I think I'm done with Sports Watcher for the foreseeable future...

According to Wikipedia, MegaVideo wants to replace YouTube as THE place to get video online. However, it restricts how much video you can view before having to wait an hour if you're not a paying member. And it does this based on people's IP addresses, not by putting a cookie on your computer or even by tracking non-paying members separately.

If you're creating a situation where people on a shared network using one IP address - say, at a school, or at a WiFi cafe - can be cut out through no fault of their own, and end up competing to get the most video out of the IP address's 72 minutes, you're going to have a hard time going after YouTube.

College Football Schedule: Week 15

The much-delayed college football rankings are up. I've also corrected an error and listed the correct start time of the SEC Title Game. All times Eastern.

Top 25 Games
#1 *Florida	v.	#7 *Alabama	4 PM	CBS
#2 *Oklahoma	@	#13 Missouri	8 PM	ABC
#4 USC	@	UCLA	4:30	ABC
#9 Ball State	v.	Buffalo	8 PM FR	ESPN2
East Carolina	@	#23 Tulsa	Noon	ESPN2
#24 Boston College	v.	Virginia Tech	1 PM	ABC
This Week's Other HD Games
Louisville	@	Rutgers	7:30 TH	ESPN
Navy	v.	Army	Noon	CBS
Pittsburgh	@	Connecticut	Noon	ESPN
Washington	@	California	3 PM	FSN
Arizona State	@	Arizona	8 PM	ESPN
South Florida	@	West Virginia	8 PM	ESPN2
Cincinnati	@	Hawaii	8:30PT	ESPN2
Sun Belt
Middle Tenn. St.	@	Louisiana-Lafayette	7 PM WE	ESPN+
Arkansas State	@	Troy	7 PM	ESPN+
Western Kentucky	@	Florida International	7 PM

As promised a significantly longer time ago than I would have hoped...

Why should we put up with the reality presented to us by the BCS? A 16-team playoff with all conference champions can avoid most if not all of the pitfalls BCS backers claim would befall a playoff - especially if the media puts enough of an emphasis on seeding. I've heard people say we should top out a playoff at 8 teams and/or keep out the weaker conference champions (just the top 8 teams) in order to keep out teams that don't deserve to play for a national championship. To which I reply: That's kind of the point. By dangling the carrot of playing a scrub team that won a scrub conference in the first round, my system (and even an 8-team system with all BCS champions) motivates teams to keep playing even when they're safely in the field. (It's a more valid argument with the 8-team version, however, because lower-tier BCS conference champions are still good enough to surprise high seeds - especially overrated high seeds - and with only three rounds, can luck into a national championship, and with only two at-larges and no auto bid for good mid-major teams, they may be keeping out teams that deserve at least a shot.)

Last year, I in fact did conduct a 16-team Golden Bowl playoff, in much the way I imagine the NCAA would. Rather than blindly using the BCS rankings or even my own college football rankings, I used much the same criteria the NCAA uses for the basketball tournament: RPI, quality wins, road record, record entering the playoff, that sort of thing. The result was an odd field, to say the least (Virginia Tech the #1 seed?), caused by most BCS programs' tendency to schedule nothing but scrub teams in the nonconference schedule. (The ACC, which also produced Boston College as an at-large, was artificially inflated in this system simply by having a high number of high-RPI teams.) Nonetheless, I don't think I excluded anyone that was considered a plausible candidate for the real-life national championship, with Boston College and maybe Florida the only dodgy candidate in the top 12 or 13 seeds. (This year also produced three viable at-large teams - Texas, Texas Tech, the SEC title game loser - for a five-at-large field, which has me wondering if shrinkage might be feasible.)

However, I made a mistake in having all rounds determined entirely by voting. As I had even fewer readers than I had now, I got basically no votes. Result: I ended up making a lot of painstaking read-throughs of possibly meaningless statistics at Yahoo Sports, which burned me out so bad I never actually did declare the winner of the Golden Bowl Championship. I have more readers now, but most come for the webcomic posts, and even with voting I still have to come up with some concept of how the game would go, which practically means I don't come up with one. And that doesn't give you a vivid concept of how a playoff would actually go. It doesn't make you as excited as a real playoff. No simulated version can, but last year's model wasn't even trying.

Instead, I'm using Whatifsports.com to simulate each game - assuming they will have 2008 rosters up by next weekend (by which I mean the weekend of the 14th). Here's how last year's Golden Bowl might have gone down.

