Cougar Football Pipe Dreams

Every year, starting somewhere around August, BYU football fans start getting all hyped up with delusions of grandeur.  These quests for perfection induce eye rolls from most non-BYU fans as well as many BYU fans, myself included, and recent history has proven those eye rollers correct.

But it's not August.  It's October, and BYU is still undefeated.  (Yes, I know the calendar still says September, but you can't lose if you don't play, which BYU doesn't until October 3rd.)  So, I'm officially declaring myself on the grandeur bandwagon.  It's been really well documented in the last few weeks, but BYU has as good a shot as anyone at going undefeated this year.  (per ESPNs FPI, where BYU has slid to 2nd most likely to win out, slightly behind Marshall.)

The biggest reason that BYU has such a high chance of going 12-0 (25% for now) is that their schedule is decidedly mediocre. Here's how the schedule looks broken into rough quintiles by opponent ranking, with the road games italicized.  (I'm using the FPI for this, but I doubt it would be significantly different using other ranking systems.)

Rank	# of Opponents
1-30	0
31-60	5	(Texas, BSU, Houston, Virginia, Cal)
61-90	4	(UCF, Nevada, Middle Tennessee, USU)
90-120	2	(UConn, UNLV)
120+	1	(Savannah State)

The schedule isn't bloated at the bottom, it's bloated in the middle.  Rankings obviously have a lot of evolving to do over the rest of the season, but there are a number of "good" teams on there. BYU has a chance at going undefeated and proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are consistently better than good.  The more games BYU wins, the more you'll hear about the lack of a single ranked opponent on the schedule.  The narrative would be totally different if Texas was at their typical level and ranked in the top 15.  Even if BYU had gone and pulled off a 1 point win (rather than a 34 point win) if Texas was ranked, then the pundits would be mostly placated.  Would changing one opponents ranking from 37 up to 15 really tell you that much more about the quality of BYU?  A bit more, but not all that much more, in my opinion.  But rather than another thousand words about schedule strength, let's move on to what we care about:

Bowl Projections.

The point of winning football games is to get a ranking, and the point of that ranking is to get yourself a good bowl.  BYU has 4 bowl possibilities:

• No bowl.  Win 5 games or less and this is your fate.
• The Miami Bowl, or whatever it's called, against some AAC team.  If BYU wins 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 games, this is where they are going for sure.  Even at 11-1 this very likely where they end up.
• a New Years Day Bowl (Orange, Cotton, Fiesta or Peach, with Fiesta probably the most likely).
• a Playoff Bowl (Rose or Sugar).

Let's talk about those last two options.  The way it works these days is that 13 people go into a room, and pick 12 teams to go to the big 6 bowls.  The top 4 go to the Rose and Sugar bowl (this year) and play for the right to play for the national championship in one more game.  The other 8 get fancy bowls, lots of publicity and even more money.  So, it's all about convincing those 13 people that you're one of the top 12 teams.

Of course, it isn't quite that simple.  The Power 5 conferences (ACC, B1G, Pac12, Big XII and SEC) are all guaranteed one of those 12 spots.  This doesn't bother me much, as it's pretty likely that one team from each of those conferences really is in the top 12.  One more spot is also reserved for the top team from the "group of 5" conferences.  (Those are the "other" conferences, namely the MWC, Sun Belt, AAC, MAC and Conference USA.)  (I only had to cheat to remember 1 of those!)  In general, I like this, because it provides some assurance that when one of the "little guys" has a great season, they can't be totally left out.  This year specifically, however, there aren't any group of 5 teams that look particularly great and this hurts BYU, because the top group of 5 team is likely to be ranked (by the committee, the only rankers who matter) out of the top 12.  But they get a spot anyway.

So what it comes down to is this.  If BYU gets into the top 11, they get into a new years day bowl, and if they get into the top 4, they go to the playoff.  I consider the former to be very likely at 12-0, while the latter is so unlikely that it's almost not even worth considering.

There's no news from the committee yet (they start giving updates on their thinking in a few weeks), but the other polls and rankings probably give a reasonable picture of where BYU stands as of right now.  FPI has BYU at #18, AP at #20 and USA Today at #21.  BYU only needs to move up about 1 spot each week to hit the magic #11.

In 2006 and 2008 BSU was 12-0 and ranked #9 to end the regular season, 2004 they were #10.  In 2007 Hawaii was 12-0 and ranked #10, despite having a schedule that included 2 FCS teams, as well as UNLV, Idaho, USU (before they got decent), and NMSt.  Also, their two toughest games (BSU and Fresno) were both at home.  Even including their Sugar Bowl gave against Georgia, Sagarin rated their schedule the 132nd toughest in the nation. (For comparison, BYU probably ends this year witha  strength of schedule in the 60s with 4 of their 6 toughest opponents on the road.) Other undefeated "non-BCS" teams (BSU, TCU, Utah) have been ranked even higher.  There is no precedent* for an undefeated team to be ranked outside the top 11.

