Gerald R. Ford; A Return Home; Grand Rapids, Michigan

I don't usually discuss my personal life here, at least not in any great detail, but since an issue of (apparent) national concern has coincided with my recent family-holiday in Grand Rapids, I felt a few words of observation were in order. The body of former President Gerald R. Ford arrived in Grand Rapids on Tuesday, just hours after Karen and I were able to -- at the last possible moment -- struggle past the incompetent airline clerks at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport, a small and ineptly run outfit from which we barely escaped. We are never able to travel in and out of Grand Rapids without some awful episode, some dreadful display of incompetence that ruins our trip and sabotages whatever nice feelings we might still have for the scene of our youth and the people who inhabit it. The weather there is not nice. It is cold and damp and the sky is full of clouds. The land is flat, the buildings are low, and the dark clouded sky seems always to hang down and press forcefully into our souls.

The day after President Ford died, the front-page headline of the Grand Rapids Press was "He Saved the Nation." President Ford was, as the Press would inform us in the following days, a "man of character," an "uncommon man," a "common man," a "Michigan man." One headline even called him "a national treasure." But I find myself repulsed by the legacy he has left us, of Christian forgiveness, phony honesty, and Eagle Scout salutes. Of Michigan football and Midwestern normalcy. What an absurd lie, that the only unelected president in the history of our supposedly democratic union should be the most representative, the most down-to-earth citizen ever to take office. Maybe it’s even true! Actually, I'm beginning to fear it is -- which is even worse, by the way. To think that what the nation really wanted in the wake of Watergate was not understanding, but only someone honest-looking enough to make it all go away. This, I suppose, is his heritage: a legacy of covering up and burying, of obscuring the truth. Of looking the other way at the moment when it is most necessary to take a closer look. A legacy that -- I must admit -- is well suited to a man from Grand Rapids.

Watching the President's funeral on cable yesterday, I heard many references to "values." Middle American values, Christian values, the "values of a place like Grand Rapids." Every moment of the funeral had been scripted by the Ford family, but it was Grand Rapids that played the most important role, lending its so-called values to this fairy tale pageant about a Michigan everyman who accidentally became the Leader of the Free World. I won't specify why the values of Grand Rapids are, in my mind, far from unimpeachable. But I will say that the sight of Dick Cheney sitting in the pews of the church where I once watched my brother being baptized set my teeth on edge. Donald Rumsfeld giving a eulogy from the same podium where, two years ago, my father and uncle eulogized my grandfather -- this actually made me nauseous. This church "where the Fords worshipped since the 1940s," this Grace Episcopal Church, where I formerly recited the Lord's Prayer and sang hymns and never once saw anyone from the Ford family praying or worshiping or singing beside me, may no longer be a part of my life, but (even though I do not believe in God and have long since moved to New York) I find myself unable to leave it for good.

So I watched in morbid fascination, waiting for the moment when the President's casket would at last be dropped into the ground. I wanted the closure of that moment, of the final burial of thirty years of subsequent burying and covering up and turning a blind eye -- but, in the end, that moment never came. The cameras turned away. (A respectful gesture for the Ford family, certainly, but a kind of final denial as well -- a refusal to acknowledge the mortal facts one last time.) Instead I am left only with the following remark, which President Ford is said to have made shortly before his death:

"When I wake up at night and can't sleep, I always think of Grand Rapids."

BCS Mess: Three Arguments Keeping the Bullshit Corporate System in Place

Although I happened to graduate from the University of Michigan, I would've been just as frustrated had it gone the other way and Florida been left out of the national title game. This was a lose-lose situation, and everyone knew it. If UCLA hadn't beaten USC, it would've been a lose-lose-lose situation. (In fact, if you count Boise State -- and you probably should -- it already is a lose-lose-lose situation.) My feelings about the BCS are well established: it is a Bullshit Corporate System that only serves the interest of a few bowl-game administers and university presidents, and of course the advertisers. No one who plays or watches college football likes it and no one ever has. Nevertheless, the sports media continues to stand up for the BCS. Here, then, are three of the ridiculous arguments now being made on the system's behalf. Again, if Florida had been left out, the arguments would be different (perhaps even easier to diffuse). For the moment, however, I am interested in the given circumstances and will argue against the arguments that presently seek to defend this sham so-called championship.

Florida had a tougher schedule

This is an inherently arbitrary claim that relies on the premise that the SEC is the strongest conference in college football -- a very dubious premise, since the only way we have of determining the relative strength of one conference as opposed to another is by watching teams from one conference play other teams from their own conference. The SEC may have several teams with excellent records this year, but most of those victories were won over other SEC teams. This makes for a closed circle of victory. It works the same way in the Big Ten, Pac 10, and every other conference. The only way to determine whether one conference is better than another is to play more inter-conference games, but match-ups between top teams from different conferences are incredibly rare during the regular season. Even the ones that do take place tell us very little about which conference is the best. For instance: just because Ohio State beat Texas (this year) doesn't mean the Big Ten, as a whole, is necessarily better than the Big Twelve, as a whole. And so forth.