Also last year, I held first round games on campus sites and subsequent rounds at various other sites. The semifinals went to the Sugar and Rose Bowls, and I deliberately seeded the Big 10 and Pac-10 champions to meet in the semifinals to preserve at least a chance of the traditional matchup. (I may have underseeded #11 USC a bit to make it work.) The quarterfinals went to the Cotton, Capital One, Orange, and Fiesta Bowls.

This year, to better preserve the role of the bowls and further increase the incentive to play for seeding, I'm moving the quarterfinals to campus sites as well, although I'm not convinced about that. The semifinals will still be at bowl sites, and for a while I was tempted to go with a system that would determine which bowls would be the semifinals by which teams made the semifinals. That would be a logistical nightmare and was only ever a sop to the Rose Bowl's traditional Big Ten-Pac-10 matchup.

The bowls would run alongside the tournament and any teams eliminated in any round would move on to play one more game later on. First-round losers would be dumped into the general bowl pool with teams that did not make the tournament. I'm actually thinking any money they would receive would be the same as any regular season game, with only the stakes increasing its value, thus further encouraging playing for seeding and encouraging more competitive first round games. I'd also delete a week from the season, though I obviously can't do that here - and I actually like the Pac-10's switch to a true round-robin format since the 12th game was added - to make it work properly and prevent the Heisman ceremony from going ridiculously late.

Quarterfinal losers would go to one of the BCS bowls: the Sugar, Rose, Cotton, and Orange bowls would rotate between being semifinal games and bowls for BCS losers. I'm leaning towards not going with the Capital One Bowl, despite having a higher payout right now, higher ratings, and a higher SEC tie-in than the Cotton Bowl, because of the Cotton's now-bastardized tradition and the Cap One's corporate name, not to mention its proximity to the Orange Bowl. (In fact, because of the weird SEC tie-in structure for the 3 and 4 spots, which bowl I pick has major implications for the SEC tie-in structure at the top.) The Fiesta Bowl I'm reserving for a third-place game, for semifinal losers, but it still rotates with the semifinal bowls for hosting the Golden Bowl.

My work ethic and other projects and obligations permitting, the Second Annual Golden Bowl Selection Show will begin this Sunday at 7 PM ET (4 PM PT). Watch Da Countdown! Next weekend, around the 13th, I'll post the first round results, along with a revised minor bowl schedule; quarterfinal results will be posted the weekend before Christmas. This timing hopefully avoids finals week for schools which hold finals around this time, which I know is a concern. The semifinals are held around New Year's Day, along with perfunctory quarterfinal-loser-bowl results, and the Golden Bowl is a week or two later, maybe even as late as MLK weekend or the gap between the NFL conference championships and Super Bowl. (The idea of football being a "one-semester sport" is kind of diluted when the current National Championship Game is held on January 8th. The "gap" may be preferable to avoid conflicting with, say, the Senior Bowl, with two weeks after New Year's even more preferable.) Fiesta Bowl results would be available anywhere from a week to a day before the Golden Bowl itself.

I'm still kind of tweaking the whole format and I'm getting a MUCH later start on actually figuring out who's in or out than I'd otherwise like. Still, I hope you have an opinion and you're ready for the ride...

Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Watch: Week 13

NBC's Sunday Night Football package gives it flexible scheduling. For the last seven weeks of the season, the games are determined on 12-day notice, 6-day notice for Week 17.

The first year, no game was listed in the Sunday Night slot, only a notation that one game could move there. Now, NBC lists the game it "tentatively" schedules for each night. However, the NFL is in charge of moving games to prime time.

Here are the rules from the NFL web site (note that this was written with last season in mind):

