Mark Gilroy

Bringing Books to Life!

Time for a College Football Playoff? Only If …

Is it time for a college football playoff?

College Football Postseason Is Not Fair to Northern Teams

Utah knocked off Alabama in the Sugar Bowl a couple of days ago, lifting their record to 13-0. Shouldn’t that give them a claim as college football’s national champions? Or how about Texas who beat Oklahoma who is playing for the title against Florida?

I’m somewhat of a traditionalist – okay, a little mix of iconoclast and traditionalist – so I’ve never had a dog in the we-must-have-a-playoff-for-Division-I-college-football fight. I can see both sides of the debate.

The arguments against a D-I college football (CFB) playoff include –

  • the bowl system generates more income for schools and communities than a playoff would
  • a little controversy keeps interest level high
  • the bowl system is a reward to the kids – and allows many schools to claim some form of a championship
  • college football is healthy so why mess with something that’s already working
  • college football is about tradition and the bowls with their parades and pageantry are definitely traditional
  • extra games associated with a playoff would cut into student-athletes’ academic studies

There is an answer for and to every point above. I’m oversimplifying but here’s the quick responses in corresponding order: playoffs would generate NFL type of dollars; controversy is not good when the ‘best team’ gets ripped off due to system rules; you can still keep some form of the bowl system but some of the bowls would go away (and need to go away); sure CFB is healthy but so is basketball and people absolutely love March Madness and filling in their brackets; again, you can keep some of the bowls as part of the playoff system; hey, if athletes from the lower divisions of CFB can do a playoffs and handle the academic work load at some rigorous universities, why can’t the D-I kids?

Like I said, I have no dog in this fight – something Michael Vick wishes he could have said – so you pick the answers you like best and you won’t get me worked up. As you can tell with the associated arguments above, most solutions try to incorporate traditional bowls into the playoff equation. And this is where I have a problem. In fact, I would go so far as to say, dump the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) completely and return to stand-alone bowls with a vote at the end of the year or go strictly with a playoff for the top eight teams. But don’t mix the two.

Why?

Bowls were never set up to determine a national champion. Bowls were about rewarding kids with travel, gifts, and a televised game and giving alums and fans a warm weather place to go for a vacation. As a result the bowls have always favored warm weather schools and penalized cold weather schools.

Warm weather schools can recruit and play a style of football that doesn’t have to change as the leaves fall off of trees. (Texas Tech needs to bring their passing attack to Madison, Wisconsin, in late November to test my theory.) Warm weather schools often travel less distance (and many times stay in-state) for a near home field advantage in bowl season. (USC’s last home game every year is the Rose Bowl! Of course, if the mighty Trojans would stop getting upset by 30-point underdogs they would have to play for a championship instead of relying on ESPN to crown them as best-ever each year.) The pundits discuss and explore home field issues, including weather conditions, in-depth and ad nauseum in the NFL – no one wants to go to Green Bay in December I’ve heard – but college analysts conveniently ignore that reality.

Oh, you’re a Buckeye fan and are just making excuses. Let’s face it, the best football is played in the SEC and Big 12 South! Weather is a non-issue.

Uh oh. The topic of discussion just changed! And yes, I confess, I am defending my much-maligned Buckeyes and the Big 10 and its quality of football as evidenced by the last few bowl seasons. Realistically, I can accept that the Big 10 is down the past two or three years and the SEC is up based on year-end results – but there’s an even more telling statistic that argues against the kind of disparity being argued. It’s number of players in the NFL. The score card reads:

SEC – 263 players / 137 starters
ACC – 238 players / 121 starters
Big Ten – 234 players / 105 starters
Pac-10 – 183 players / 70 starters
Big 12 – 176 players / 72 starters
Big East – 84 players / 33 starters

So admittedly there is a power shift toward the southeast USA, but not to the degree it’s been propagated by fans who claim if you ain’t cheating you ain’t really trying.

But back to the question: Is it time for a college football playoff? I’m all for the top eight teams forming a bracket to set up a Super Bowl type climax to the CFB season – because we all know how great SB games are most years! (Sarcasm font on.) But not if all games are played in warm weather sites.

After all, since weather is just an excuse, shouldn’t Gator, Trojan, Sooner, Tiger, and Seminole fans get to experience football the way it was meant to be played … outdoors in December in Ann Arbor, Columbus, Happy Valley or other northern climes?

That’s a thought that warms my heart!

Peace On Earth, Good Will to All Men

The Simple Blessings of Christmas

Does your attitude proclaim that you are a person of peace and good will?

My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?
Bob Hope

Christmas calls us to peace with all people – even those different from ourselves.

It happened in the midst of the fiercest fighting of World War I. It spanned all 500 miles of the Western Front, a jagged ever-changing line separating British and German forces. Newspapers around the world hailed it as miracle.

“All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking, and whining of bullets in flight, machine gun fire and distant German voices,” said Alfred Anderson. “But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other.”

Anderson, who was 108 years old when he spoke those words, was the last survivor of the Christmas Truce of 1914, a spontaneous event that he experienced at 18 years of age and one that he had thought of every day since.

