The election may be over, but the arguments and recriminations are still going strong. Which brings up an interesting point. You frequently hear people say, “Now is not the time for recriminations,” and you think, “Well, sure. Okay. Let’s wait a while. There’s plenty of time.” But you never hear anyone announce, “Okay, now is the time. Recriminate all you want.”
If there were such an announcement after the recent election, then it wasn’t widely broadcast and perhaps people didn’t need to be told. As soon as it was clear that Hillary Clinton had not won, the recriminations began. It took a while for them to form into cogent themes but we seem to be there now. First, there is the argument that she won the popular vote, and the buried premise here is that this is the true victory. That Electoral College stuff is the antiquated and obsolete construction of a bunch of dead white men, many of whom were slaveholders, etc. According to this line of argument, she may have lost on the scoreboard while winning in some more important arena. It’s the kind of thing a big-time football coach says when his team has lost to its traditional rival and the alumni are on the warpath and after his scalp.
And then there is the argument that the results were tainted, corrupted, and poisoned, either by the director of the FBI or by the Russians or perhaps both. FBI director James Comey, who must be the most unpopular man in Washington right now, wrote his famous letter to Congress, and this cost Hillary the election. No less an authority than Nate Silver has advanced this one. But . . . she had months, years even, to clean up the email controversy. That there were still loose ends, in the last days of the campaign . . . well, for that the candidate has only herself to blame.
And then there is the matter of the Russians and their hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails. This was the genesis of the WikiLeaks material that found its way into the public realm and was embarrassing to the Clinton campaign. But fatally so? Who knows?
And if Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks fessed up tomorrow, then what? There is no constitutional mechanism for a do-over. Clinton loyalists could console themselves by muttering, “We wuz robbed.” That and $4.95 will buy them a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
If there is consolation to be found, they might look to the world of college football. Yes, college football.
Every year, there is a campaign among a couple of dozen candidates to determine which school’s team will be number one in the land. The competition should, one thinks, be a fairly straightforward affair. The team that wins the most games, beats the most contenders, wins a showdown game at the end of the season. Simple.
But there are years, lots of them, when it doesn’t play out like this, and who gets to say, legitimately, “We’re number one” is a matter of considerable and bitter dispute.
For many years, teams did not actually “win” that number one ranking. It was bestowed upon them by, for instance, the Associated Press. The sportswriters and editors polled by the AP may not have watched the team that they voted for play a single game. And they may have been subject to all manner of biases. They may have been influenced by the PR engines of one school or another. They may have found more inspiration—for spiritual or patriotic reasons—to vote for Notre Dame or Army than for, say, Michigan State.
The anomalies of this “system” were legion—as, for instance, in the 1964 season when Alabama and Texas were both undefeated and ranked number one and number five, respectively. They played in the Orange Bowl and Texas won a squeaker when it stopped Joe Namath on a late quarterback sneak. Even so, the AP made Alabama its number-one team. Its argument was that bowl games were “exhibitions.” Longhorn fans argued that what the game exhibited was that their team was number one. It didn’t appear that way in the books, though.
Michigan State and Notre Dame were undefeated when they met during the 1966 season in what was called “The Game of the Century.” It turned out to be a pretty dull affair. But with less than two minutes to play and the score tied at 10-10, Notre Dame got the ball in its own territory. There was enough time to move into field goal range. But Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian chose to run out the clock and, as Dan Jenkins unforgettably wrote, “Tie one for the Gipper.”
Neither Notre Dame nor Michigan State played in a bowl game following the regular season. They finished the season with Notre Dame at the top of the rankings, followed by Michigan State. Alabama had gone undefeated and, conspicuously, untied during the regular season and won a prestigious bowl game in a rout. Still, the Tide was ranked number three. There are people in Alabama who still haven’t gotten over this injustice though plenty of the same people were fine with Alabama’s being ranked number one in 1964, in spite of that loss to Texas.
Eventually, bowl games were included in the determination of final rankings, and the old ad-hoc “system” that sometimes led to split number-one rankings, with the AP naming one team while the UPI coaches’ poll came down in favor of another, gave way to the BCS (Bowl Championship Series), which employed a mix of polls and computer-generated ratings to determine which teams should play in one of the major bowl games for the “national championship.” This system had some built-in empirical consistency but seemed to produce a lot of mediocre “showdowns” between teams that were supposedly No. 1 and No. 2 and a lot of controversy over who was unfairly left out of the big game. It also produced one “championship” game that was just a rematch of a regular season game, and one was left to wonder just what point was served. Should there be do-overs in showdowns? Among the most debatable of the BCS championship games was the one played in 2001, when Nebraska had lost to Colorado, in the regular season, by a score of 62-36. Still, Nebraska finished ranked second in the nation (above Colorado, among others) and played in the Rose Bowl for the national title. It was, predictably, blown away, 37-14, by the University of Miami.
So pressure built for a better format, and what has emerged is something called the College Football Playoff system, in which a 13-member committee anoints four teams as participants in a playoff. The winner of the final game is awarded the College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy.
As Jeffrey H. Anderson, a contributor to this magazine (and whose Anderson & Hester College Football Computer Rankings were part of the BCS throughout its entire 16-year run) has noted, the final four were no different than they would have been under the old system. But, as always, there is controversy.
Among those final four is Ohio State. The arguments for Ohio State’s inclusion are persuasive—unless you are a Penn State fan. In which case you point out that your team beat Ohio State in a football game, as opposed to a poll, and finished first in the conference in which both teams play. So, conference champs and winner in head-to-head competition, that means you should go to the big dance, right? To the fans of Penn State, there is no refuting this argument.
But that is all they will get . . . the satisfactions of the argument. Ohio State will play Clemson in the semis. The winner of that game will play either Alabama or Washington for the national title. That much will be final, but it won’t end the arguments.
But that is among the joys of the college game. The argument never ends. Of course, it isn’t the Russians and the director of the FBI and the presidency of the United States.
It’s a lot more important than that.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