• Begins Sunday of Week 11
• In effect during Weeks 11-17
• Only Sunday afternoon games are subject to being moved into the Sunday night window.
• The game that has been tentatively scheduled for Sunday night during flex weeks will be listed at 8:15 p.m. ET. (Note: Last year, NBC listed a tentative game for Week 17; they are not doing so this year.)
• The majority of games on Sundays will be listed at 1:00 p.m. ET during flex weeks except for games played in Pacific or Mountain Time zones which will be listed at 4:05 or 4:15 p.m. ET.
• No impact on Thursday, Saturday or Monday night games.
• The NFL will decide (after consultation with CBS, FOX, NBC) and announce as early as possible the game being played at 8:15 p.m. ET. The announcement will come no later than 12 days prior to the game. The NFL may also announce games moving to 4:05 p.m. ET and 4:15 p.m. ET.
• Week 17 start time changes could be decided on 6 days notice to ensure a game with playoff implications.
• The NBC Sunday night time slot in "flex" weeks will list the game that has been tentatively scheduled for Sunday night. (Note: Again, excluding Week 17.)
• Fans and ticket holders must be aware that NFL games in flex weeks are subject to change 12 days in advance (6 days in Week 17) and should plan accordingly.
• NFL schedules all games.
• Teams will be informed as soon as they are no longer under consideration or eligible for a move to Sunday night.
• Rules NOT listed on NFL web site but pertinent to flex schedule selection: CBS and Fox each protect games in five out of six weeks, and could not protect any games Week 17 last year. Unless I find out otherwise, I'm assuming that's still the case this year, especially with no tentative game listed Week 17, and that protections were scheduled after Week 4.
• Three teams can appear a maximum of six games in primetime on NBC, ESPN or NFL Network (everyone else gets five) and no team may appear more than four times on NBC. A list of all teams' number of appearances is in my Week 4 post.

Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games and my predictions:

Week 11 (November 16):

• Selected game: Dallas @ Washington.

Week 12 (November 23):

• Selected game: Indianapolis @ San Diego.

Week 13 (November 30):

• Selected game: Chicago @ Minnesota.

Week 14 (December 7):

• Selected game: Washington @ Baltimore.

Week 15 (December 14):

• Selected game: NY Giants @ Dallas.

Week 16 (December 21):

• Tentative game: San Diego @ Tampa Bay
• Prospects: 4-8 @ 9-3? Good lord is this game lopsided.
• Likely protections: Panthers-Giants or Eagles-Redskins (FOX) and Steelers-Titans (CBS).
• "That's my story and I'm sticking to it"'s protections: Eagles-Redskins (FOX) and Steelers-Titans (CBS)
• Other possible games: Cardinals-Patriots is still strong and Bills-Broncos and Falcons-Vikings are still at least close. If TMS&ISTI is right all this is moot because the Panthers and Giants would have to collapse to give up the spot (the Panthers did lose this week), but if it was Panthers-Giants protected Eagles-Redskins would be in it as well. Even if Panthers-Giants had been protected, Cardinals-Patriots is a strong enough game it probably would have gotten the spot anyway.
• Analysis: If Panthers-Giants isn't protected I might as well pick it now. If it is, there are four games that are very close, and Falcons-Vikings is probably the leader in the clubhouse at 8-4 v. 7-5. Cardinals-Patriots is next at 7-5 @ 7-5, then Eagles-Redskins at 6-5-1 @ 7-5, then Bills-Broncos at 6-6 @ 7-5. For any of these games to have a shot, Panthers-Giants must be protected and the Falcons, at the very least, must lose. A Falcons loss, a Vikings win, and wins by the Cardinals and Patriots would put those two games on even footing; Bills-Broncos needs a perfect scenario (Falcons and Vikings losses, Bills and Broncos wins), but Eagles-Redskins might get close enough to pull a pretty good case that the Eagles should have won "The Tie" and the accounting should be even.

Week 17 (December 28 Playoff Positioning Watch):

• Note that not only is there no longer an NBC tentative game, there's no NFL Network game. Apparently the league learned their lesson from last year's Patriots-Giants debacle.
• AFC East: Anyone's game. All four teams within two games of one another, with the Jets leading, the Pats and Dolphins a game back, and the Bills a game behind that. The Pats and Bills play each other, as do the Dolphins and Jets.
• AFC North: The Steelers and Ravens are the only two teams still in it; Steelers have a one-game edge. The Steelers play the Browns while the Ravens play the Jags.
• AFC South: The Titans are running away with it, with the Colts the only other team with a shot. No matter the standings, if the Titans remain undefeated Titans-Colts could be a lock.
• AFC West: Chiefs out, Raiders hanging on by a tiebreaker. Broncos and Chargers the main contenders, and play each other. Hmm. However, the gap is three games, advantage Broncos, and the Raiders are only a game behind the Chargers.
• AFC Wild Card: The Ravens and Colts would get the nod if the season ended today. The Dolphins and Patriots are a game back, and the Bills are waiting in the wings. Both East games and Titans-Colts are the main AFC contenders. Raiders, Chiefs, Bengals out, Chargers, Jags, Browns need a tiebreaker.
• NFC East: The Giants have a three-game lead over the Cowboys, with the Redskins hanging on by a tiebreaker and the Eagles out by half a game. The Giants play the Vikings while the Cowboys face the Eagles.
• NFC North: Vikings lead, Bears a game back, Packers two, Lions out. The Bears play the Texans and the Packers play the Lions, but the Vikings play the Giants.
• NFC South: Every team still in it, with the Panthers and Bucs leading, the Falcons a game back, and the Saints three back. The Panthers play the Saints, but Tampa Bay plays the Raiders and the Falcons play the Rams.
• NFC West: The Cardinals are running away with it and the 49ers are the only other team with a shot. Cardinals play the Seahawks. Hardly must-see TV.
• NFC Wild Card: The Panthers-Bucs loser and either the Cowboys or Falcons would get the nod if the season ended today. Redskins a game back, Eagles 1.5 back, Bears and Saints waiting in the wings. Packers three back, 49ers need a tiebreak. Giants-Vikings, Cowboys-Eagles, and Panthers-Saints are strong games, but that may be it in the NFC and the last one could be fading. Those could be competitive games for the NBC pick, though.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Apparently I'm an "ambling armadillo".

