I think I have a simple solution to the problem of deciding a national champion in College Football. Take the winners of all 11 conferences, and put them in a playoff. The tournament would last 4 rounds, and the top 5 teams would get a bye for the first round. This has the advantage of giving every team the chance to play their way a national title. If you win your conference, you get a shot. If you don’t win your conference, then it’s your own fault and you can’t blame voting or computers or anything else. The regular season remains incredibly important, which is one of the nicer aspects of the current system, and we get a meaningful championship where all 120 teams have a shot at it each year. To test this new approach, let’s consider the worst cases possible with the current system in terms of being able to find a fair solution.

• Three (or more) major conference champions are undefeated. Let’s say the winners of the PAC-10, the Big 12, and the SEC are all undefeated. In the current system, only two of them get a chance to win the title. The third is left outside looking in, even though they never lost a game. Going to my proposed system clearly solves this problem.
• There are no undefeated teams, but three (or more) contenders only have one loss. Again, the current system tries to pick the best two subjectively, but that decides things off the field. Being able to make your case to the media and on TV becomes a coaching skill. With my proposed system, it’s settled on the field. Note that you may run into a case where a team is considered a top contender by the polls but loses their conference. I say, tough shit. They should have won their conference.
• The only undefeated team is from a smaller conference, and the major contenders (according to the polls) all have one or more losses. The current system tries to decide who is better – the major conference contenders with losses, or the undefeated minor conference team. This is not where the debate belongs. Teams from the smaller conferences that have great years deserve a shot to at least play their way into the national title game.

All that being said, there are a few problems with my proposal, but I think I have answers to those as well. The first one is, at least in theory, easy to solve. Right now, there are just 3 teams that don’t belong to any conference, the most famous being Notre Dame. The simple solution is to force all teams into conferences. With 120 teams, there’s no way to fairly evaluate the best teams if you don’t divide them into groups and have them play each other. Having “special” teams outside those groups just doesn’t work.

The next two problems are kind of related. First, what do we do with all the current Bowl Games? Second, how can we make sure that students from the competing universities can still have enough time and afford to attend the games? If we make each playoff game a different bowl, the average student will only be able to make it to one (or two at most), and then they get into the case where they have to either go to the less meaningful early games or try and guess how far their team will make it. Again, I think I have a solution. The first three rounds of the tournament should happen after the regular season during the early bowl season. These games should be home-away games, with the higher ranked team getting the home-team advantage. The bowl system stays intact, but six bowls agree to participate in the new system. Each of those six bowls takes turns hosting the national championship game, with the other 5 hosting the remaining 9 teams from the tournament, as well as one at-large team from outside the tournament. The 11 conference champions and those 6 bowl games are the only special case here – the rest of the bowls can pick teams to participate however they wish.

Finally, there’s the matter of determining rankings, which can be tremendously important because the higher ranked teams get bye weeks as well as home-field advantage. It’s tempting to use a ranking system similar to the BCS to determine the higher ranked teams, which isn’t terrible, but I’d like to stick with the philosophy of keeping things deterministic. Since the teams are each representing a specific conference, I would suggest we rank the teams based on the past performance of their conferences, so that the average finish of a conference over the past 10 years will determine the ranking of each team in the playoff.

Alright – that’s my idea in all its glory. I’ve mentioned it to a couple of people at various points, and now I’ve written it down. Let me know what you think.

I was feeling productive today and had some spare time, so I decided to work on the blog a little bit. I just finished adding support for Gravatars; if you have one, your comments will show up with a pretty picture beside them. If not, they’ll just show the default one. I also made a new “About Me” widget for the sidebar. If you want, you can go set up your Gravatar at their website. If not, it’s no big deal – don’t feel pressured or anything. Next up, I think I might make a run at enabling OpenID for the site.

These days, it seems like everybody wants to save/protect the environment. We aren’t allowed to get disposable grocery bags anymore (at least not here), people are driving like passive maniacs in the name of “hypermiling,” buses are over-crowded, and my office has installed composting bins everywhere and switched to Play-Doh silverware. With all of this effort, it seems to me that we all might have missed an easy target to reduce waste. Take a look at what I pulled out of my mailbox today (this was 2 days worth of mail).

