For fans of The Wire

During the past few weeks, I took the little breaks in work that I had to re-watch certain seasons of--why, yes--The Wire (hey, how'd you guess?) I watched most of Seasons 2, 3 and 5. I think re-watching The Wire is maybe just as important as an initial viewing, if not more so. It is only upon repeat viewings that you truly get an appreciation for the masterpiece that has been created by David Simon, et al (raise your hand if you get the "et al" reference).

More than any other series in the history of television, The Wire was laid out from the beginning to be a televised novel so it lends itself to much better viewing as something that can be watched multiple episodes at a time rather than in a weekly serialized format. This was especially true for me in watching Seasons 2 and 5 because it was the first time I had actually re-watched them. That allowed me a chance to get a better grasp on characters and their motives, as well as observe how intricately the stories were planned by the writing staff. It amazes me how a comment or action that might have seemed like a throwaway in an early season episode develops ramifications toward the end of the series.

Also more than any other show, The Wire creates in its fans a need to seek out other fans of the show for discussion. This is not the same thing as the watercooler talk about how Jack and Sawyer are fighting over Kate, or how Agent Bauer rescued yet another President. When fans of this show discuss, it deals more with the social issues that we have been forced to ponder throughout the run of the show. One critic I have heard says that years from now people will look back and regard The Wire the same way that we look back and regard the novels of Charles Dickens (which is just another reason why the show never attained mass popularity--how many people today can actually have a discussion about David Copperfield or A Tale of Two Cities?). Re-watching the show has only caused me to more strongly believe that.

Anyway, because of my need to find out other people's thoughts on The Greatest Television Show to Ever Air, I took to the web to quench my thirst and found a lot of great stuff. I decided to post links in case anyone else might also be interested. Be warned: most of these links assume that the reader or listener has already watched the entire series so there are spoilers galore.

Alan Sepinwall's wrapup of the series

Alan Sepinwall's interview with creator David Simon
Has some really good stuff from the mind of the man who brought us the series, including why he does not think that he will ever revisit the world of The Wire, although he does not completely dismiss the idea.

Maureen Ryan's final thoughts

What real thugs thought about The Wire
Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology professor at Columbia, watched the final season with some actual leaders of drug gangs (Venkatesh had built up street cred by spending seven years observing and living with drug gangs in Chicago for his PhD program) to get their take on the show. I was actually introduced to this blog by my friend Jason during the original run of Season 5. It is probably more effective to read these posts right after you have watched the concurrent episode but it is entertaining nonetheless.

/Film podcast goes in depth
/Film brought together some critics to discuss The Wire in general, and then each season in depth. It's over three hours long but you can either listen to it at this page or download the mp3.

Harvard University panel discussion
Harvard University's Institute of Politics brought together a panel of speakers, including David Simon and Professor Venkatesh, to discuss the decay of the American city, with The Wire serving as the catalyst for discussion. This is the video of that discussion, which is about an hour and a half long.

*************

Most of these sites allow comments from readers/listeners/viewers. Of course, anytime that anyone wants to discuss The Wire, I am definitely interested.

For whenever you need a "pick me up"

If watching this doesn't inspire you to do something...I'm guessing that you're dead.

(link from Facebook)

The BCMess

(Note: normally I wouldn't write about college football until after the regular season ends this Saturday. But so much interesting stuff has happened that I have to write it all down before I forget.)

To paraphrase some of my neighbors here in Austin, it's 2008...and the BCS still sucks. No one should be surprised that there is controversy in the BCS. As I pointed out last year, it happens 70% of the time. From where I sit, there are two major controversies in this year's edition, one of which has garnered quite a bit of attention and one which has slipped under the radar. I'll examine both.

*****

The big thing that everyone has been talking about is the fact that Oklahoma passed Texas in the BCS polls which allowed the Sooners to win out in the three way tie they shared with the Longhorns and the Texas Tech Red Raiders to win the Big XII South. Texas fans are irate that they now have to watch two teams that their team beat play for their conference championship, while their Oklahoma counterparts are pointing out that head to head results don't factor in when there is a three way tie. I can see both sides.

(Full disclosure: I live in Austin and my brother is a Texas Ex, as are many of my friends. However, there are actually more people in my extended family who attended or currently attend OU. I am an alumnus of a school that receives annual beat downs from both the Longhorns and the Sooners so I think that I'm as impartial as can be expected.)