They made it official yesterday: we've been in a recession for a year. Will the WNBA survive it?

I write this Tuesday night, already tired from my last post and staying up too late the previous night, so I keep it brief.

The Houston Comets are folding - the team with the first four WNBA championships.

The symbolism can't be good.

The importance in terms of the size of the markets the WNBA is or isn't in? Philadelphia was always a bigger problem.

The importance in terms of expansion back to 14 teams (again)? Leaving aside the question of whether 14 teams is really a healthy number for the league, there has been some question of playing in Tennessee, but it's worth noting that going too far east would force the Chicago Sky into the Western Conference. However, a Memphis team could plausibly play in the West, much like the Memphis Grizzlies play in the West. Other Western targets could include a trip up I-45 to Dallas, reviving the idea of a team in Denver, or a real Bay Area team. Other Eastern targets could include reviving a team in Florida or Cleveland, or a Philadelphia or real Boston team.

The all-purpose tool of choice. (That came out wrong...)

Freehostia takes a step forward (a slightly more managable file manager) and a step back (the MySQL server isn't working). So I have to post Sandsday here until morning. And I'm REALLY pissed about it. But then, I'm really pissed about anything and everything.

On April 4, 1748, the French were embarking in the last major offensive in the War of the Austrian Succession, and someone wanted to run a human through the then-new field of taxidermy.

(From mezzacotta. Click for full-sized complex games. IE users will need to get something to allow them to see SVG files.)

On October 10, 2008, the long-running, once-delayed-but-twice-changed, countdown running at mezzacotta.net finally reached its conclusion, unveiling the latest project from the circle of friends known as the Comic Irregulars (named for Irregular Webcomic! and best known for Darths and Droids).

The centerpiece of the site was a webcomic. One requiring SVG support in order to be able to see it. One with archives going back before the site's launch... indeed before the advent of the Internet... indeed extending into the BC era... indeed before the estimated age of the entire universe. Obviously such a comic would need to be automatically generated in order to have archives dating back that far, and indeed most of the characters and lines seem to fit a cookie-cutter pattern, from identified sources ranging from the Dungeons and Dragons manual to Irregular Webcomic! In fact, there are certain patterns with certain "characters" that has led to the creation of a cast page.

(The only thing missing? Lines from other webcomics not affiliated with David Morgan-Mar. I know he's done at least three xkcd pseudo-parody strips, I'd like to see the characters spout some lines from that - that'd be really surreal. Dinosaur Comics would add an... interesting vibe to say the least, and might fit best of any other webcomic. Order of the Stick would make the whole thing even more surreal yet paradoxically give the D&D manual quoter someone to talk to. Really crappy idea, but it kinda fits, for reasons I get into below.)

But how? The strip "for" the most famous date of this millenium (and a few others) call it a "randomly generated comic", which would seem to suggest each strip in the "archive" is only generated when someone visits that date. Since each date generates the same strip each time, that would in turn seem to suggest the mechanism in place then saves that comic to that date for any future visitors. 24 hours after the site's launch, David Morgan-Mar (the group's apparent leader and proprietor of IWC) seemed to back up that theory by proclaiming mezzacotta the new comic with the most strips (supplanting Sluggy Freelance) on the basis of how many strips had been viewed in the archive, a statistic that would be most relevant under such a model.