The dearth of inter-conference games is a symptom of how ill suited college football is to determining a national champion at all.

Michigan didn't win its conference championship

This places a fundamental importance on conference championships that is not in keeping with the increasingly national character of college football. One of the reasons the BCS has failed so thoroughly is that it is a quick-fix solution -- a hasty attempt to transpose national legitimacy onto the vestiges of a regional system. College football was originally, and has for most of its history been, a regional game. Due to the limitations of long-distance travel in the early-twentieth century, when the game came of age, local rivalries were more important than defeating a team from six states away. A bowl game was an opportunity to play on a more visible stage, perhaps, to extend the scope of a school's reputation, even to test one's own worth, so to speak, against an unfamiliar opponent. But the bowl system was never intended -- and is not well suited -- to serve as the basis of a national championship.

When I was growing up, Michigan fans didn't care who won the national championship -- we all knew the end-of-season rankings were an arbitrary farce, and that the only important thing was to go to the Rose Bowl. It didn't even matter if we won the Rose Bowl (though winning was always nice) because just going was sufficient proof of a successful and hard fought season. But cable television has had its influence and, this year, the disappointment among Wolverine (and USC Trojan) fans, whose teams are going to the Rose Bowl as a consolation (!), signifies the totality of our shift. Fans now care more about the national championship game than anything else, about a perfect record and "finding a way to win" than about the other, more abstract qualities that might make for an excellent season.

This can make for a boring season, I think, in which everything seems to come down to a single game. This year it was the Michigan/Ohio State game, which was all anyone wanted to talk about for more than half the season. Last year it was the USC/Texas game. These were both great games, but they also wound up making the rest of the season -- and all the other bowl games -- seem irrelevant.

In college basketball, a decidedly national game, which came of age during the era of plane travel and birthed a popular and non-controversial tournament, it is common for a team to win the NCAA championship without having won its conference championship. It is also not unprecedented, in men's basketball, for two teams from the same conference to play in the title game: Michigan and Indiana met in 1978; Georgetown and Villanova in 1985. To my knowledge, no one has seen this as a reason to question the credibility of the Final Four.

So if college football is going to come to terms with its desire for the two best teams in the country to play each other in a title game, it will have to acknowledge the possibility that, at some point, the two best teams will come from the same conference. It is a statistical inevitability.

At least this isn't the computers' fault

When Florida coach Urban Meyer was asked about the potential for a Michigan/Ohio State rematch in the BCS title game, he said that such a match up would be immediate grounds to abolish the BCS in favor of a playoff. "All the presidents [would] need to get together immediately and put together a playoff system," he said. "I mean like now, in January or whenever to get that done." Incidentally, now that his own team is playing Ohio State instead of Michigan, Meyer isn't pushing for a playoff nearly this hard. "It's an imperfect system," Meyer said after his team was selected for the title game. "If you want a true national championship, the only way to do it is on the field." (If you want my opinion, selecting Florida was an entirely political decision. Surely the BCS knew that if they didn't select Florida, Urban Meyer would've had a conniption and done everything in his power to destroy the BCS. As things stand, Meyer has been placated and Michigan's coach, Lloyd Carr, a "company" man who wouldn't yelp if a university bus ran over his daughter, has -- predictably -- not raised much of a fuss.)

Meanwhile, when Meyer was asked about what happened in 1996, when Florida won its only national title by beating Florida State in the Sugar Bowl, a rematch of a game that Florida had lost at the end of the regular season, Meyer said, "that was a completely different era." He said, "I think what happened in 1996 was a lot different because you didn't have the BCS. You had simply voting at the end and that was unique. I don't believe that's right either, what happened in 1996. I think it worked out, but there was no BCS."

Yet it is apparent that, even with the BCS, the national title is still largely determined by "simply voting." This supposedly different era is actually the same as the previous era. What's so strange is that many of the pundits are using this argument to defend the BCS. This year, the computer polls interpreted the choice between Michigan and Florida as a dead draw -- in the end it was the human polls, rather than the computers, that selected the title match up. Since many of the anti-BCS arguments made in previous years invoked the BCS formula, which seemed overly determined by computer polls, the media now seems to believe that the BCS has finally got it right! Of course, this is only a matter of convenient memory. Anyone who can remember farther back than last season will recall that the argument for implementing the BCS in the first place was that human polls had too much influence in determining the national champion.

Oh, how far we've come!! Such great lengths to sell more tortilla chips!!!

*For more on the BCS, read my post, BCS: Stands for Bullshit Corporate System.*