How Not To Do A Top 11 List
The Wall Street Journal is the finest newspaper in America, if not the world, but I would no more go to them for sports than I’d go to Paris Hilton for … anything.
1. Florida vs. Florida St.
2. Georgia vs. Georgia Tech
3. Alabama vs. Auburn
4. Michigan vs. Ohio St.
4. BYU vs. Utah
6. Nebraska vs. Colorado
7. Arizona vs. Arizona St.
8. Virginia vs. Virginia Tech
8. Washington vs. Washington St.
10. Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma St.
10. Oregon St. vs. Oregon
12. USC vs. UCLA
13. Pittsburgh vs. West Virginia
14. Arkansas vs. LSU
15. California vs. Stanford
Three problems immediately jump out:
* Number 1 is listed at the top of the list, destroying all suspense.
* The list is too long – studies show that the optimal length for a list is eleven.
* When ranking something as subjective as football rivalries, there is no need for ties. Take a stand. Is the Oklahoma/Oklahoma State rivalry bigger, or is it Oregon State/Oregon?
Where are the long standing traditional rivalries? The games where the fans wouldn’t care if their team went 1-12, so long as the one win denied the hated rival a shot at a National Championship? Don’t they know that there are two kinds of Texans: Longhorn fans and Aggies fans and they don’t care much for one another? Have they ever heard of a little rivalry called the Army/Navy game? True, those games have been mismatches of late, but tradition should count for something. And if you’re going to bring recently created rivalries into the mix, you can’t ignore all of the new University of Minnesota rivalries created by the scheduling genius of Glen Mason (my personal favorite of these is Minnesota/Louisiana-Lafayette).
The Wall Street Journal should stick to reporting on stock splits and leave the lists to the experts.
posted by Sisyphus at 11/19/2005 09:44:00 AM
2 Comments:
You know, Pitt vs. Penn State has always been the biggest football rivalry around here. West Virginia is close, sure, but Pitt and Penn State was always the grand finale, the perfect capper to end the season, the true Division 1 Pennsylvania championship match. Just because Pitt and Penn State have gone on to join two different conferences and never play one another anymore does not lessen the intense feelings that fans of the two schools have towards one another.
And THAT's why this is no way to do a top 11 list.
The problem with Texas is that it has too many great rivalries. I went to UT, they used to have to play the Oklahoma -UT game in neutral territory equidistant from both schools because of the potential for armed conflict among the fans.
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