Sunday, December 04, 2011

Sunday Night Beer: Death to the BCS

OK, bowl proponents, now what's your excuse against a playoff?  "It cheapens the regular season" goes right down the toilet.  Alabama already had a shot at LSU, and lost on their own home field.  Meanwhile, Oklahoma State has a better resume, as far as I'm concerned.  Maybe Alabama is truly the #2 team in the country, but we'll never know because we have no cross-reference between Okie State and LSU/Alabama.

And when you look at the truly awful matchups that the bowl season has foisted on us (Oklahoma/Iowa?!?!?), it's hard to argue that we're getting good football out of this thing.  Only excuse left is that presidents don't want to play football games around the holidays...or the big power conferences still like having a lockhold on the spoils.

I was out of town most of the weekend, so it was really disappointing to log onto my computer and learn that it was a night of embarassing suckage all over the board.  Nebraska volleyball lost in five sets to Kansas State.  Ugh.  I guess the whining about being assigned to the Honolulu regional was all for naught.  UNO hockey lost to previously winless Alabama-Huntsville despite outshooting the Chargers 45-17.  Yikes. And the Ohio Bobcats blew a 20-0 halftime lead to lose 23-20.

Saturday was only moderately better, as UNO hockey rebounded to win 6-2 against Huntsville. UNO basketball pulled off a  nice win over Northern Illinois for their first D-1 victory as well.  But it was a good day to watch football as it snowed.  If I had a Heisman ballot, I'd gladly cast it for Baylor's Robert Griffin III.  Not having to face RG3 is one of the small advantages of leaving the Big XII.

On nearly all accounts, today's Nebraska/Creighton basketball game was painful to watch.  While I appreciate the attempt that KMTV makes in televising a local school, it's effort is lacking on all accounts.  Travis Justice on play-by-play is painful to listen to.  My favorite was watching Creighton scrambling out of control to keep the ball in bounds while Justice praised Creighton's ball control.  Later in the broadcast, Justice is praising the officiating while trying to figure out just why Doc Sadler and Nebraska was getting lit up with technical fouls.

And those technical fouls pretty much turned the game into a farce from that point going forward. Many local media members have been touting Creighton as a "Sweet 16" candidate to go far in the NCAA tournament. Well, that's still three and a half months away, but neither team impressed me as an NCAA tournament calibre team. Frankly, it's a little premature to say much about Creighton's performance so far.  Lots of local media members got excited about Creighton's dismantling of Iowa a couple of weeks ago...but that's before Iowa was completely exposed by Campbell.  (No, I'm not talking about the soup company either...)

Oh, and back to KMTV's broadcast. What can I say about the video quality, except to say that I didn't think you could find three working VHS camcorders in the world.  Or at least, that's what it looks like. Even those new Flip cameras have better picture quality than what was shown. I know we're spoiled by HD, but this broadcast looked like a basketball game from the 1960's being shown on ESPN Classic.

Apparantly, channel 3 is televising a game next Saturday, and they ran several commercials to promote the broadcast.  Except that the commercial contained two different broadcast times:  11 am and 4 pm.  Go figure.  Or you go figure; I won't be watching at either time.

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