BCS Update

Longtime readers of this blog no doubt recall the entry a few years ago about the BCS and the need to dismantle it in favor of college football playoffs. Astonishingly, this may actually come true, but not without a lot of speculation about “Armageddon” scenarios for the final season of the BCS: it appears possible that there will be two undefeated teams, neither of whom automatically qualify for a championship game, along with a large number of very good teams with one loss. And if this happens then the last year of the BCS will be one in which the subjective nature of its ranking system will be exposed to a greater degree than its creators ever imagined. We can’t claim full responsibility for the elimination of the BCS, but the fact of the matter is that we wrote on this blog about the need for playoffs, and sometime later they came about despite seemingly impossible odds. Therefore, in the hopes of making further progress in American football, we would like to recommend another important change: the NFL and college football should convert to metric units. This would likely have many benefits, one of which would be to increase the appeal of American football to an international audience, most of whom consider football to be what Americans call soccer. The simplest way to implement this change would be to convert the field length to 100 meters long by 50 meters wide. Endzones would be 10 meters long. Goal posts would be 3 meters off the ground and 6 meters wide. Footballs would be 3 decimeters long and 6 decimeters in circumference at the center, and they would be inflated to about 90 kPa. This is all pretty straightforward, though it might require that some stadiums be renovated or rebuilt, but we think that the fans who see the value of metric units won’t mind paying higher taxes to build new stadiums. However, the real advantages could be gained in scoring. With the conventional scoring system it’s often hard to tell what sequence of events led up to a particular score. For example, today the Packers won against the Cowboys 37-36 (despite seemingly impossible odds after the first half). How did this come about? We can only speculate and wonder from the score alone. However, an alternative could be a system where touchdowns and field goals are treated separately, and this could be achieved using complex numbers. In that case the score would be Packers 34+3i and the Cowboys 21+15i. The absolute value of the scores would be Packers 34.13, Cowboys 25.81, and using this system it would be clear that this game wasn’t as close as it seemed. This would justify the use of scientific calculators during football, which at the very least would be a fun episode to watch on the The League. It could happen.

Comments (2)

2 thoughts on “BCS Update

  1. what next, cats sleeping with dogs? if football went metric, i’m pretty sure the universe would explode.

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