Mediocrity

I had a harm time debating whether to write about how George Bush's farewell address reminded me of a girl and guy breaking off a relationship that neither of us wanted to be in. In fact we've both been cheating on each other since August, we just couldn't get ourselves to end it.

But this week I have to salute Major League Baseball for the best thing that they have done in years. MLB network shows a classic game every day in the afternoon. Today I'm watching the 1991 Cubs-Pirates classic which ended 13-12. With a little help from my friends at Baseball-Almanac.com I can tell you that Greg Maddox, Ryan Sandberg, Rick Sutcliffe, Shawon Dunston, Andre Dawson, Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, Joe Girardi, Jay Bell, Mark Grace and Andy Van Slyke are all on the rosters with coaching staffs that include Don Zimmer, "The Rabbit" Ray Miller and Jim Leyland.

Every game seems to give you a few sure fire HOFers, a few coaches that you've heard of or are still around, and the subject of my tribute today The Mediocres. These are players that will never be very good. If they make an All-Star game it is a complete accident. If they win a World Series it won't be their fault.

These are the players that seem to stick around forever, play on a ton of teams and somehow leave a lasting impression in your mind. They might have been young once, with a lot of potential. They may have had the ability to hit .270-.300 and never demanded a lot of salary. They may have been an ex-superstar who ended up injury plagued. From this game I can give you examples of each of these.

Bobby Bonilla came up and was a young corner outfielder for the Pirates. He was supposed to team up with Barry and would have been the franchise. But Barry left and the Pirates figured out that Bobby wasn't all that good. He started in two All-Star games early in his career. He won a World Series in 1997 with the Marlins, both of which were accidents. He played on 8 teams (one twice) in 16 years. He led the league in extra base hits once, games played once and sacrifice flies twice. He led the league in salary three consecutive years. He pitched an inning in his last season and ended his career with an 18.00 era and a balk. Go figure.

Mark Grace had a sweet stroke and never made more than 5.3 million, hit fairly well, but never led the league. Hit no more that 16 home runs. Played in three All-Star games, but never started. Played and won a World Series.

Andy Van Slyke used to be really good, a rising star, and then he got hurt and was sequestered to mediocrity the rest of his career.

My favorite of the Mediocres are the ones that are instilled in your mind because of an event they had a part in. Brady Anderson striking out before Cal Ripken got a chance to win the game in his last at bat ever. Jay Bell jumping into Matt Williams arms to win the 2001 World Series. There are a million of these incidents.

The best thing about the MLB is that they don't really have good footage of any game before 1988, which means that most of their classics are from either the World Series or games that would have people in them that I know.

I understand that unless you are a baseball fan then you probably don't care. So I will get around to writing about our broken relationship with the Prez, don't worry.

My (Democratic) Solution to the BCS

I think just about no one will agree with my solution without an explanation, or even with one, so here it is. I am tired of talks about a college football playoff system. It won't happen without Barrack Obama stepping in, and I don't think he's going to have the time to do that for a few years. (Yes I admit I would rather have him work on improving the job market so that I don't have nearly as much time to watch football.)

So instead of letting a certain number of voters vote, or plugging everyone into a computer- let's let America decide. The first two systems are inherently flawed by human bias, so why not allow everyone to share their biased opinions.

Oh, and instead of a popular vote I want to use the electoral college. If it's good enough to pick the President of the United States of America, I think it just might be good enough to pick the college football champion.

Yes I know it's biased, but it's not nearly as biased as you think it might be. Anyone wanting to stuff the ballot would only be able to do so in their own state (unless they take a road trip, but if they want it that bad I am prepared to give it to them). My system doesn't favor bigger schools with bigger budgets who play in bigger conferences. It doesn't matter if you've won your last 11 after losing your first, or vice-versa. All that matters is that you get on the ballot. To do that you have to 1) Go undefeated or 2) Win your important BCS bowl game or 3) Play in the National Championship game. I'm going to use ESPN's poll of the Sports Nation (yes that is a real thing) as my source for determining the winner.

