Beyond Criminally Stupid

Today is the day that Auburn University and their Heisman trophy winning quarterback, Cameron Newton meet the University of Oregon in Glendale, Arizona to play for a crystal football in the Bowl Championship Series "championship" game. I hesitate to call this game the National Championship, or even a championship at all, because the way that it selects its "champion." Throughout history, the United States and the world have seen cases of greed, corruption, and just plain evil, but aside of the choke hold that DeBeers has on the diamond industry and *MAYBE* OPEC's control of petroleum, this country has never seen a cartel quite like the cartel that burdens college football's postseason.

In case you're not familiar with the current scheme of college football's "championship," it goes something like this. All 120 Division 1-A (the division for the largest schools) football teams play 12 games during the regular season. After that season, a few groups of pollsters (from the coach's and Harris polls) and an undisclosed computer ranking system rank the top 25 teams in the nation. The number 1 and 2 teams in the country play each other in the BCS "championship" game and others go to various bowl games. The 4 oldest and most prestigious bowls are the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange bowls. These bowls combined with the BCS "championship" actually have contractual obligations to the six oldest and richest college football conferences to invite the conference champion to one of these bowl games. There are eleven conferences in Division 1-A college football. The six "Automatic Qualifying" (AQ) conferences are the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Big Ten Conference, the Big XII Conference, the Pacific 10 Conference (Pac 10), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), and the Big East Conference. The five non-automatic qualifying (non-AQ) conferences are the Mountain West Conference, the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), Conference USA (C-USA), the Mid-American Conference (MAC), and the Sun Belt Conference. The AQ conferences send their champions to the most prestigious and well-paying bowls, while the non-AQ schools get sent to the likes of the papajohns.com bowl.

If you haven't discerned it yet, the Bowl Championship Series, and by default the entire Division 1-A college football postseason is governed by who has the stranglehold on the power that there is, and not who legitimately has the most competitive college football team. In recent years, teams like Boise State, Texas Christian, Utah, Brigham Young, Houston, and others have demonstrated that they can beat just about any other team in college football and should have the opportunity to play for a national championship. However, they have been denied because they do have a long and storied football program and don't come from one of the richest conferences in the system. In the 13 years of BCS postseason football from 1998 to 2010, only 12 teams in the country had the opportunity to play for the "championship." Keep in mind that two teams meet every year for the game, and thus there would be a maximum of 26 teams that would have been able to play in that game. Only the most storied football programs from the richest conferences actually make it to the "championship" game. Even the teams in the "Big Six" conferences that are a little lower on the totem pole haven't gotten a chance to play for the title.

I'll admit 2 things: 1) The BCS is slightly better than the previous system. 2) The trend that I just mentioned did change a little this year. The previous system for college football's Division 1-A championship was to have the bowls select whoever they wanted, then have pollsters choose who they thought was best after the bowl season. This system was terrible because the top-ranked teams in the country wouldn't necessarily have to play each other. However, I feel pretty confident in saying that matching the two highest-ranked teams at the end of the season is not sufficient in crowning a true champion. Saying the BCS is better that the previous system is like saying that the frying pan is better than the fire: It may be a little bit cooler, but it still sucks.

This year Oregon and Auburn face each other in the BCS "championship" game. These two teams have never been to the BCS championship and have usually been considered second-tier in their conferences. However, this only goes to the incriminate the BCS further because it exemplifies the parity that exists in Division 1-A college football. No longer do USC, Texas, and Florida dominate every team they play and walk to an easy national "championship." Now, every team has to fight for its conference because players have easy access to information and aren't willing to sit for years at a historic program when they could play at a less historic one. Now teams like Auburn and Oregon can contend for their conference championships and teams like Boise State, TCU and Utah can contend that they deserve a shot at the national championship.

Part of the reason that I feel this way toward the BCS is that I have recently read the book Death to the BCS by Yahoo! Sports writers Dan Wetzel, Jeff Passan, and Josh Peter. The subtitle to this book is "The Definitive Case Against the BCS," and I don't think that this could be any more true. The authors of this book went into painstaking detail, investigating the financial reports of universities and incorporated bowl games to discover the truth about the BCS and to develop probably the best alternative that anyone has conceived so far. This book has changed that way that I see college football and I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the sport.


