Newsflash - Tom Osborne Was a Good Coach
2 comments so far
August 25, 2006 by
About a week ago, the Wall Street Journal released the Dow Jones College-Football Success Index or as I like to call it the "Good God What a Useless Way of Ranking College Football Teams Index". The index assigns "Alumni Success Points" based on whether a player starts an NFL game, plays in the game, or is just on the roster then awards additional points based on whether the team won or lost that game. Sounds fair, right?
Until you actually think about it.
By their scoring method. Jimmy Smith, who had just over 1,000 yards receiving and 6 touchdowns was a better contributor than Steve Smith (who had more than 1,500 yards receiving and 12 touchdowns) because his team won more. Or thinking backward, it would mean a bunch of running backs were better than Barry Sanders because the Lions teams he played on lost so much.
Even if you stay with them that far, there's another problem. What does it mean? It means your college team is one of the best at producing starting NFL players for winning teams in the last TEN OR FIFTEEN YEARS. Think about that. The average tenure of a college head coach at one school is way less than that. So now we want to rank programs that in a sense, no longer exist? Other than Penn State's Joe Paterno and Florida State's Bobby Bowden, how many schools keep the same coaching staff that long? And what about all of the turnover of assistants?
In other words, so what? Do I need an index to tell me that Nebraska was probably the best Big XII team over the last 15 years? Or that Florida State probably had more success year-to-year over that span, than anyone? How exactly is our appreciation of college football enhanced by this.
Next time you're watching college football, lean over to your buddy and say, "Florida State has had a lot of good NFL talent over the last fifteen years". If you don't get a blank stare back, you might get a polite, "yup" which is a nice way of saying, "I could care less".
But hey, this wildly informative index will soon tell us that Mack Brown has had success recruiting at Texas. Not yet though, since he's only been there 8 years. I can't wait.
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Robert Sep 03 06
I still like the index because it confirms why I like watching the UF, FSU, and Miami, because I know I am going to see most of the people I am watching play in the NFL someday. You're talking about some of the greatest collections of talent ever assembled at times, like the FSU and Miami teams that won National Championships in the early 2000's, as opposed to the Nebraska national champions most of whom never played another football game after college. It's like the athletic equivalent of a business college or law school that places a high percentage of its students in top firms.
Steve Sep 04 06
Robert,
First let me dispute any notion that the Huskers didn't send a lot of players to the NFL from those national championship teams. They did. In fact, that was sort of the point of the headline.
But to your point, that the index will tell you which college teams to watch is exactly my criticism of the index. It won't. Instead it will tell you which teams you should have watched a decade ago. Texas has had much better teams than Nebraska in recent years yet the index would indicate otherwise. What's the point of an index that is so outdated?