(* This is partly because we have never had more than 2 non-BCS teams go undefeated in the same season.  Even in the new system with 12 total spots, there isn't enough room for more than 2 non-Power 5 teams.  There are only 3 non-Power 5 teams that are still undefeated this year, BYU, Marshall and Cincinnati.  If they all win out, only one would be guaranteed a spot (either Cincinnati or Marshall because they're in a conference) and one of them would almost certainly not get into the big bowl (likely Marshall, because Cincinnati has the tougher schedule).  The odds of this happening are slim (0.01% according to ESPN) but I wanted to point out that a lot of teams still don't control their own destiny in reaching a new years day bowl, and BYU is in that group.)

As I mentioned earlier, the odds of reaching the top 4 and getting to the playoff, or getting in the top 11 with an 11-1 record are very remote, but not impossible.  Here are the teams that could have done it in the last dozen years:

"Non-BCS" teams that reached top 4 in final regular season polls since 2002:

Year	Team	BCS	AP	USA Today
2010	TCU (12-0)	3	3	3
2009	TCU (12-0)	4	3	3

"Non-BCS" teams that reached top 11 in final regular season polls since 2002 without being undefeated:

Year	Team	BCS	AP	USA Today
2011	BSU (11-1)	7	8	6
2010	BSU (11-1)	10	10	10
2008	TCU (10-2)	11	11	11

You might notice there's not a lot of variety on those lists.  The BSU teams with losses didn't have very tough schedules in the WAC, but they did have signature wins over Virginia Tech and Georgia.  The 2008 TCU team had one win over a ranked BYU squad, and 2 losses to undefeated Utah (by 3 points) and #1 Oklahoma.  The undefeated TCU teams had multiple wins over ranked teams (BYU and Utah ).  BYU is unlikely to have the quality signature wins to match those teams this year.  (Though it's technically still possible for Cal to be 10-1 and PAC-12 north champs when they play BYU at the end of the year, which would be an opportunity for a huge win.  It's far more likely, however that they are 5-6 at that point.)

If BYU got a lot of help, and I mean A LOT, they could equal those BSU and TCU teams.  Provided they keep winning, this might be something I'll come back to later. 

Pathfinder and Ruins

I've read a lot of books by Orson Scott Card over the years (37 by my count) and I'd been slow to read some of his more recent books.  Maybe it was OSC burn out, or maybe it's just that I've been only reading his Ender books which seem to be getting progressively less good, but I haven't read a number of his more recent works.  But once you've read 37 books by an author, why not a few more? So I added Pathfinder and it's sequel Ruins to the list.  (The total is now 39, not counting short stories, poems, collections, etc.)

Anyone familiar with Card's work won't be surprised to find that the story centers around a young male (Rigg) who has some special talents.  If you've guessed that these talents might just come in handy for saving the world you'd be right!  It's a pattern that has turned up before in [insert every OSC novel here], but it's not like he's the only one to do this.  (A few stories about Hobbits or Jedi come to mind.)  In this case, Rigg can see the paths that all living being leave behind.  Sort of like a slime trail behind a snail, only with no slime, and he's the only one who can see it.  This makes him an excellent tracker, and he can also see into the past somewhat, at least to see who was where, and when they were there.  Adventures ensue, and along the way he meets some companions who have some interesting time related talents, and, of course, that whole saving the world thing comes up eventually.
Even though I'm poking some fun at it, the book is quite good, particularly the first one.  Though he's perhaps grown quirkier in his old age, Card is still a very good writer.  I'm not sure how I feel about the novel writing world we live in these days where adults spend most of their time reading books written for teenagers (and then watching all the movies), but I didn't find the books to be particularly "young adult".  (Perhaps we've reached the point where authors want their fiction labeled as YA, because more people will read it?)  Anyway, I don't want to ruin the plot too much, but there are two things that I did want to cover in a little more detail about these books.

First, the books, particularly the second one, continue Card's habit from the last 10 years of having characters in his book randomly launch into lengthy rants that don't seem to quite fit in with the story.  You're reading along, and suddenly one of the characters wants to go off for 5 pages about marriage and how it preserves society and even humanity as we know it.  Amazingly, these characters always seem to be echoing a sentiment that Card happens to personally hold.  I've read a fair amount of his political musings (which range from interesting to bizarre, in my opinion) but I'd prefer it if he'd leave them out of his books.  But, this only happens from time to time, so I just roll my eyes and skim for a page or two until he gets off his soap box.

