I've decided to do something this fall that should be fun.  We've got a bunch of great college football fans here, from all over the country.  I want to run an in-season weekly bloggers poll.  If you're interested in participating, leave me a comment.   I'll try to arrange a group of bloggers that covers all regions and conferences as equally as possible.  I need folks with at least a semblence of fairness and a good knowledge of teams outside your region.  Let's do this right if we're gonna do it. 

The number of bloggers used will depend on how many people from different areas are willing to participate.  I won't load up the panel with fans from any single conference, and you should be prepared to defend your picks if I think they look too far out there.  To simplify things, we'll each select a top 20.  I'll compile the points into a top 25 and list all teams receiving votes.  Let's prove we're smarter than the computers, coaches and writers...or maybe not.

Operators are standing by.

College football fans are unmatched for their loyalty, passion and commitment to their teams.  Whether we were born and bred to be a Bulldog, or caught the fire when we moved to a new area, all of us live and die with our teams successes and failures.  So, how did you become a Gator fan?  Or a Buckey nut?  Or a Mountaineer?  Or strangest of all, a Hogfan?

For me, it began on January 1, 1965.  Arkansas was the undefeated SWC champs, set to face Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl. 

I had grown up an Army brat and lived overseas as a kid.  When we returned stateside, we went to Hot Springs to spend Christmas and the holidays with my grandmother.  Everyone gathered around the TV on New years Day, and i joined them to watch the first football game I'd ever seen.  I saw guys like Jimmy Johnson, Ken Hatfield, and Bobby Burnett, all Razorback legends. I saw a gangly receiver named  Bobby Crocket make great catch after great catch on the winning drive to help lead the Hogs to a 10-7 victory over the 'Huskers.  Arkansas finished as the only undefeated team in the nation, proclaimed National Champs and winners of the Grantland Rice Trophy by the Football Writers Association, the only NC trophy at that time that was awarded after the bowl games.  Needless to say, I was hooked for life.

So, what's your story?  Tell me about your team, and how you became a fan.

I read an interesting post by Nostradamus about the USC Trojans.  He surmises that USCw is the most talented team ever assembled.  He bases this on their rankings by recruiting services when they signed with the Trojans.  Personally, I've always thought recruiting services have a built-in bias.  My theory is that a player recruited by USC or some other top team will have a higher ranking than an equally talented kid who signs with a lesser known program. 

I guess in many ways it's a question of the chicken or the egg.  Do top schools get better players, or are the players perceived as better because they were recruited by a top school?  And how do you determine which statement is true? 

Don't misunderstand me.  I fully realize that no one is going to win at the top level of NCAA football without talent, and lots of it. My question is about how accurate recruiting services are at identifying that talent, and whether there is a built in bias favoring the top teams.  To see if I could answer these questions, I decided to go back and look at the NFL draft from this past Spring. 

I make some basic assumptions.  First, I assume that all first round picks are basically closely equal in talent.  The #1 pick may be marginally better than the #32 pick, but for purposes of this analysis, a #1 pick is considered a premier player.  A five star player, if you will.  So, how many five star players were five star recruits? Looking at the draft, I found some interesting results.

(Ratings are from Rivals.com)

Five star recruits - 5

Four star recruits - 17

Three star recruits - 7

Two star recruits - 3

First, we see that 27 of the 32 five star players were not five star recruits.  In fact, more three star recruits went in Round 1 than did five star recruits.  But, 22 of 32 were either four or five stars, a sign proponents would point to as validating the rankings.  Still, that leaves 10 players who were basically off the radar coming out of high school. 

Some might argue that teams recruit for need, and sometimes will take a player who fits that need over another more talented player. So, assuming the teams drafting for need went after the best player available at that position, another way to evaluate these players is by seeing how many were ranked at the top of their positions by the recruiting services.  It turns out that 13 players were ranked in the top 10 at their position.  Another seven weren't ranked at all.  As a predictor of success, the rating services seem to be minimally  useful, certainly not anything close to statistically relevant.  Thirteen top 10 players in the first round means there were over 200 players top 10 at their position who had unranked players taken over them.

So what about my theory of bias toward players signing with top teams?  Here's a list of the schools who had five star players in the draft.:

Oklahoma, Ohio State, Florida, Tennessee, Miami.

Four star players:

Georgia Tech, Wisconsin, Penn State, LSU (4), Cal, Florida State, Tennessee (2), Michigan, Texas (2), Florida, Notre Dame, Ohio State.

Three star players:

Clemson, Mississippi, Nebraska, Pittsburgh, Miami, Purdue, Auburn

Two star players:

Arkansas, Louisville, Central  Michigan

Assuming the pros selected the best players, and that all first round picks are closely equal in talent, it seems pretty obvious to me that the helmet plays a major role in the recruiting services' rankings.  

So, is USCw the most talented team ever? Or the most hyped?  Let's play the games before we decide.

We all remember him.  That player on our high school team, the little guy.  He was too small, too slow, not strong enough.  Yet somehow he willed his way onto the field.  He was the guy during  off season workouts who led every sprint, who went all out in every drill.  We called him "Crazy Butch", or "ManCub".  Our dads called him "Mighty Mite".  Remember that time he unloaded all 145 lbs on the stud RB from across town?  He got up woozy, but we went berzerk.  Man, that play pumped us up like Brittney Spears' chest after a visit to her plastic surgeon.

He was the guy  who came and knocked on our door at 6:30 in the morning, the summer before our Senior year.  Drug us out there to run bleachers!  In the summer, no less.!!  We ran ten sets, sweated out the things we shouldn't have been doing as high school kids.  And he ran three more after we had quit because we were afraid we might  puke.  