Not only would getting rid of junk mail be an excellent way to save paper, it would also require less energy to transport all this crap around from place to place, to recycle it when people throw it away, and to dispose of whatever percentage can’t be (or just isn’t) recycled. Even better, and this is something people don’t place enough weight on, it would be less of a bother for everybody. Getting rid of junk mail is damn near universal in this country. Think of how many people go home every day and have to grab the extra mail from their mailbox, sort through it, and throw away the crap they don’t care about. Put it all together and that’s a lot of cumulatively wasted effort and time. I know there are ways to opt out of it, but that’s the wrong way around. This is just too easy of a target for the people pushing us all to conserve resources; I can’t believe they haven’t gone after it yet.

I woke up late today hoping to catch the Patriots-Jets game on TV, but the people in charge of my television seemed to have other ideas. To start with, there was only one early game on today: the Colts-Vikings game on CBS. For the late games, Fox got to show the Seahawks-49ers game, and CBS was stuck showing paid programming instead of the Pats game (which they were showing just about everywhere else in the country). I don’t know the exact rule about showing games on TV opposite the Seahawks, but I think it’s something like they aren’t allowed to show big games on the other network while the Seahawks are on.

It’s incredibly stupid when you think about it, epsecially when you take into consideration my experiences (both today and previously) trying to find a bar that I can watch the Patriots game at. Today I tried King Cobra, but the story is the same pretty much everywhere. The bars are full of Seahawks fans, and good luck finding a place that has the Sunday Ticket subscription and is willing to change a TV off of the Seahawks game. Even if you do find a place, they are usually only willing or able to put on one additional game, and it becomes a battle of who has more fans there, and who was there first. The few bars with enough TVs to show all the games (Spitfire and Fox Sports) are filled to the brim with, you guessed it, Seahawks fans.

For the record, I don’t have any objection to the fact that local bars are full of Seahawks fans and are primarily showing the local team’s games. That’s a good thing. My issue is with the fact that the local TV stations aren’t allowed to show the other games that the rest of us might care about.

I have been looking around for some kind of fan organization I can join to officially register my displeasure with the whole lack of games thing, but so far I haven’t been able to find anything. I am going to keep looking, and will put up another post if I find something. Until then, if any of you know of such an organization, I’d love to hear about it.

For about a year and a half now, I’ve been listening to music in my car through an FM transmitter hooked up to my i Pod. It’s worked pretty well, especially since I’ve managed to stick with the same radio station the whole time, which made things easy. Somebody was broadcasting something on that station; I’d usually hear static-y songs whenever I turned the radio on before hooking up my iPod, but it wasn’t a strong enough signal to interfere with my transmitter.

But then last week it stopped working. I don’t know if somebody is broadcasting a new station or if the old one just got stronger, but whatever the case, I can’t use that frequency any more. And I’m having trouble finding a new one that will work on both sides of Lake Washington, which is necessary for my commute, and up north to Tulalip, which is necessary for my weekly poker trip. If I don’t find a good station soon, I’ll probably start looking for some way to plug my iPod into my stereo.

I’ve complained here before (twice, actually) about how hot my apartment gets over the summer, and I’ve even vowed multiple times to find a new place before summer. But it turns out that I’m pretty lazy, so I came up with a different plan: to get an air conditioner. That part was pretty easy; I just bought Marques’s A/C unit when he moved to London.

The trickier part was figuring out what to do with the hot air produced by the A/C. It has a vent in the back, and there’s a hose that you can hook to it with some rubber so you can seal one of your windows, but I don’t have any windows that open in my living room. I just have a screen door. So, in the pinnacle of modern home decor, I went to the Home Depot and bought some styrofoam to seal up my screen door with. It’s all hooked up now, and my apartment has already cooled off about 6°, which is a big win in my book.

When I got my current car, I subscribed to Sirius satellite radio. I’d never tried it before, and it seemed pretty cool at first, so I bought one of their 1-year subscriptions. I kept it for two full years, but it steadily got worse as time went on, and I decided to cancel about six months ago. Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t terrible; I just didn’t think it was worth the money.

