{"id":2091,"date":"2008-12-16T10:44:29","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T16:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/12\/16\/the-category-mistake-at-the-heart-of-college-football\/"},"modified":"2008-12-16T10:44:29","modified_gmt":"2008-12-16T16:44:29","slug":"the-category-mistake-at-the-heart-of-college-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/16\/the-category-mistake-at-the-heart-of-college-football\/","title":{"rendered":"The Category Mistake at the Heart of College Football"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Too many things I would blog about, if only I could slip into an extra timelike dimension and experience several weeks in just a few of your Earth minutes.  Between now and New Year&#8217;s I&#8217;m going to clean out my collection of blog-worthy things; if you&#8217;ve read enough of <em>Cosmic Variance<\/em> in the past, you should be able to extrapolate to a full post.<\/p>\n<p>Today:  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sportingnews.com\/blog\/Noplayoffs\/172720\">&#8220;Top Ten Stupidest Arguments in College Football,&#8221;<\/a> which is itself so full of stupid arguments one suspects one is being punk&#8217;d.  College football is the only major sport that decides who plays in the championship game on the basis of a vote, rather than by a playoff.  One can debate the merits vis-a-vis excitement and revenues, but the whole operation is based on an epistemological blunder:  the idea that there is something called the &#8220;best&#8221; team.  The point of sports is not that there are better teams and worse teams, it&#8217;s that some teams win and some teams lose.  Winning and losing is not some approximation to the true measure of excellence that we are forced to put up with; it&#8217;s what the games are all about.  A sensible world would have a playoff, and let the teams play.  (I&#8217;ve actually heard people argue that a playoff would be bad idea because the &#8220;best&#8221; team might not win.)<\/p>\n<p>(If I could just train myself to make posts that are that short all the time, I&#8217;d blog twice as often.  Maybe five times as often.  Are more\/shorter posts better?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Too many things I would blog about, if only I could slip into an extra timelike dimension and experience several weeks in just a few of your Earth minutes. Between now and New Year&#8217;s I&#8217;m going to clean out my collection of blog-worthy things; if you&#8217;ve read enough of Cosmic Variance in the past, you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}