A Thorn By Any Other Name Would Prick As Painfully

Is it too much to ask people who talk about sports for a living to know the names of colleges that field teams?

The basketball phenomenon in Spokane is Gon-zag-a, not Gon-zog-a. Did you not get the hint from their nickname? They're not the Zogs, ya know.

The Catholic school from Cincinnati is pronounced Zavier, not Ecks-avier. (By the way moms and dads, if you name your son Xavier, you've given him a name that exists, and that name is pronounced Zavier.)

The national champs in football represented Clem-son, not Clemz-on.

(The broadcast partners are always good about this, so thank you CBS, TBS and friends.) 


And so on. Coastal Carolina is moving up its football program to Division 1A. So you're all going to have to learn how to say Chanticleers.

The National Championship: Don't Bet on a Good Game

I don't know which professional minor league football team representing a university is going to win tonight's National Championship game. No one does.


I could take a guess. It's a binary choice. Fifty percent of the guessers will be right. Being so doesn't demonstrate that they know anything.

Last year's game doesn't mean very much. It was one game. Many of the players from that game are gone. It's not likely to have a great deal of bearing on this year's contest.

I live in South Carolina, home of Clemson. I have many friends who are Clemson graduates or have children at Clemson. I like purple and orange. I'm sick of the Alabama franchise winning. So I certainly have my preference.

All that said, there is a lot of sentiment among the cognoscenti about a Clemson victory that is mostly wishful thinking. Alabama is so clearly the better team it hardly seems debatable.

Alabama blitzed through the SEC. They crushed almost everyone they played. They hammered Auburn. Their defense nearly outscored their opponents' offenses.

Clemson lost a game to up-and-down Pittsburgh. They should have lost to a mediocre N.C. State team that missed an easy field goal for the win. They edged Auburn by six. Non-BCS Troy took them to the wire.

Observers are weighting too heavily results from the semi-finals, where Clemson steamrolled mighty Ohio State 31-0 and Alabama struggled on offense in a 24-7 romp over a suspect Washington team. That Alabama would be criticized for only defeating the #4 team in the country by 17 is a testament to the powerhouse they are.

The Vegas spread on this game of 6.5 points is a reflection of two things: recency bias and nationwide sentiment. I've just described the recency bias. No team is as good as its best game or as bad as its worst.

The Crimson Tide played one game all season that ended within the 6.5-point spread, and that was in hostile territory to the team that defeated them last year. Fans want a close game tonight, if not an outright Clemson triumph. I hope they get both.

But that's definitely not the way to bet.