I figure that the arguments for each school can be boiled down as such:

In favor of Texas

- beat OU head to head on a neutral field (I think it was funny that many OU fans were trying to make the claim that the Cotton Bowl isn't really a neutral site since it's in Dallas; um...just because the players were breathing oxygen within the Texas borders does not erase the fact that 45,000 fans in the stadium were cheering for the Sooners or that the Cotton Bowl is actually six miles closer to Norman than it is to Austin)

- beat the best team from the Big XII North in Missouri

- has the "best loss" on a last second TD to Texas Tech.


In favor of Oklahoma

- has the best win between the three schools in the win over Tech

- has the best road win over Oklahoma State

- has better out of conference wins over Cincinnati and TCU (although it should also be pointed out that no team on Texas' OOC schedule is anywhere near as bad as Chattanooga or Washington).

Texas fans were pointing to the head to head win as the ultimate decider. Oklahoma fans were (correctly, in my opinion) arguing that you cannot point to head to head wins in the event of a three way tie. You need to dig deeper and that's where the drama begins (and she be like...).

I think most people outside of Lubbock acknowledged that Texas Tech was definitely the third dog in this race. No football team that wants to consider itself a champion of anything should EVER get blown out by 44 points. Period. However, that didn't mean that we simply ignore the fact that the Red Raiders were actually tied with the Longhorns and Sooners . After all, if Oklahoma had lost its last game Tech would have advanced to the championship game regardless of how much it lost to OU. So that brought us to the fifth tiebreaker used by the Big XII, in which case the highest ranked BCS team wins out. I have three main problems with this.

In and of itself, the fact that the BCS standings are used to break ties is not that big a deal. Every conference that hosts a championship game uses them to break ties at some point. The issue is with the way the Big XII applies it. There is a calculated reason for why the conference picks the highest ranked BCS team--it gives it a better chance to send two teams to BCS bowls, which of course means more revenue. This year is a perfect example. Texas is currently third in the BCS and the only team behind it that has any chance of surpassing is Florida. That means Texas is a lock to finish in the top four of the BCS standings, which is an automatic berth in a BCS bowl. Then you add in the automatic berth that will go to either Missouri or Oklahoma for winning the Big XII Conference and you have two big paydays for the conference. However, there's a question there: is that the fairest solution? I think it's worth noting that, of the five conferences that do host championship games, the Big XII is the ONLY one that would have allowed Oklahoma to win out over Texas. In some variation, the others would have first eliminated the third place team according to the BCS (in this case, Texas Tech) and then used the head to head to determine the division winner. That would mean that on field play would be a stronger factor in deciding the outcome.

The second issue I have is that OU was correctly ranked higher by the computers due to having beaten Big East champ Cincinnati as well as 10-2 TCU. But here's my question: why should out of conference play have any bearing on who wins one division of the Big XII Conference? That doesn't make much sense to me.

And the third concern I have is with voter fraud. Two thirds of the BCS is decided by human voters. One of those thirds is by the coaches, and they do not have to reveal their votes until after the last game of the regular season. That can lead to all kinds of voter manipulation. There was evidence of that in the most recent human polls when Oklahoma was ranked ahead of Texas previous to this past weekend's games but then Texas jumped ahead of them afterward, despite both teams winning. That doesn't necessarily mean that there was an intentionally nefarious plot to have Texas move ahead of Oklahoma. It could simply mean that more voters were trying to take into account the entire season (and specifically the Saturday when Oklahoma and Texas met on the field) and deciding that Texas had the better body of work. But again, that is voters wielding a little bit too much power. I mentioned this last year, there needs to be an established understanding in the ways voters make their selection. If, at the end of the season, voters are deciding to take into account the entire season for their votes, that needs to be done each and every week of the football season instead of moving teams around based primarily on the most recent weekend's outcomes.

At the end of the day, Oklahoma won the division because of the rules that had been set in place before the season. Based on their play, the Sooners deserve the chance to play in the conference championship. The problem is that so do the Texas Longhorns. On si.com, Stewart Mandel wrote, "All I see are two extremely deserving teams with no discernible separation between them." I couldn't agree more.

