BELOW THE BORDER FOR SOME SOUTH AMERICAN JIVE

Tico Tico No Fubá is not just a jazz standard, but apparently some sort of mid-century musical phenomenon. The peppy Brazilian piece was written in 1917 by Zequinha de Abreu, but became popular in the US with its use in Disney's Saludos Amigos in the 1940s, after which musicians began rushing to cover it the way indie rock bands ironically flock to the A-Ha catalogue. The tune is fairly infectious, although an awkwardly phrased translation of the lyrics includes the phrase:

This tico-tico - he's the cuckoo in my clock.
And when he says: "Cuckoo!" he means it's time to woo

This WFMU blog entry cataloging 61 versions of Tico Tico remains consistently riveting. The blog has downloadable versions from luminaries such as Les Paul and Henry Mancini, as well as from the greatest all-harmonica outfit of all time, the Harmonicats.

The Harmonicats were born from an experiment to test
whether it would be more disconcerting for someone
to pull a tommie gun or a giant harmonica out of a
nondescript leather case

The Lucien Jeneusse version remains a personal favorite, but you would be doing yourself a personal disservice if you didn't drop what you are doing (including a small child if you are located near a supply of gin and a precarious wooden staircase) and download the Shooby Taylor version. I don't want to ruin too much, but it's a must have in the fusion genre combining scat singing and grand mal seizures.

Also of interest is Raymond Scott's version, not because it is particularly good but because Raymond Scott himself is a fascinating guy, putting together odd, quasi-jazz orchestral recordings in the late 1930s that were taken by Warner Brothers musical director Carl Stalling and used as the backbone of Looney Tunes soundtracks, most notably using the second half of Powerhouse as ubiquitous "factory music." Scott was also a notable pioneer in electronic music, and he dedicated his mature years to developing synthesizers and an electronic composing machine he called the Electronium.

Scott built his Electronium (right) after an unfortunate discovery that whirring tape
machines cannot be used for any purpose other than space lasers

At best, Tico Tico is a whirling cascade of notes, which is most effectively demonstrated by Ethel Smith, the "first lady of the organ," who gets down with her backing band, which I have dubbed the Squarenado.