The alternative that Death to the BCS suggests is a 16-team playoff in which the highest-ranked teams get home field advantage. Under this scenario, the 11 conference champions would all get a seed in the playoff bracket and the 5 remaining seeds would be chosen at large by a selection committee, similar to NCAA basketball tournament. Most of the bowls would continue to exist, but would not be quite as obscenely profitable as they are now. Bowls like the GoDaddy.com Bowl and the Insight Bowl would probably perish, and I say "good riddance," to them. However, the large bowls would survive and the fans and schools would get to have an actual championship instead of the imitation that the BCS is putting on.

Now, I've saved the most incriminating evidence against the BCS for last; and trust me, it's incriminating. Anyone who pays taxes in the United States ends up subsidizing the college and universities in their state of residence. I currently live in Colorado, so my tax dollars go to the University of Colorado, Colorado State University, and others. The bowl games in the current system claim that they pay out hundreds of thousands or millions of dollar to participants in their bowl games, however this comes with a catch. Teams that play in these bowl games have to pay (usually in the form of a decreased payout) for tickets for that bowl. The teams have to pay full price for these tickets, and usually one sell a fraction of them for less than face value. Even though I'm a die-hard fan of my alma-mater, I'm not going to pay $155 dollars for a Fiesta Bowl ticket when they're going to $30 on StubHub. Universities also have to pay for travel and accommodations for their team as well as for cheerleaders and band, if they choose to bring them, with no help from the bowl. Bowl games end up paying their participants almost nothing, and in many cases end up costing the university money. This deficit in the athletic budget has to be made up somewhere; usually from the university coffers, and at least in part by the tax dollars of the people. If you pay state taxes, you are subsidizing the Bowl Championship Series.

Lest you go preaching that college football is a waste of money, let me assure that the alternative playoff system would be much more profitable for universities. First of all, schools would be able to sell their own tickets, and make their own revenue instead of paying someone else to host a bowl game at a random neutral site. This money could be shared with traveling schools so that no one has to lose money on college football. Secondly, television ratings and conversely, commercial revenue for playoff games would skyrocket, leading to manifold more money that is had in the Bowl Championship Series, and much more money for the schools. With a playoff system, college football could subsidize your tax dollar instead of the other way around.

The book Death to the BCS is currently selling on Amazon for $13.50, which is a ridiculously low price considering the valuable information that's available therein. If you enjoy college football, let me urge to read this book and to know what I and many others know about the cartel that is the BCS. Boo payoffs, hooray playoffs!

Back to Bass-ics

Recently, I've remembered a few things about which I want to blag and have had motivation to blag recently. I think this is because I did something reasonably productive for a couple of weeks (working at tαr3eI as a cashier) and it managed to give a little spark to neurons. Whatever the reason, please bear with me.

When I was young, my father told me that our family had no real musical inclination or talent and that I probably wouldn't be able to play a musical instrument as long as I live. Naturally, that only made me want to stick it the old curmudgeon and learn to play a musical instrument anyway, just to spite him. While I was in college, I was exposed to some of the most musical people that I had ever met. Also, while I was in college, I was able to attend more sporting events, namely football and basketball games, than I had seen in my life up to that point. This is relevant in this case because, at these games I managed to improve the strength and endurance of my vocal chords while I was there. This enabled me to sing both louder and more precisely than I had ever sung before. To make a long, boring story short, I was more interested in music than I had ever been previously.


At this point, it was just a matter of picking which instrument I would want to learn to play. The summer after my junior year, I met a now good friend of mine, Scott Manning. Scott is/was the bassist for the Empirates. I first heard of these guys at BYU's battle of the bands and absolutely loved their stuff from day 1. (You follow the link that I've posted above to go to their facebook page and partake in their musical deliciousness.) Anywho, after I met Scott and heard his silky-smooth bass lines, I started to pay more attention to bass lines and rhythmic portions of popular music. I discovered that rhythm and the bass guitar are at the heart and sole of everything that I enjoy about music. The bass is the foundation for most popular music, and most music in general. As such music tends to sound somewhere between incomplete and just plain bad without it. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Yellowcard.) My absolute favorite part of bass sounds and the bass guitar is the musical tension that is built in measures where the bass is absent, and the headbanging glory that ensues when it returns. To put it succinctly, I think the bass guitar is awesome and I wanted it to be a part of my life.