There are numerous first hand accounts from soldiers’ journals of how this seemingly spontaneous outburst got started. But the story most remembered was that a German soldier began singing “Stille Nacht” and his solo soon became a chorus as he was joined by English voices singing “Silent Night.” A British regiment serenaded the Germans with “The First Noel” and the Germans sang back to them, “O Tannenbaum.”

Men from both armies laid down their weapons and crept cautiously and then quickly into No Man’s Land to share food, cigars, drinks – and even play a game of soccer together.

Christmas has always been a time when people of all ages, races, and creeds come together to break bread peacefully. Like the Truce of 1914 sometimes even sworn enemies have laid aside historical and more recent hostilities.

In the Christmas story, a newborn Baby was given gifts by Wise Men from the East, probably Persians from a city in what is now Iran. When these Magi realized that King Herod was a threat to the Baby’s life, they protected him by returning home by a different route in order to keep his location a secret from the madman. This Baby was sheltered during his childhood in Egypt, a country that had fought many wars with his homeland.

When angels sang to shepherds, ‘Peace on Earth, good will to all men,” they announced the simple yet profound truth that enemies can be reconciled; that strangers can become friends; that those who think and believe differently can still be neighbors. Christmas was literally born in strife – but celebrated and protected by “foreigners” who were men and women of peace and good will.

As you experience the Christmas season this year, don’t think that peace is something to be negotiated by politicians between lands and peoples that are thousands of miles from your world. Begin with how you look at those who are different from you. Does your attitude proclaim that you are a person of peace and good will? Move closer to home and ask yourself if there is a relationship where you need to lay down weapons of anger and harmful words? Is there a person with whom you need to call a truce and be reconciled? Not just for a day but from this point forward?

 

the simple blessings of christmas by mark gilroy.

Excerpted from The Simple Blessings of Christmas by Mark Gilroy.

Holidays Are for Games: 3 Recommendations

The online video gaming industry is huge and getting huger every year – almost as big as Hollywood and on a growth trajectory that will continue to cut into the TV audience for sports. But for all the realism and sophistication found in the new product launches and annual updates, video games lack something important that can still be found in playing old school board games: face-to-face human interaction and intimacy.

It’s almost Christmas. A lot of people will be off work with vacation time and a lot of families and friends will gather to celebrate and catch up. Tis the season when classic board games like Life, Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly. Clue, and Scrabble will be lifted down from top closet shelves and dusted off. Holidays are for games.

Here are three holiday game ideas that you might want to try or adapt with your friends and family members.

Settlers of Catan

Up to 6 can play.

1. Settlers of Catan. My soon to be son-in-law brought this to our family Christmas gathering last year and the award-winning game was an instant hit. Think of Risk on steroids without the cannons and destroyed troops. The board comes in about 30 pieces and can be set up different every time. Up to six can play. The goal is to get 10 ‘victory points’, which are gained by building roads, settlements, cities, and armies. Players have to accumulate wood, bricks, ore, sheep, and grain through strategically building settlements in the right spots – and through good old-fashioned barter with other players. Sounds complicated but it only takes 15 to 30 minutes to learn. There are game extensions in the Catan family that can take you on the ocean or to outer space or into particular historical epochs, like the Roman Empire.

2. Fast Scrabble. I like regular Scrabble just fine but if you want an interesting variation try ‘fast scrabble.’ All tiles are placed in the middle of the table face down. The first player turns over a tile. If it’s a one-letter word like ‘I’ or ‘A’ then the first player to call out the word gets to keep the tile, face up, in front of him or her. If it’s not a word, the tile remains with the person who turned it over as a free letter. The second player turns over a tile and again, whoever calls out a word, made from that letter or that letter and any other letters that are face up, gets all the tiles to make a new word. If ‘A’ came up first and then ‘M’ came up second, player three can call out ‘Am’ and keeps that word in front of him. If the third letter pulled up is ‘C’ then the first player can call ‘Cam’ and all letters come back to him or her. If the next letter is an ‘E’ then someone can yell ‘Came’ and the tiles are now all theirs. Once a word is formed the letters must stay intact and in that order but can switch to different players throughout the game. ‘Oven’ can become ‘Coven’ can become ‘Covens’ and so on. When all tiles have been turned over, each player adds up the points on their tiles that are formed into words and subtracts any letters that are sitting free. Loud. Fast. Fun.

3. Team Hybrid Game Night. One of our favorite activities during the holidays is a family and/or friend game night where we divide into teams and play a combination of popular games, a new one each round. This works best with four or five teams going four to five rounds. We like to use Trivial Pursuit (each team is asked every question on a single card per round and is awarded 10 to 20 points per correct answer), Pictionary (50 points for identifying the picture), Tabu (20 points per correct word), Outburst (10 points per correct word), Scene-It (all teams compete at once in an ‘All Play’), but you can come up with a myriad of other options, like Charades or Family Feud, by adapting your favorite games into the process. One of the nice things about the team approach is that you can enjoy competition but no one gets singled out as not being good at something like Trivial Pursuit. I like to do a final round where points are doubled and each team gets to choose which of the previous games played they want to try.

Whether you’re gearing up to drive to Grandma’s or are hosting a group of friends on Christmas afternoon, don’t get stuck in the rut of staring at the TV screen and missing out on the people around you. Games or no games, find ways to interact face-to-face.