Better Off Red: Absurdly Objective

For the most part, I can’t imagine anything could happen Sunday night in Columbus to convince me the Buckeyes are a better football team than the Badgers. Short of a 50-point blowout at the hands of Ohio State, my opinion of the Wisconsin football team will remain as it is today, and as it was before the shocking defeat in East Lansing last weekend. I still believe the Badgers are the best team in the Big Ten, I still think they are a top-10 team in the nation, and I still think they would have as good a chance as most any team to advance to the Championship Game in a college football playoff scenario.

What gives? The Badgers just lost their first true road game, the coach is being second-guessed, the previously unflappable quarterback has been resoundingly flapped. The audacity of suggesting that my opinions could go unswayed by such events. Penn State is obviously the best team in the Big Ten Leaders division–they’re 4-0! Of course, claiming Penn State isn’t the best team in their division despite their record is objectively analogous to claiming Wisconsin is the best despite their record. I’d imagine few people outside Happy Valley are truly confident in the dominance of Penn State.

I remember back when the New England Patriots were in the later weeks of their undefeated regular season, I was reading the introduction to ESPN’s NFL Power Rankings, which openly wondered how the rankings would change should the Patriots drop a contest. The conclusion: they wouldn’t. The Patriots had been too dominant the entire season for the voters to be swayed by a single flub. Now, the power rankings on ESPN’s website wield no influence on which teams make it to the postseason; the NCAA football rankings are essentially the only things that matters in the college game’s counterpart. So while the difference is mostly a “spiritual” one, there’s a functional disconnect that highlights how temperamental the college football rankings can be.

Wisconsin, already sitting in precarious territory in the first edition of the BCS Standings, tumbled dramatically following their loss to the Spartans. A National Championship is essentially an impossibility at this point. So what’s the difference between this Badger football team and the one from last week? The record. The volume of wins and losses they’ve racked up, which means more to voters, analysts, projections, and computers than any other number, player, or highlight. It’s almost paradoxical how wins–the stat teams want to accumulate more than any other–can be both the most important and least telling number of all. While varying in degrees, the problem mimics the pitching win in baseball. To say that pitcher wins are worthless is accurate but a bit misleading. Every major league pitcher would like to earn as many wins as possible (it means his team is winning), but failing to do so does not preclude success, individual or team, while piling up wins doesn’t always require pitching well.

“Least telling” is overstating it. A 2-3 win difference says a lot about the relative quality of a pair of teams. But the only reason opinions of football teams swing wildly from week-to-week is because of the structure of the season. It’s ludicrous to make a concrete evaluation of a baseball team after one game of 162. We do it with football teams every week because we have to. If you don’t overreact fast enough, you’re not going to get a chance to overreact at all. So I’m putting my foot down.

So allow me to ask, once more, what gives? One loss via Hail Mary to a ranked team on the road and suddenly the number of teams that are “better” than Wisconsin increases fivefold? Those teams may have done more to earn those ranks than Wisconsin, but I’m not ready to accept that each and every one is better. I could be arguing a different question than the one those rankings are asking. Either way, my stubbornness will remain. Objective stubbornness. I know Wisconsin is a better team than Ohio State. I’ve seen Ohio State’s offense–it’s not pretty. I’ve seen the same Wisconsin defense described as “slightly above average” by self-loathing Wisconsin sports radio hosts–it’s better than that. It would be a minor surprise if the Badgers lost this game–it wouldn’t change their true talent level. It would be a disaster-and-a-half , make no mistake. But over a full 162-game season, I know Wisconsin is going to finish on top.

Er, wait, I’m confused.

Afterword: Presented in 90% of situations, this reads as nothing more than homerist delusions. But I’d feel entirely comfortable replacing “Wisconsin” with “Oklahoma”, changing the specifics appropriately, and rolling with that. It’s the nature of the beast.