Now, as I already mentioned, neither of my parents families are very musically inclined, and I have my doubts that I would really be able to successfully play any musical instrument. However, there are couple of things about the bass guitar: 1) It only has 4 strings. I have 4 fingers... this shouldn't be a problem. 2) It's a perfectly symmetrical instrument... inasmuch as something on a binary logarithmic scale can be symmetrical. In short, the bass guitar is one of the easier instruments to learn to play, and I like it that way.

This summer I got myself a bass guitar and have been learning to play it. It's been a little tough, because I've had somewhat limited access to amplifiers of any sort, and playing a bass acoustically is mostly futile... So if you know anyone who has a bass amp for sale, or for free, let me know. However, I believe that my bass and I will be pumping out some pretty smooth bass lines together before you know it.

Just in Case You Had Any Doubt that I'm a Nerd

So, I was looking through my blag posts, both new and old, and I realized that I have not yet on this blag really mentioned my life's passion and the field where most of my greatest talents lie. Though over the last two years, a bachelor's degree in civil engineering has been reduced to the likes of a BA in English or a BS in Psychology, this field is truly where I belong.

I'd like to take a moment to explain that I'm comparing a BS in Civil Engineering to the aforementioned degrees because one who completes any of them has zero chance of finding a job other than bagging groceries in the years 2010/2011... much like any other bachelor's degree. According to BYU's undergraduate catalog, a BA in English takes 48-65 credit hours (depending on your foreign language experience) and a BS in Psych takes 52-53. For those of you who are saying, "And your point is?" a bachelor's in civil engineering takes 95-96 hours which include courses in chemistry, physics, single and multivariable calculus, mechanics of materials, structural analysis, fluid mechanics, and if you're really ambitious, something called "Continuum Mechanics and Finite Element Analysis." It's not exactly literary criticism that we're dealing with. Over the last 200 years, there have only really been 2 in which it was difficult to find a job with a BS in Civil Engineering, and those were 2009 and 2010.

Anywho, I have wanted to be a civil engineer since I was in the 8th grade. Before that, I had ambitions of being a Paleontologist, a Marine Biologist, and a Mechanical Engineer. The turning point came when my 8th grade shop class held a balsa wood bridge building contest. The assignment was given before the winter break and the bridges were to be broken about a week after the break. Being the nerd that I am, I spent almost the entirety of that winter break sketching out the truss structure for my balsa wood bridge, including miter joints and angles and then carefully constructing my bridge. (Through 4 years of college, I've realized that my design was far from being very efficient, but it worked out fairly well.) The method that was used to break them was barbaric, but neither I, nor anyone else in the class new any better. Mr. Moore took a pair of wooden blocks, put them 8 inches apart, put a coffee can on top of the bridge, and put 45-lb weight plates on top of the coffee can. Though my bridge made some cracking noises early on, it managed to hold 962x its own weight, which wasn't the best design, but it was up there. After that experience, I decided that designing infrastructure was something for I had a passion and something that I would want to do for the rest of my life.

Throughout my time studying civil engineering in college, I found that I enjoyed learning about most, though not all, of the sub-specialties of civil engineering and most of the principles that went therewith. I think I was the only person in the history of CEEn 203, Mechanics of Materials who not only understood Castigliano's theorem the first time, but also kind of enjoyed it. I can say that I enjoyed learning the concepts in just about all of my classes that were labeled "CEEn." There are some notable exceptions. CEEn 270 involved coding. I'm not only incredibly bad at coding, I hate the very thought of it. As far as I'm concerned, you cut a check and you get software by email or on a CD by snail mail. I was thinking about going into transportation engineering when I realized that transportation engineers are just a mask for corrupt and incompetent government officials to do whatever they want anyway. While this is true in some cases anywhere in civil engineering, it's true in almost every case that I've found for transportation engineering. I can totally get into designing an intersection for maximum efficiency. However, designing an intersection so that people have to wait extra long at the light in front of the Target that a city councilman's brother owns is not my bag... if you get my drift. When I went into my class in environmental engineering, I secretly dared the course to prove to me that this sub-specialty wasn't just a bunch of leftist hippies with good math skills. Sadly after the encounters with deep ecology and conversion factors in the back of the book like, "1 lite year = 365 days drinking low-calorie beer," and "2 kilo-mockingbird = 2000 mockingbirds," I couldn't possibly take the field seriously. However, there are still the fields of structural, hydraulic, and geotechnical engineering along with a couple others that captivate my interest.