Right now five teams are in the poll- USC, Florida, Oklahoma, Utah and Texas. The great thing about this poll is that it has the state by state breakdown. So USC will get California, Florida will get the SEC, Texas will get Texas and the Big XII south, Oklahoma gets the Big XII North, Utah gets Utah and points north, and who knows who gets the rest. Campaigning in New England and the Great Lakes will determine who wins my national championship this year.

As of when I decided to write this USC was winning with 233 electoral votes. Florida was next with 133 and Utah was Ralph Nader with their 73 votes. Texas had 34 and Oklahoma had 29. There were around 200,000 votes in. Since we've gone to print Maine and Minnesota have changed to undecided.

At press time I called Bananas the Bear (if you didn't know, he is the mascot of the U of Maine football team) and he agreed to be delegate for his state. At the time that I asked him he said that he would support splitting Maine's four votes, giving 2 to Florida and 1 each to Utah and USC. Herbie the Husker said that all 5 of his votes were going to Oklahoma.

Right now USC is sitting pretty with one hundred more votes than the next team. However they have slim leads in New York, Illinois, South Dakota, Delaware and Ohio. That's 78 votes they could drop right there. The only bad news for Trojan haters out there is that Florida is behind in half of them and Utah is behind in the other half- so even if the Trojans do drop points, no one will pick up enough of them.

The most votes that Utah could end up with realistically is 147, USC would still have 155. So unless something weird happens, like USC dropping all of its contested states and Florida picking up all of the undecideds and New York, USC will take home my first ever electoral college championship. The Sports Nation has spoken.

If you aren't interested in the political science aspect of this turn around now. Take the blue pill and wake up in your nice cozy bed.

While campaigning for President both sides had a pretty good idea of which states were going to be swing states well before the election. Usually the Great Lakes- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan- that sort of deal. However with five possible teams in the poll, the swing states won't be determined until after the poll is set, which is immediately before the voting.

This year there are two Big XII teams, a Pac 10 team, an SEC team and Utah. Since most things in college are split down conference lines it should be safe to assume that the Pac 10 states will go with their team, the SEC with theirs, and the Mountain West with Utah. The Big XII split up North and South, which unfortunately for Texas means that they only got the South (Texas), while Oklahoma got all points north.

Keeping the focus on conferences we will notice the lack of a Big Ten team. That puts the Big Ten states on swing alert. They may not all vote together since they don't have one of their own to root for. Penn State, having just lost to USC, may want to see the team they lost to be national champions. Ohio State may vote for Texas for the same reason. Or they might just vote for Utah to spice things up a bit.

New England, for the most part, will always be swing. There is no, sorry Bananas, good college football in New England on a regular basis. So New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey will pretty much always be up for grabs.

So while Florida controls the South, and in a Presidential election that will always keep you close, they are still at a distinct advantage. The SEC and the ACC overlap- and while the ACC will never be a football conference like the SEC will, they could still steal votes. What if the ACC has Miami or Florida State and the SEC has Tennessee or South Carolina? The ACC team could steal those votes.

Lets look back to some of the past races that would have happened. Last year the poll would have had six teams in it- LSU, USC, Georgia, Ohio State, West Virginia, and Missouri. This poll would have been a little closer, Missouri would have had 63 Big 12 votes, USC would have had the 83 Pac Ten votes, and other than that...? LSU and Georgia would have fought over the SEC, West Virginia might have gotten Big East votes (do those exist), and Ohio State may or may not have gotten Michigan votes (would they really vote for the Buckeye's in Anne Arbor?)

Breaking it down based on votes this year, and conference line votes here is how I think it might have ended up- USC would have 120 votes, LSU 97, Georgia 77, Ohio St. 96, West Virginia 48, Missouri 80, and I didn't give out 21 votes. These tallies assume that I split up the SEC correctly, I gave Florida's 27 votes to Georgia.

Let's take a team out of the poll. Any team. If you take out Georgia, LSU gets 74 more votes and wins the poll fairly easily. Take out West Virginia and Georgia gets 13 more while 35 votes become harded to decide. Take out Ohio St. or USC and you have a whole different map, with the Great Lakes and Pacific up for grabs. This year if we take out Utah, Oklahoma or Texas the game changes.

