Michigan State Fans These Days Don’t Know What They’re In For

I was in jail.

Michigan State University police station, actually, waiting for a transfer to Ingham County Jail. I had let a fix-it ticket for my Honda’s busted exhaust turn into an actual ticket while saving up for a new exhaust, and then the old exhaust fell off completely while driving downtown which drew the attention of the local constabulary and it turns out I had a warrant from the unpaid ticket and . . . yeah.

This was in the Hazy Period of my life. I was as done as I was going to get with college but hadn’t yet bothered to spin the numbered wheel of The Game of LIFE or add people-pegs to my little plastic car. I was taking stock of that decision, or lack thereof, when a fresh-faced lad sporting a blue cardigan and khakis was seated next to me.

I asked him what he was in for. “Rioting,” he said.

I asked him what in the hell he’d been rioting for.

“I . . . I don’t know,” he said. “I’m from Connecticut. I thought  . . . that’s just what we do here.”

* * *

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the student sections at Michigan State. The Izzone is bigger than ever, packing the lower (and part of the upper) bowl, but instead of making the Breslin an impenetrable fortress of intimidation the Izzone picks their spots. They make noise, sure, but they save themselves for big games and big situations.

The southeast corner of Spartan Stadium doesn’t fill up anymore, despite MSU not losing at home since October 2009. Think about that: this fall’s class of Michigan State juniors have never witnessed Michigan State lose at football, yet AD Mark Hollis is openly considering shrinking the student section.

The students are passing up no opportunity to add salty words to their chants, because ha ha why not? FIRST DOWN, BITCH! That’s clever and funny! As Jim mentioned earlier, they also have no problem wheeling out the “Little Sister” chant to against Michigan, because apparently being a girl is worse than being a boy. Besides, we can’t be each other’s little siblings. If students are going to be sexist idiots, they should at least make sense and call Michigan “Big Sister.”

What’s wrong with kids these days?

Part of it, as Hollis said, is cultural. His twelve-year-old doesn’t ever “sit down for two hours and do anything.” But if college kids can’t pay attention to their football or basketball team establishing itself at the top end of national awesomeness, then we might as well give up on humanity now because nobody will ever pay attention to anything ever again.

Part of it is a trend across all sports: going to a game used to be the ultimate populist spectacle. Entering Spartan Stadium meant joining a seething mass of humanity, the lower bowl a cauldron filled by the bloodthirsty hoi polloi. Now, sporting events are more like joining a fancy club with steep dues. The kind of people who go to games are the kind of people who can afford to drop hundreds, or thousands, on tickets and concessions and apparel—and frankly, those people are less likely to stand up and holler from kickoff to gun.

Those are also the kind of people who can afford to send their kid to Michigan State. Tuition keeps going up, and every year the percentage of (highly profitable) out-of-state and international students grows. More and more kids from Connecticut are showing up expecting nonstop multi-sport Spartan domination . . . and nobody screams their lungs out with joy when they get what they expect.

I don’t mean to suggest that students who aren’t from Michigan can’t be Real Spartans. In my experience, how green your blood is depends entirely on how green your heart is—what Michigan State means to you personally.

But of my Spartan friends, many are legacies; their parents moved from wherever to the Lansing area and stayed here. Coming to Michigan State meant establishing themselves as independent adults—and the potential to reach a standard of living much higher than they were raised in. In turn, they taught us to be Spartans and hate Michigan and all that good stuff. When my eldest child started school, I found to my delight kids still display partisanship by chanting, “Michigan, State! Michigan, State!” and jabbing a thumb down (or up), then up (or down) in time with the words, just as I did when I was a kid.

For me, the success of Michigan State athletics, and the rivalry between the two schools, was expressed constantly around me in the home and at school and at church . . . it absorbed the entire community. Nick Saban’s last season here, the amazing 9-2 Citrus Bowl year, seemed as close to glory as Michigan State was ever going to get. Crowds packed Spartan Stadium to the brim, and the team started calling their home “The Woodshed” because they almost never lost there.

Now they actually never lose there.

When I see current MSU students from parts unknown on Twitter with “Proud future Chicagoan” in their bio, it makes me wonder. Coming from money elsewhere, heading for money elsewhere, stopping here to party in between . . .  how much can Spartan triumph possibly mean? Who cares about taking pride or being classy when they can just show up drunk and have fun and leave halfway through to go drink? Or, hey better yet, just leave the paid-for ticket in their pocket and keep playing another few hours of flip cup?

For this generation of Spartan students, going to a top bowl game or beating Michigan or going to a Final Four isn’t a jumping-up-and-down screaming, fandom-defining moment, it’s just what we do here.

* * *

The final part of it rests squarely on the shoulders of the power brokers in college sports. Mark Hollis, Jim Delany, and the NCAA as a whole, I’m looking at you. How can students think football games are special when they don’t mean anything? How can you expect thousands of college kids to show up and scream their brains out as Michigan State puts it in cruise control against FAU or Chicago State for the umpteenth time?

When I rant and rave about “diluting the product,” this is what I mean. College athletics has stretched itself to the breaking point. Universities and conferences are desperately trying to board the TV money train while their arm is shackled to the boring old concrete pylon that is a century of amateur college athletic tradition. That money train is pulling away, and either they need to let it roll away, or break out of their college handcuffs once and for all.

Oh Delany What New Devilry Is This?