The other interesting thing about the series is that there's time travel.  This starts happening early enough in the story that I don't feel too bad about writing about it.  Generally, stories that deal with time travel all follow the Back to the Future model.  Namely, that there is a certain way things happened, and stories should be cleverly written so that characters can always manage to stay away from their past selves and make things turn out alright.  Marty McFly hides under the table at the dance to keep from being seen by himself, and Harry, Ron and Hermione save Buckbeak but in a way that they don't know that they've saved him until after they've gone back in time and done the saving.  OSC bravely throws away all these "rules" about time travel and builds a universe that hasn't been this chaotic since Bill and Ted were running around with their phone booth.  In Pathfinder, you can travel back in time, walk up to yourself and say, "hey self, don't leave for work on time today or you'll get in a car accident."  Then, you future self goes back to a the future where he's from.  But - here's the tricky part - because you don't leave for work at the usual time, you avoid the accident and consequently, there's no need to go back in time to warn yourself of something that didn't happen.  So what happened to your future self that came back to warn you?  I don't know. Maybe he doesn't exist any more, maybe OSC has created an infinitely branching multiverse.  The only thing that matters is what happens to the you that you are right now, and we let the strange circumstances take care of themselves.  It gets confusing at times to both the reader and the characters, but it's rather fun.

One final warning, there is at least one more book in the series which is supposed to come out late this year.  I don't know if that's the last one or not.

Shhhhh

I recently finished the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain.  the book came out about a year and a half ago, and I seem to vaguely recall people talking about it back then.  Shannon picked this up at the library as something that seemed interesting, and indeed, it does seem interesting, but the book came up a bit short, in my opinion.

I don't think it surprises anyone to say that American culture holds up an extrovert ideal.  To get ahead in life we're constantly told to throw on our winning smile and tell our best anecdote.  It's all about winning friends and influencing people, collecting Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections, twitter followers, big groups of friends and being the "life of the party."  Well, it turns out that a pretty big chunk of people don't like that stuff, and aren't good at it.  Personally, I generally come out as borderline introverted on the little quizzes that abound on the topic.  Ms. Cain has devoted a book to explaining who introverts are, what they like, what they don't, and to remind the world that we aren't all natural born door-to-door security system salesmen.

While the book has plenty of interesting factoids, studies, stories and theories, it never managed to move the needle past "good" for me.  I found the basic premise to be rather obvious "introverts have value, too!" and most of the major points of the book to be pretty obvious as well.  Introverts can be more cautious, they need space to work quietly, privacy and time to relax away from stressful social settings.  Many of these things are ideas that just about anyone could probably come up with if we spent some time to think about it - the thing is we probably haven't.

So, the book is good, and the topic worth thinking about even if I found the pace a bit slow at times.  Even more valuable than the time spent reading it, is some time spent thinking about how we interact with different personalities in our every day lives, particularly people who spend a lot of time with people.  This week at work I'm spending 12 hours a day in a room with just me and some whirring equipment - it's pretty loud, so it must be an extrovert.  But hopefully this book prompts teachers to think about how it effects the introverts when every assignment turns into a group project, or managers to think about employees in open offices, or parents who are concerned about their kids social lives.

As an added LDS topic, I think we could do a lot more to talk about introversion and missionary work.  What could be a better example of an extrovert lifestyle than 2 years in a foreign place approaching strangers about religion?  And even for the many people who aren't full-time missionaries, what are the roles of introverts in spreading the gospel?  To what extent so missionary messages tell introverts that they have to be extroverts?  It's a stressful thing to put on that persona when it doesn't feel quite natural.  And are there strengths of interverts that we're over looking because we can't hear over the noise of the extroverts?

This book is probably great for a book club like discussion, or something like that.  Or, if you're introverted, you can just read it by yourself, I guess.

Meat is Back!

September is here, which means cooler weather, football and a return to meat.

Our month long meatless experiment has ended, and it was pretty uneventful.  I didn't feel healthier, stronger or more energetic.  I also didn't feel sicker, weaker or more lethargic.  I didn't "miss" meat all that much either.  In the end, it all comes down to a great big "meh".  I think I've proven that I can eat meat, or not, and I don't really care.  If I were to give up meat permanently, I think I'd certainly miss it, particularly on holidays where the food is an important part of the tradition.  But on an average day, I'm just as happy with all the other foods.

Labor Day was on the 1st this year, and we celebrated with turkey burgers, which were very tasty.  We spent the long weekend in Michigan, so on the drive back I added a McDonald's cheeseburger to the meat tally for the day - just as tasty as ever.  Shannon is in charge of the cooking, and she plans to implement a somewhat lower meat diet than we have had in the past, but for now we don't have any plans to have any more meat prohibitions.