*****

It is also interesting how the above situation will affect the Heisman race. It's pretty much come down to either Sam Bradford from Oklahoma or Colt McCoy of Texas. The significance is that, in my mind, they are almost at a dead heat but now Bradford gets one more game to try to influence voters.

In some ways, this race reminds me of 2005 when Vincent Paul Young, Jr of Texas finished a distant second to Reggie Bush from USC. I didn't have a problem with Bush winning because the Heisman is supposed to go to the Most Outstanding Player in college football and every time he stepped onto the field Bush was a highlight reel waiting to happen. However there is no question that if the Heisman was supposed to go to the Most VALUABLE Player in college football, Young would have won it handily. No player meant more to his team that year.

Colt McCoy is that same caliber MVP this year. No player is more invaluable to the success of his respective team than he is. Bradford isn't necessarily more outstanding in the same vein as Bush but he is the trigger man for probably the most explosive offense in the nation. I'm very interested in seeing how this ends.

*****

There is another controversy in the BCS that is not being discussed as much but should upset fans of both Texas and Southern California. The SEC championship has essentially become a semifinal game for the national championship since the winner between Alabama and Florida is pretty much assured of finishing in the top two of the BCS. But upon closer examination, I don't know if that is quite fair.

Alabama is currently the number one ranked team in the nation. It's hard to argue with that since the Crimson Tide is the only undefeated BCS conference team in the nation. Florida, with an 11-1 record, is the number four team and has looked extremely impressive since losing to Ole Miss two months ago. But I think that both Longhorn and Trojan fans have a legitimate gripe in knowing that one of those teams is almost certainly guaranteed to make it to the championship game while their teams are just as almost certain to NOT make it.

The biggest reason given for the higher rankings of Alabama and Florida is that their schedules are among the most difficult due to playing in the SEC. Looking more closely, there are some serious flaws in that logic. Take a look at the respective resumes of each team:

Alabama (12-0)
- No losses
- Wins over teams currently ranked in the BCS, #16 Georgia

Florida (11-1)
- One loss to Ole Miss
- Wins over teams currently ranked in the BCS, #16 Georgia, #24 Florida State

Southern California (10-1)
- One loss to Oregon State
- Wins over teams currently ranked in the BCS, #10 Ohio State, #19 Oregon

Texas (11-1)
- One loss to #7 Texas Tech
- Wins over teams currently ranked in the BCS, #2 Oklahoma, #14 Oklahoma State, #20 Missouri

Texas has the biggest gripe. Not only have the Longhorns beaten better teams than Alabama or Florida, they've beaten as many ranked teams as the Crimson Tide and Gators COMBINED (or more, if you don't count Georgia as two separate teams). But USC has a legitimate complaint as well. The Trojans resume is slightly better than Florida's but they are essentially shut out of playing in the championship game. Now, it should be pointed out that whoever does win the SEC championship will have defeated another ranked team but you have to wonder if the rankings of those schools are somewhat built upon a house of cards. That is especially true of Alabama. Again, you cannot discount the fact the team is undefeated but it is worth noting that out 12 wins, only four have come against BCS conference schools that have a winning record. One message board post I saw made the comparison between this year's Alabama team and last year's Kansas Jayhawks team. That is, they both achieved a lofty record due to playing in the weaker division of a relatively strong conference and a soft out of conference schedule. Truth be told, it is not difficult to argue that Utah deserves to be ranked ahead of Alabama. The Utes are also undefeated and have beaten TWO teams currently ranked in theBCS (#11 TCU and #18 BYU). I can begrudgingly accept that Alabama should be ranked #1 but they are nowhere near the best team in the nation, in my opinion.

*****

Last year I said that college football needs to figure out some sort of playoff. Most fans, including President Elect Barack Obama, want one. I think I've come up with the fairest solution, which of course means that it will never be adopted.

The first thing that college football fans need to realize is that the BCS is necessary. In a sport that features 119 teams playing 12 game schedules, there is absolutely no way to choose a champion in a completely objective manner. So there has to be some sort of way to narrow down those teams into a group that most people will reasonably accept as the best (the same way the selection committee in college basketball chooses the field of 64). That's where the BCS comes in. The problem with the BCS isn't the BCS itself; it's that it tries to find the two best teams and almost never does that in an acceptable manner.

