But on occasion he applies his magnificent brain to other sports (his Slate piece from last March about when a lead in a college basketball game is officially "safe" was fantastic and well worth checking out), and today's article in Slate about the BCS is spot-dead-on. Too many money quotes to list, SO READ THE DAMN LINK ALREADY, but the best is the closer:
Simply put, Bill James is The Balls.But until that happens, statisticians, quantitative analysts, and all related professionals should have the dignity, the self-respect, and the common sense to have nothing to do with the BCS. This isn't a national championship—it's a big-money waltz. The only role that the computer rankings play in this is that they're there to take the fall when the system doesn't work—and it doesn't work most of the time. When it doesn't, you can put the blame on the greedy small schools that wanted to milk money from the big football factories, on the greedy big schools that wanted to keep as much money as possible in the fewest possible hands, on the lunk-head football coaches who can't program a computer to play tic-tac-toe but want to make all the rules, or on the Congress that sits idly by and watches it happen. You guys want to make a mess of this, you can make a mess of it without our help.
