In tennis, unless you're playing on the pro circuit, you typically call your own lines during a match. When the other player deliberately calls a ball out to steal a point, you say you got "hooked" on the line-call.
In a bit of irony, it appears that the Texas Longhorns, whose supporters devotedly flash the ubiquitous "Hook'em Horns" sign during games, were themselves "hooked" this week when their arch-rival Oklahoma Sooners squeeked past them in the BCS polls, and snuck into the Big 12 Championship Game.
Now, the Longhorns were ahead in the Harris Poll and a mere 1 point behind the Sooners in the Coaches Poll, but the BCS computers were sufficiently impressed with Oklahoma's dismantling of their intra-state rivals to give the Sooners the edge. The result was troubling to most because the two teams had played each other on a neutral field on October 11th, and Texas had won the head-to-head matchup by 10 points. If that wasn't an accurate measure of which team was more deserving, the Texas fans argued, then what exactly is the point of playing the game? Sooner fans, on the other hand, countered that their team had not only beaten the team that had beaten Texas (Texas Tech), they had humiliated them by 40 points on national television. Accordingly, their team rightfully deserved the trip to Kansas City to play Missouri in the conference title game.
These partisan interests aside, most observers believed that the human polls should have done a better job of safe-guarding the process to better reflect the on-field outcomes of this 2008 football season. After all, freeing us from the inflexible and cold calculations of impersonal machines - incapable of weighing subjective, but nevertheless important metrics such as momentum and clutch performances - was precisely the reason that the BCS formula was tweaked in recent years to give the human element twice the weight of the computer portion (the BCS rating system is comprised of two human polls and one composite computer ranking gleaned from six individual computer ratings).
In the interest of full disclosure, I have a confession: I'm a Texas fan. Always have been, and always will be. My dad, fresh from Pusan, Korea (where American football was as foreign as black Angus steaks) went to graduate school at UT-Austin in the 70's, and something about Bevo, Earl Campbell, and the bright lights at Memorial Stadium really captured his imagination. He was instantly hooked. (No pun intended). As a result, I've always bled burnt orange, and I've always cheered for the Longhorns. From Eric Metcalf and Tony Jones to Vince Young and Ricky Williams, I've always had a deep-rooted interest in the team.
But I'm not going to use this space to argue whether Texas is more deserving than Oklahoma of a Big 12 Championship Game bid - that's something for the talking heads at ESPN or College Football GameDay to sort out. What I will do, however, is under-cut the argument that some pollsters made in ranking OU ahead of Texas on their latest ballots, despite the Longhorns' 45-35 victory over the Sooners in October: that is, as the argument goes, while Oklahoma did lose that game on a neutral field, they have played better than Texas in the six games since then. Erego, they are the stronger team; and thus, deserve to be ranked ahead of the Longhorns.
Truth is, that is an entirely subjective argument. While we can compare their relative bodies of work, we can only compare the teams meaningfully if they play again. So an argument that Oklahoma is a better team at this point in time (whereas they were not two months ago) is virtually impossible to substantiate.
But my question is: Is this OU team even playing better now than they were before meeting Texas back in October? Sure, the Sooners' recent streak of four consecutive 60-plus point games has been impressive. But people tend to forget that the Sooners were ranked a solid No. 1 in every poll after the first five games of the year. In fact, in the Coaches' Poll, they received every first place vote, save for two (Les Miles and Mack Brown presumably voted for their own teams for the No. 1 spot). Unfortunately for Texas, the deluge of OU points in recent weeks has washed away any memory of the first part of the season.
Let's take a look at the Sooners' season, however, just to tickle our fancy.
The following are the results from the Sooners' first give games before the loss to Texas, with the current BCS ranking (if any) of their opponent in parentheses:
UT-Chattanooga W 57-2
Cincinnati (13) W 52-26
Washington W 55-19
Texas Christian (11) W 35-10
Baylor W 49-17
The following are the results from the Sooners' last six games after the loss to Texas, with the current BCS ranking (if any) of their opponent in parentheses:
Kansas W 45-31
Kansas State W 58-35
Nebraska W 62-28
Texas A&M W 66-28
Texas Tech (7) W 65-21
Oklahoma State (14) W 61-41
Interestingly enough, Oklahoma's margin-of-victory in its first five games was actually higher (by nearly 6 points - 34.8 to 28.8) than it has been since the loss to Texas. Well, one might say, Oklahoma played a much easier schedule in the first month, with cream-puff out-of-conference teams served up on a platter.
Well, in each part of the season, the Sooners played two teams currently in the Top 15 in the BCS (#11 TCU and #13 Cincinnati in the first part, and #7 Texas Tech and #14 OSU in the second part). Admittedly, Oklahoma did benefit statistically from playing FCS bottom-feeding UT-Chattanooga and putrid Washington (1-22 combined record).
But even if we take out those cake-walks from the tabulations, Oklahoma's margin of victory in the first part of the season is almost within a point of its differential during the second part (28.8 to 27.7). Further, the relative combined winning percentages of those subsets are: 0.666 (24-12) to 0.611 (44-28), in favor of the season's first half opponents.
So then, what can we gather from all this? Just one ineluctable conclusion: Oklahoma has been playing at virtually the same level all-season - exceedingly well, of course. Granted, Oklahoma has impressed voters lately with their nationally televised annihilation of then-No. 2 Texas Tech, followed by a 61-point explosion against Oklahoma State in another national TV game. But, while it is easy to forget, they were just as dominant, if not moreso, in the season's first month.
As the numbers bear out, Oklahoma is no better now than they have been at any point this season. They simply played a superior team on October 11th, and they lost by 10 points. Fortunately for them, the pollsters seem to have a short memory.