But why use a two-part mechanism for that purpose? Why set yourself up for future potential space strain down the road by even having the endless archive in the first place? How do we know this "evidence" isn't a misdirection, and the comics are actually generated based on some formula from the date, one complex enough it might seem random? With the evidence seemingly this obvious, why are Morgan-Mar and the other Comic Irregulars still putting on a show about being tight-lipped about all the workings?

With the method of comic generation, the vast majority of the comics are bound to be incomprehensible crap, but that comes with the territory; a comic rating system allows more comprehensible and even funny comics to rise to the top and get viewed more. But mezzacotta the webcomic - which derives its name from some form of the Italian for "half-baked" (good luck reverse-engineering that result from an automatic translator though) - is just one example of a, well, half-baked idea to come out of mezzacotta the site. As Morgan-Mar described it on the first day:

I lamented that the problem with our furious generation of ideas and our attempts to implement them was that we kept needing to register new domains for sites that might turn out good, but are in fact more likely to turn out truly half-baked and never do much. What we needed was a single site which could be a central repository of half-baked ideas that we sort of half-implement, to see if they’re any good.

mezzacotta is that site. [...]

So, the initial idea was half-baked. The countdown timer was half-baked. ... The webcomic is half-baked. Everything about this site is half-baked. That’s what mezzacotta is.

Welcome to our central repository for half-baked web implementations of half-baked ideas. Most of the stuff on this site won’t be great. But by just throwing it all out there and daring to be stupid, you’ll get to discover the rare gems that we might generate and not immediately recognise ourselves.

Coming up with ideas is easy - anyone can do that. Actually doing something about them is the hard part. Anyone who’s done it knows how much sweat you have to put in to get an idea beyond the “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?” stage. This is our place for doing the hard work. It’s a spur to drive us to do something with some of those crazy half-baked ideas we get. And hopefully we’ll entertain a few of you, rather than just ourselves.

It's impossible to say anything about the above without in some way rephrasing it. Beyond being a single... experiment, for lack of a better word, mezzacotta is a place for throwing ideas on the wall and seeing what sticks, some of which amounts to little more than that, some of which results in some actual implementations. That includes even a couple other webcomics.

Lightning Made of Owls, inspired by a completely random phrase posted on the mezzacotta blog, is essentially a redo of a pre-mezzacotta concept, Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, both of which are attempts at collaboratively-written-and-drawn comics. Because ∞ on 30Cr a Day has an ongoing story, it's gotten bogged down in administrative tasks and competition for the "best" strips. LMoO was conceived from the start as a gag-a-day comic with six characters that are very rough sketches, with comics to be sent in completed, not as scripts for artists to work on. Needless to say, the result is somewhat... disjointed, and there's very little to unite the various appearances of the characters into coherent, well, characters.

More interesting - and potentially making its way into my RSS reader - is Square Root of Minus Garfield, inspired by Garfield Minus Garfield and other mashups of the Garfield comics. Let me say upfront that I don't really get the hatred many have for Garfield. I find it entertaining enough, and in fact it's one of only four newspaper comics I have really taken an interest in getting the book collections for and following in any way. In recent years (by which I mean the most recent years to be released in the book collections) it's felt like it's been running out of ideas, and the seeming disappearance of such characters as Arlene, Pooky, and to a lesser extent Nermal seems ill-timed and exascerbating to the ongoing decline, but the early years, through the mid-to-late 90s at least, were funny enough comics to hold me captivated. (But then, I read Ctrl+Alt+Del.) I hear (again, I only keep up with the book collections) that in recent years Jim Davis has resorted to advancing the Jon-Liz relationship beyond the unrequited and hopeless puppy love it had been for, what, two decades? That just smacks of desperation to me.

Secondly, as popular as G-G has become (to the extent of actually inspiring an officially sanctioned book), I actually find the mashups that remove Garfield's dialogue, not Garfield himself, to be more appealing. G-G essentially says, "Wouldn't it be cool if we took these Garfield strips and get rid of the title character? See how crazy Jon looks!" Only stripping the dialogue, on the other hand, has a more appealing hook as - assuming Garfield isn't actually speaking despite the thought balloon and isn't communicating through telepathy - it depicts how things actually happen from the perspective of the human characters. It really drives home the idea that Jon is crazy when it actually reflects something actually happening in-universe.