Do you love college football? Well I love college football too, and we all know that settling the national champion on the field would be only the right thing to do. Even crazier than that, Jim Delany might finally be starting to agree with you. In a reversal of policy that seems a little too good to be true Northwestern athletic director Jim Phillips said the following regarding a playoff:

"We have to listen to the fans; we cannot be tone-deaf," Northwestern athletic director Jim Phillips, the chair of the Big Ten's Administrators Council, told the Tribune. "The Big Ten is open and curious."

Shotgun on The Open and The Curious as new Big Ten division name candidates to replace Leaders and Legends. Delany has always struck me as two things. The first, in the movie Hot Tub Time Machine they say the line, "He's an a-hole, but he's our a-hole". The second, Delany introduced the concept of a network devoted solely to a conference when he launched the Big Ten Network in 2007. He's been the indisputable winner of the conference retooling by landing Nebraska. Nebraska is excellent at every sport except the one where you put the round orange ball in the cylindrical thing, the state is the Bermuda triangle of basketballs.

If Delany is going to relent at this point it's because he's figured out an angle. It's not fan pressure, that's been there for 15 years. It's not dollars, at least not overtly, those dollars have been there for 15 years. It's because he's figured out a way to put the Big Ten in a strong position through this proposal. On an interesting and certainly unrelated note from the Big Ten/Pac-12 Partnership article in the 12/28 New York Times.

The collaboration could lead to the conferences creating bowl partnerships and postseason games that would be shown on their networks. Delany pointed out that ESPN and the NFL Network both run bowl games.

While Delany and Scott said the idea of starting a bowl game shown on their networks had not been formally discussed, both said they were open to the idea.

So wait, you're cool with a playoff now AND you're also cool with Big Ten/Pac-12 Bowl Games shown on those networks? Hm, if Delany gets his way I'd be a skosh itchy if the bowl I ran didn't have the word Rose in it.

A Proposed College Playoff Ranking System Pt. 1

Part One, today, part two later this week. Thanks to both KJ and Ty for talking things through on this.

Currently, I'm reading Dan Wetzel's marvelous book Death to the BCS. The mid-book review would be like that of a great documentary, it asks many great questions, points out the flaws in the current system flawlessly and offers some answers that are incomplete. This is a good thing, a book with all the answers would come across as dictatorial and anything that commands a billion dollars needs a democratic, conversational solution.

Wetzel et al(I've always said and pals in conversation, it's just more fun to read that way). Wetzel and pals offer the solution of a sixteen team playoff with the eleven conferences getting automagic bids into the playoff and the remaining five teams being drawn at large. They go on to state that all the games except the Championship Game would be played at the higher seed's home field. Which as a Michigan State fan(brr..), still I think if we were playing to be in the elite eight of college football against the best in CFB, my zeal for king and country would keep me warm.

And beer, so very very much beer could keep me warm

Still, my mind immediately went to two things. First, how could you fairly decide which five teams get in at-large? Obviously human rankings are not reliable and computers while reliable still produce results that a human can look at and know are incorrect. Second, since the home field team would have a distinct advantage over the away team(Can you imagine Texas playing at Michigan State on January 3rd? That's simply not fair.) how can someone ensure that the teams are ranked fairly?

Were someone to draw up this list using the final BCS ranking on December 4th, 2011 they would look like this.

2011 Postseason Rankings - BCS

1.)LSU(SEC Champs)
2.)Alabama(At-Large)
3.)Oklahoma State(Big 12 Champs)
4.) Stanford(At-Large)
5.) Oregon(Pac-12 Champs)
6.) Arkansas(At-Large)
7.) Boise State(At-Large)
8.) Kansas State(At-Large)
9.) Wisconsin(Flopping Champs)
10.) Clemson(ACC Champs)
11.) TCU(Mountain West Champs)
12.) Houston(Conference-USA Champs)
13.) West Virginia(Big East Champs)
14.) N. Illinois(MAC Champs)
15.)  Arkansas State(Sun Belt Champs)
16.)  La Tech (WAC Champs)


* - Teams 14-16 were unranked, Northern Illinois received 36 votes in the final coaches poll, Arkansas State received 1 vote and La Tech received zero. God rest their souls.

The bracket then looks like this.

Russell Wilson finally does get a trip to Manhattan!

This isn't bad, we don't have to abide the annual Boise whining about how they don't get a shot to play for the national title game, after all they play two actual games and 10 tune-ups on their way to an undefeated season every year so it's totally fair that they should get a shot to be mentioned in the same breath as teams who play 8-10 real games and 2 tune up games.

Honestly, my biggest beef with these rankings is that they are in some part based on preseason rankings which are just crap. The rankings then get carried forward into the season and then there is a bias as the season goes on. I want to reward teams for playing and beating quality competition. So I decided to come up with a rating system. This system needed to calculate a score based on wins, losses, quality of opponent and margin of victory. Is this hypothetical ranking perfect? Absolutely not, but is it based on postseason, pre-bowl results when the maximum set of data has been gathered for a college football season? You betcha. Is it a rating system meant to be open for discussion, certainly.

I'm breaking this post into two parts because I'm actually looking to create two or three different kinds of ratings, since it's the offseason and it's time for hypothetical discussion. One common tenet amongst the various ratings will be though that the base Win-Loss total will be calculated as FBS wins - ((FBS losses * 1) + (FCS losses * 2)). Since this system could actually be used to create an actual set of rankings instead of just the college football playoff rankings, I do want to pay attention to things like the effect of an FCS loss.