He wanted it more than any other guy on the team.  He never pretended he was gonna play ball after high school, he just played with all his heart.  He was ignored by the girls, laughed at by our opponents, and loved by our coaches.  How 'bout that time he got in the face of our all-conference tackle at half-time of the division championship game?  Called him out in front of the whole team, said we all needed to do more if we were gonna win. 

He was the guy we all laughed at when he first tried out.  He was the guy we thought was way too serious.   We look back now and wish we'd have put as much into it as he did. We don't know where he is, but we're sure he's succesful.

He was the guy we secretly all wished we'd have had the guts to be.  He was the Bleacher King. 

I seldom blog on topics that aren't sports related.  Okay, okay, I did write a short story.  But it was full of sports angles.  Football, cars, even bowling and poker, were there for the reader.  But here we are stuck in the doldrums of July, with nothing big going on in sports.  Everyone seems to be spinning their wheels as we gear up towards my favorite time of the sports year, autumn. 

Soon, football will be kicking off,  MLB will be winding toward the play-offs, baketball will begin preseason, and all will be right with the sports world.  Meanwhile, here in bloggerland, we search for something to talk about.  So I was left with a few choices.  Keep my mouth shut, (never a serious option), or possibly I could follow the crowd and do a puff piece, blowing smoke up the butt of my fellow bloggers, maybe even write something truly on sports and be prepared for a small handful of comments.  Or I could write something that means something, even if only to me.

Chris Ross has been the one stirring the pot around here lately, keeping us entertained with mystery, (he is/isn't Dusty,) conflict, (he'll defend Doug Williams to the death,) and some pretty good writing thrown in for free.   Chris wrote what I thought was a great piece, about OJ and the reaction of many blacks to his acquittal.  Chris's main point, which I happened to agree with, was that blacks who cheered OJ's freedom were turning a guilt-innocence issue into a black-white issue.  The comments got pretty intense, as they are wont to do around here.  Some agreed, some said it was old news.  Others wondered what in the world it had to do with sports.  Every once in a while someone would jump in and accuse Chris of being an angry white man.  Others jumped in and accused him of being an angry black man.  If nothing else, we bloggers are open minded about who we can hate. 

Chris's secondary point, which some got and some didn't, was that the OJ trial was more about Rich vs Poor than Black vs White.  This is where Chris and I will have to disagree.  Certainly, OJ bought a rich man's justice.  His celebrity and wealth (along with the ineptitude of the LAPD and prosecutors) allowed OJ to walk for the accused murder of his white wife and her boyfriend.  But only the naive would think the story would have been front page for months if OJ's wife and her companion had been black. 

The OJ story was really the beginning of a downward spiral we've seen in journalism.  As if the gruesome facts of the murder weren't enough, the story was sensationalized and we were subjected to non-stop coverage and speculation, as judges, lawyers and reporters became celebrities.  We've since seen paparrazi chase Princess Di to her death, and we've been subjected to overblown coverage of Scott Peterson, Natalie Holloway, and Anna Nicole. 

The luckiest person alive has to be Lisa Nowak.  The "newsworthiness" of Anna's death superceded even an astronaut in diapers. And now it seems we've come full circle, with black cop Bobby Cutts accused of killing his white pregnant girlfriend, Jessica Davis. 

In some cases, the characters were famous.  In others they became famous.  So where is the black-white in all these cases?  In the Davis-Cutts case it's obvious.  In many of the others it's more subliminal.  As we heard daily of the tragedy in the Holloway family, black children came up missing all over this country.  No one on CNN or Fox News deemed them newsworthy.  It seems the first requirements for determining news coverage are a pretty face and a fair complexion. 

On Sunday, a 12 year old black boy was buried in West Memphis.  DeAuntae Farrow was shot and killed by a West Memphis police officer June 22.  It seems DeAuntae was carrying a toy gun, and made a "furtive motion" toward the officer when told to halt.  It's a great tragedy, both for the boy's family and the officer involved.  I would never minimize the sorrow and grief felt by the officer, but I must confess my cynical nature made me wonder if he'd have fired so quickly at a blue-eyed blond-haired 12 year old.  Or how much coverage the story would have received if the victim were a white child.

The incident was a small blip on the national scene.  It brought out its own brand of celebrity seekers.  Reverend Al Sharpton arrived and managed to divert much of the attention away from the loss of a family, and toward his own agenda of self promotion.  Pictures in the paper show him leading the funeral procession, boldly walking ahead of the grieving mother.  He didn't realize that her grief speaks to our hearts much more than his fervent stride and angry verbosity.  A simple picture of a heart-broken Mom speaks to us all.  Put Al Sharpton in front of it, and once again the racial lines are drawn. There is one thing of which we can be certain.  With Al,  It's always all about Al. 

Another subtle sign of 21st cenury racism:  Google Natalee Holloway, you'll see multiple images of a pretty missing white girl.  You'll find pleas for help, conspiracy theories and countless articles.  Google DeAuntae, you'll see a handful of news reports and a promotional photo of Reverend Al.

So what's my point?  I guess it's this.  We've seen great strides in race relations in this country over the past 50 years.  Open bigotry and hatred are rare, and almost universally condemned.  But many people continue to draw a dividing line in their actions and in their hearts, based solely on the color of someone's skin.  We can legislate away the most egregious of actions, it's up to each of us individually to change the small prejudices of our hearts.  It's time that we see tragedy in human terms, not in shades of black and white.

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