Second, automatic berths for certain conferences is ridiculous. There is no way of knowing which conference in any given year are going to be better than others. This year, the Mountain West Conference is probably better overall than any other conference except the Big XII and SEC. Yet four other conferences, the ACC, the Big East, the Big Ten and the Pac 10 have guaranteed berths while the MWC had to have one of it's teams go undefeated before it was considered.

Third, give slightly more weight to the computers. Right now the humans account for 2/3 of the BCS while computers are 1/3. I think that should be more like 60:40. As described above, it is far too easy for human voters (and specifically coaches) to manipulate the polls. Giving more weight to the computers will negate that to some extent while still giving human voters the final word.

Fourth, preseason polls need to be eliminated. As much as polls are guesswork, preseason polls are utter shots in the dark. Check out the rankings of these teams before the season started compared to where they are now (using the Coaches Poll):

Georgia- Preseason #1; Currently #19
LSU- #6; unranked
Missouri- #7; #17
West Virginia- #8; unranked
Clemson- #9; unranked
Auburn- #11; unranked
Wisconsin- #12; unranked
Kansas- #13; unranked
Virginia Tech- #15; unranked
Arizona State- #16; unranked
Tennessee- #18; unranked
Illinois- #19; unranked
South Florida- #21; unranked
Penn State- #22; #6
Wake Forest- #23; unranked
Michigan- #24; unranked
Fresno State- #25; unranked
Ole Miss- unranked; #25
Oregon State- unranked; #24
Pittsburgh- unranked; #23
Northwestern- unranked; #22
Michigan State- unranked; #21
Boston College- unranked; #20
Oklahoma State- unraned; #15
Ball State- unranked; #13
Cincinnati- unranked; #12
TCU- unranked; #11
Boise State- unranked; #9
Utah- unranked; #7

That is a list of 29 teams that are either 10 poll positions away from where they were in the preseason, dropped from the rankings completely, or entered the rankings after not being ranked in the preseason. TWENTY-NINE. That's more teams than are ranked in the first place. And that's with the prejudice of preseason polls! Why is it such a difficult thing for voters to watch a few games before deciding which team should be ranked where? I understand that fans want to have an idea (however false that idea might be) of how good their team is going to be but leave the speculation to Athlon and Street & Smith. If we want to have a sport be as objective as possible, there is simply no reason to have premature guesswork be an official factor.

Ultimately, I'd like to see the BCS used to determine the best eight teams in the nation and then have them play it out on the field. Some critics of a playoff think that it would ruin the regular season, which 1) is hogwash and 2) can already be ruined in the current system (ask any Burnt Orange fan today). These critics point to college basketball as proof that a playoff renders the regular season less interesting. To those people, I would like to say, "Congratulations on making an apples to oranges comparison." College basketball's regular season is not as meaningful because there are nearly 400 teams that play close to 30 games per season. Additionally, many of these games are played during the week. Of course they get less attention than the football games. I promise you this: 119 school trying to make it into eight slots will not make for boring games. The difference is that one loss will not necessarily knock a team out of contention and losing late in the season will have no more of an impact than losing early. And that's how it should be.

*****

Finally, I would like to announce the pride I have in my Baylor Bear cubs. Yeah, the 4-8 record is only one game better than we finished last year but there is a palpable difference in the team this year. The Bears played hard in every single game. In fact we lost by a touchdown or less to Connecticut, Missouri and Texas Tech. Had me managed to win those three games, we'd be 7-4 and headed to a bowl. I wouldn't even care which one, I'd be going. The improvement in this team is a direct result of the attitude instilled by first-year coach ArtBriles and the leadership of freshman quarterback Robert Griffin III (whom I sometimes refer to as Moses, because he will lead us to the promised land). Other than maybe Terrelle Pryor of Ohio State and Jacquizz Rodgers of Oregon State, Robert Griffin III has easily been the most impressive freshman player in NCAA Division I football this season. He set a school record for most rushing yards in a game (in his second game as a starter) and an NCAA record for most passes attempts at the beginning of a career without an interception. And on the side he just earned a 3.7 GPA in his first semester in college and almost qualified for the Olympic team in the 400 meter hurdles. If I had a daughter I'd be trying to gather up a dowry to bring HIM into the family. I'm definitely looking forward to the next three years.

-30-