A bunch of small pieces, loosely blogged:
Congrats to all my friends in Gator Nation. Last night's "championship" was hardly one at all after about 10 minutes. Florida exposed OSU even more radically than USC exposed Michigan. Maybe it was selective listening on my part, but I didn't hear all those talking heads who were calling for the Big 10 rematch apologizing for wasting our time. That's why two teams from the same conference in college football shouldn't play for the title--unless we get past a system that rewards weak non-conference schedules, you simply can't trust that a given conference is the best.
Unfortunately, this year's BCS came courtesy of some of the worst announcing I can recall in recent years. I like Alvarez okay, but he's got no experience announcing. Charles Davis was audibly checking rosters for the names of the players during his commentary. And you could practically hear Brennaman getting corrected in his earphone when he demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge about college rules (as opposed to the NFL). I understand that the BCS runs on greed, but giving the majority of the games to FOX, when they don't run games during the year, is absurd. And the commentary was in places unbearable. They should be embarrassed, the BCS should be embarrassed, and we should get some announcers next year who actually have some minimal familiarity with the game itself, the teams, and the profession. I'm not asking for stars, just for competency.
Speaking of stars, I should note the passing of Le Blogue. Like Donna, I'm a little sad that Michael's taking it offline, but I understand, too. Timothy's discussion, of some of the challenges of blog celebrity, makes a lot of sense as well, though. Our tendency is to differentiate among blogs according to the topics they take up, but there is an important distinction (or series of distinctions) to be made among blogs at different points along the distribution curve as well. Even down here on the Tail, the owners of relatively popular sites can find themselves spending a lot of time managing conversations, comment threads, etc. In other words, there's a lot of invisible work that goes into sites as popular as Michael's, and that makes it hard for me to begrudge him his retirement from blogspace.
Finally, regardless of what happens this year, I'll be on a new contract. And you're absolutely nuts if you don't think that new contract will include some provision for this. I'll most likely spend the first month or so just cycling through all the features and showing it to anyone who will look. Shiny...so shiny....
That is all.