Since I have little to no chance of finding a job in civil engineering over the next couple of years with only a bachelor's degree, I have decided to pursue a master's degree (as if you haven't heard about that on this blag.) In civil engineering, a master's degree usually involves an area of deeper specialization in a sub-specialty like structural or water resources engineering. At this point, I've decided that I want to study geotechnical engineering, mostly because I could justify taking a couple of courses in other sub-specialties, since geotechnical engineering is so broad. For those who aren't familiar with the concept of geotechnical engineering, it is literally the engineering of dirt, and includes topics like soil mechanics, foundation design, groundwater flow, etc. As fiancée #2 pointed out, this does indeed sound like about the nerdiest thing that you could possibly think of. And yes, I realized this when I took Elementary Soil Mechanics with Dr. Gerber at BYU.

On that note, I recently bought a foundation engineering textbook to read to keep my neurons from withering away and dying while I'm hopelessly un(der)employed. I just started reading it, and again I'm taken back to that day when I designed my first structure in 8th grade shop class. Not only am I now thinking about structures and how the individual members interact with each other, but also how the entire structure interacts with the soil, and the potential problems that can be faced when a foundation is not properly designed.

The reason why I'm writing this blag post is because it has been reaffirmed again to me today that civil engineering is really what I love and that if the construction industry ever rebounds and I can find in job in this field that I will scarcely have to work a day in my life. I've known people who have gone through multiple years of college and still not really known what they want to do. I made it through an engineering program in 4 years at least partially because I figured out what I wanted to do for a living in the 8th grade and have hardly had any doubts since. In the words of one dubious BYU Econ professor, "Self, great day." :D

A Faire

I really don't like to set new year's resolutions. I don't know that there's any particular reason why, I just don't. Though I don't particularly like resolutions, 2010 sucked and there are a few things that I'd like to accomplish in 2011. I won't call these resolutions, since many of them are partially or completely out of my control. I think I'll just call them my goals and hopes for 2011:

• At long last, choose a graduate school. (Purdue and UCLA are already out, btw.)
• Start grad school (or get a job, which is drastically less likely.)
• Move out of my parents' house (again). Like I tell my dad, "Dad, no one wants me out of your house more than me."
• Get an internship. After I choose a grad program and adjust my résumé accordingly, I hope to expand that résumé with some internship experience.
• Get a car. If my mom gets some cash from her deceased father anytime soon, I might just have a brand new car fall into my lap (figuratively speaking). If not, I'm going to get an older, crappier one. I've had a driver's license for 6 years, and an adult not having a car anywhere west of Jersey is bullsh*t.
• Turn 23. I'm a big fan of Milan Hejduk of the Colorado Avalanche, who wears number 23. Also, ever since I was exposed to fiancée #2's strange fixation with even numbers, I've developed a strange fixation with odd numbers, especially 3's and 7's.
• Figure out a really good and relevant Halloween costume by the time October rolls around.
• See at least 6 football games. In 2010, I only saw one football game in person. It was a good game and I got to chill with some friends, but I just need more football in my life.
• See at least one BYU football game. If I go to Oregon State for grad school, this will be easy, since BYU comes to Corvallis in September, otherwise I'll have to make a trip to Provo, probably for either the Idaho or Idaho State game, but I'll see how my schedule looks in 10 or 11 months.
• Get a new cell phone. I feel pretty confident that my phone isn't going to make it through 2011. The other day, the hinge popped open and the top half separated from the bottom. I was able to fit them back together, but it's pretty clearly broken.

I think that pretty much wraps it up. If I could accomplish the first four or five things on the list, I would consider 2011 a very successful year. Let me just say that if this year is as bad as last year, I'm going to start organizing a French Revolution-style coup d'état to overthrow the reign of the nouveau American bourgeoisie. :P