A reasonable football playoff proposal…

The folks over at Football Outsiders have come up with a pretty good playoff proposal for Div I FBS College Football.  It incorporates all the conference champs, 5 at-large teams, and allows for the continuation of the current bowl system.  The only things that are dealbreakers are probably the elimination of the conference championship games, and the removal of the 12th game of the regular season.

But overall, I think it’s a very workable proposal.

Thirteen+ months later…

So it’s been a long time… and I need to get back in the swing of blogging. Since I’ve last blogged, I’ve seen (among other things):

• The birth of my second child
• a 13-3 record for my Dallas Cowboys, only to get nipped by the juggernaut that was the eventual Super Bowl Champ Giants in the playoffs
• My Cal Bears being about 90 minutes away from the #1 ranking in the land, only to see that slip away in the final seconds of a loss to Oregon State, followed by one of the all-time implosions (impressive even by Cal standards)
• Those same bears firing the men’s basketball coach and replacing him with a fantastic coach whose most recent college job was the head coach at Cal’s arch-rival, Stanfurd… and strangely enough, the firing came the day immediately after I sent a long, passionate letter to the athletic director indicating my displeasure with the direction of the basketball team (not that there was any cause-and-effect, but it was still a strange coincidence)
• My Angels losing twice in the postseason, both times to the Red Sox, and “blessed” with management that doesn’t seem to understand much about how to identify quality offensive players (outside of the trade for Mark Teixeira, who many people think will spurn the Angels for greener pastures)
• A very intense Democratic primary, with 3 high-quality candidates, in which my first choice dropped out the day after I decided to donate money to him, and then later was found to have been hiding an affair which would have crushed his presidential hopes had he won the nomination (and has effectively scuttled a future in politics for him… John Edwards, I think that you showed an unforgivable level of arrogance in hiding that affair)
• A mixed-race candidate win the presidential nomination of a major party
• A supposedly democratic congress caving to a president with record-high levels of unpopularity and granting him powers (and granting telecoms retroactive immunity) that a republican congress was unable to give him
• The banking deregulation chickens coming home to roost in the recent economic crisis, in which the current administration’s initial response was to give away, with no strings attached, $700 billion of taxpayer money to the very people who created the mess(!)

I’ve left out many things, of course, but those were some of the first things I thought when i thought about what I would have blogged about. My impetus for blogging again today was a quote I saw from David Sedaris in the New Yorker (h/t Balloon Juice):

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I don’t know if anyone could have put it better (although I will admit that after reading the full article, I don’t know if it was intended with the same implications that I read into it)… However, I’ll just leave it at that and let you decide .

One final link…. A great post by Ta-Nehisi Coates.