By the way apparently the Sport's Nation does not have a Twenty-Third Amendment, so DC's 3 votes get lumped in with Maryland's.

Looking along conference lines the Pac 10 controls 83 votes, the SEC 90, the Big XII 79, the Big 10 117, the ACC 102 and the Big East 134. Go figure. There is overlap in each conference except for the Pac 10. Three conferences claim Florida. The biggest state not taken by a conference only has 5 votes.

There are so many variables to my system that it would be difficult to guess the winner before the election. Currently USC has the most votes in a popular election, but only by 1 percentage point over Florida. They are up by 100 electoral votes.

I admit that my system is not the most fair, but it might be the most interesting. And since we're leaving it up to chance anyway with the polls that I have no say over counting into a computer system that I did not invent, we might as well let the Sports Nation decide.

If there are updates in the races I will add them on as comments.

The Antonymous Relationship of Hapless and Hopeless

I woke up on New Year's Day and promptly went back to sleep. When I got up a second time though, it was about 11am and I felt different. I know people generally don't feel different when they are 22 years 364 days old as apposed to when they are 23, and I know that New Year's Eve and New Years Day ought to feel just about the same, but this year it didn't.

I don't know if there was hope brewing in me, or if I had just enjoyed my hotel room, but I felt different walking around Baltimore on New Year's Day. And then I realized that it was 1 and Alex Pyzik had been sitting in a couch watching sports for two hours. He was competing in the ESPNZone Couch Potato Competition. All he had to do was sit in a chair and watch sports longer than three other individuals and he would win a gluttony of prizes.

Since we've graduated, and I mean a collective 'we', I know only two people that like what they do for a living. Others are fine doing what they are doing but want to move on. They are suffering through their jobs in order to get better ones, or to get grad school paid for. Those of us without real jobs are scrapping by, substitute teaching, working at bars, doing what we can to last out this economy.

But as I enter my fourth month of job hunting I realize that their is little hope. Not much has changed, there still aren't a lot of jobs to be had. Some of my friends are giving up and going back to school.

But as Pyzik was sitting there in that chair, he was sitting there with a part of me. He was the part of me that didn't need a job, didn't need a different way to validate myself, just needed to sit in a chair and watch sports to be famous.

I was rooting for him, but as you can probably guess it's hard to root for a guy sitting in a chair. It's not like rooting for any sports team or person that you can imagine. I couldn't watch him, I couldn't tune into SportsCenter for my 11 pm update. But I could get text messages.

So on the night of the first I went home and recovered from the previous evening. It was around 11 when I got the text that Pyzik was still going. My symbol of hope had lasted 12 hours in the chair so far. He was showing the type of resilience that I would need for the next few months to find a job.

On the night of the second I went to visit my girlfriend and then went out. Pyzik was still sitting in that chair. The next night I went to a birthday party for one of my lovely ladies, and Pyzik was still sitting in that chair. It was two in the morning, and I got the message that he was five hours away from the world record.

That was my boy, five hours from the world record. Five hours later he would set it and win the championship. After that he was hopeless again, Pyzik is a Religious Studies Major, and other than his current job has nothing in the horizon. He jumped back into the big pot with the rest of us. But in the mean time he was a hero.

Which brings me to my original thesis. We as a generation are hopeless, but we are not hapless. We have ability, we just need a job, a way to prove ourselves. We are qualified, if not over qualified for most jobs, but those jobs don't exist. We are not lucky, we are not betting on ourselves. We know the truth, we know the situation, but we don't care.

Pyzik was us, protesting. He didn't need a job for those almost three full days in a chair. He was doing what God put him on this earth to do, and that was all that any of us could hope for. We hope for job's that we like, that we were meant to do. We romanticize a job market which only seems to hold nothing, or at least nothing that we will enjoy. Nothing that we were meant to do.

Ten years ago in our position we would have been hapless. We would only have ourselves to blame for being in the position we are. Today however, we are sitting on our chairs, watching sports (the Fiesta Bowl as I type), and hoping that when we get out after sitting here for a world record time, that hopefully our new year will have us feeling more hopeful and less hapless.

Happy New Year everyone. Keep on sitting.