For the past couple of weeks, Sirius has been calling me to try and convince me to sign back up, and it is by far the most annoying telemarketing ever. First of all, they keep calling. Second, they’re calling my cell phone number. And finally, the calls just play an automated recording when I answer the phone. It’s one thing when I call my cable or phone company and they have an automated system to route me to the right person, but Sirius is using one to call me, which is completely unacceptable. They called me today, and this time I hit zero to try and complain to somebody about it. But the automated system put me on hold, and my patience ran out after 30 seconds, so I hung up. There needs to be a “Fuck that, you called me” button. Freaking ridiculous.

For some reason, I seem to have the strange ability to pick out random appliances with broken or missing features that most people take for granted. I bought a brand new microwave a couple of years ago (in 2005), and it didn’t have a kitchen timer. I never even thought to check that before buying it; it was something I just assumed would be there. It does have a timer, after all; it would only make sense for there to be a way to time things without running the damn microwave, but nope. Not on this microwave.

And then there’s my alarm clock and its crazy snooze button. When you hit it, it turns the alarm off for nine minutes before turning it back on again. That part is pretty standard; I’m not sure why they picked nine minutes, but whatever. Unfortunately, whoever designed the thing also decided that it should give up after three times. After you hit the snooze button a third time, the alarm never turns back on until the next day. Not only does this lead to all kinds of waking up late, it also forces me to try and remember how many times I’ve hit snooze already. This is especially challenging given that it only comes up while I’m trying to put off waking up for another nine minutes.

Every so often, I’d find myself flipping through the channels late on a Sunday night and would stumble onto At the Movies with Ebert and Roeper. The show is on at some crazy time slot (something like 12:35 Sunday night/Monday morning), but every time I caught it I really enjoyed watching the reviews. I would see an episode, like it, and later realize that it would be a good show to record each week, only to forget about it and not actually set it up. I did this about three different times.

Well, since I’m writing this, I’ve obviously remembered to set it up to record. I probably never would have remembered if I hadn’t found their website, where you can browse through most of their old reviews. It’s great for wasting time online; I personally like to try and find the best movies I can that got two thumbs down (so far, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Reservoir Dogs are winning). They don’t hesitate to recommend against a movie if they didn’t like it, which is a good thing for a critic, but it also means they’ll have a few that lots of people disagree with after the fact.

Anyway, I’d give a pretty high recommendation to recording the show and for checking out their website.

I went north to Tulalip yesterday and played poker, and while nothing really exciting happened while I was there, I did have a fairly eventful drive home. It started when my radar detector went off, not for radar like usual, but because a cop had tagged me with a laser. I never really understood why they bothered putting in a warning for lasers, since by the time you can detect them it’s already too late, but they did. After it went off, I actually saw the cop sitting in his car on top of an overpass as I drove under it, with the laser gun sticking out the window, and I immediately started thinking about how best to avoid the ticket. I usually like to pull off at the next exit and get some gas and/or snacks, but yesterday I decided to change lanes a few times and hope the cop wouldn’t be able to pick me out of traffic in the dark. I don’t know if that helped or not; I never saw the cop pass me and I obviously didn’t get pulled over.

Then, as I was driving along (more slowly than before), a warning light started blinking on my dashboard. My Audi has a couple of different ways to show warnings; there are several fixed warning lights, presumably for the really significant stuff, and then there’s an all-purpose screen where they usually show things like what station I’m playing, gas mileage info, and mini-directions. That screen can also show warning symbols, and those symbols will be red if it’s serious and yellow if it’s just a warning. The symbol I saw last night was yellow, so I wasn’t too worried.

But I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I drove with it blinking off and on for about 20 minutes, I looked through my car’s manual (it wasn’t there), and I’ve had a whole day to think about it, but i still don’t have any idea what it was trying to tell me. I was going to take a picture of it and post it here, but it’s not showing up today, so I had to draw one instead. You’ll have to forgive my lack of skill with the virtual paintbrush, but the basic idea is there: it was a trapezoid, with one corner missing and replaced with an arrow, and with 5 or so lines on the left side. Keep in mind that this symbol showed up on a screen that is perfectly capable of showing text.