(Incidentially, take a look at the strip to the right, from page 3 of the original T&BB thread. It attracted such comments as "I can't even imagine it with Garfield saying something" and even "This is one of those weird ones, where you know Jon isn't actually supposed to hear Garfield, but clearly this is in response to something Garfield said. Huh." Certainly that's a common enough feature that it's sometimes confusing whether or not Jon is or isn't supposed to "hear" Garfield's thoughts. Replying to the latter comment, one poster psychoanalyzed the resulting mashup:

I like it because it's as though Jon takes a moment to consider what he said, mentally kick himself and then project that hatred onto his cat. It's a neat little psychological study that I quite like. I'm not entirely sure that Jim Davis didn't plan this all along and that we're merely forging the next step of his global empire.

The kicker? The original comic - posted at left because the Garfield web site doesn't seem to have a way to permalink to old comics, which is kind of ironic and stupid when you think about it because it forces people like me to "pirate" the strip, and forces √-G to link to the individual comic images, neither of which allows Garfield to benefit from its web advertising - doesn't actually have Garfield saying anything in the second panel. In fact, all he says in the strip is "I didn't say anything". Jon's remark actually was in response to nothing in particular, and much of his neuroses in the "modified" strip actually were intended, rather obviously, by Davis all along - or don't exist even in the "modified" strip. Does this say more about Garfield (and if so, is it positive or negative), or about the people who like to bash it?)

Anyway, √-G is essentially a different mashup of a different comic each time it comes out. Some of them so far are really little more than changing the dialogue or the pictures in a slightly surreal way, and one really only shines a light on an old series of strips with two identical panels. But it's somewhat fascinating nonetheless for anyone who's been interested in Garfield mashups. And... I don't know why I wasted time with other Garfield related stuff.

But I do have to sympathize with the Comic Irregulars' plight. I too have way too many ideas than I would ever be able to work on. The web site is, in many ways, my own version of mezzacotta, a repository for all my many and varied ideas, be they the 100 Greatest Movies Project (still on indefinite hold), my street sign gallery, Sandsday, the football lineal titles, or my college football rankings. And then there are the projects I host right here on Da Blog. There are some ideas that, for some reason or another, I just can't implement, at least alone. Here's a brief start on getting started on a list of ideas I may not be able to implement myself, but that I'd like to see fruition in some way, shape, or form:

• Election results based on my projection formulae. Would require a source of results and a group of people willing and able to call races based not on their own biases, not on unreliable exit polls, not on past performance, but on nothing but the results themselves.
• Truth Court: Sorting out fact from fiction in politics based on hard evidence, and always open to new evidence or a new interpretation of old evidence. Like Mythbusters or Snopes, but more focused on questions like "Do people cause global warming?" and "Was the 2000/2004 election stolen?" and "Do gun control laws help or hurt violent crime?" and "Was 9/11 an inside job?" and "Does supply-side economics really work?" and "Who's really to blame for economic and/or foreign turmoil, the current president or the preceding one?" and...
• Similarly, a (bi/nonpartisan) web site dedicated to "keeping the media in check - and the blogs that watch them".
• The 100 Greatest Movies Project, currently on hold indefinitely on my end unless and until my old USB drive's stuff comes back. Even if I have to shut it down, I'd like to see someone else take it over and do it justice; even if it does come back, I know for a fact I need a third person to do write-ups (I have two at the moment, including me). More here.

That's just the ones for which I've solicited comment at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com (except the third). I have a bunch more ideas bouncing around in my head, some of which I just haven't mentioned, some of which I'd still like to try to do myself, some of which I don't feel I can reveal yet. I'm a veritable font of ideas in a wide variety of topics. I can only hope that I can bring as many as I can out into the open for you to peruse... and that they don't turn out half baked.

I need to remind myself that I *CAN* save long TV Tropes pages for reading at home.

Welp, I have once again had a disappointingly unproductive day.

But I have updated the lineal titles on the website. You may not have paid much attention to the Iron Bowl or the Florida-Florida State game, but it had two lineal title implications: first, the SEC Title Game will unify the 2004 Auburn-Utah and 2008 BCS titles (finally, the two SEC titles actually get unified!), and second, there will be no need for a 2009 BCS title because the unified Auburn-Utah title will be at stake in the National Title Game.

More stating the obvious: if Oklahoma wins the Big 12 Title Game and goes on to play for the national title, it'll merge Auburn-Utah with Princeton-Yale, and we'll be left with all of two lineal titles. Which is nowhere near as fun, especially when one is the safely-ignorable 2007 Boise State title (unless Utah loses their bowl). Our last hope may be for Boise and Ball States to continue undefeated...