Are my eyes really blue?

Guess which candidate didn’t prepare a concession speech for Tuesday night?

1988.  Willie Horton. The Pledge of Allegiance. The “card-carrying member of the ACLU”. George H.W. Bush, with Lee Atwater at the controls, ran a campaign that was almost completely free from issues and instead turned on equal parts “you never had it so good” and visceral appeals against The Other.  Never mind that Michael Dukakis was as radical as warm milk. (Side note: stop trying to make Massachusetts candidates happen, America. They aren’t happening.)

From there, the Perot split, the Congressional realignment as senior Democrats packed it in, and the decision by the GOP to place its destiny in the hands of Southern leadership.  Newt Gingrich, of course, and Trent Lott and Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell and Bob Livingston and Dick Armey and ultimately, George W. Bush, aided and abetted the whole way by the rise of AM talk radio (with Rush Limbaugh as the apotheosis of Republican thought) and then by Fox News and ultimately by the creation of the entire media ecosystem necessary to nurture an entire alternate reality.

In this world, it was Mitt Romney who was the stalwart conservative, rather than a complete political cipher. It was a world where anything involving the seashore was obviously Obama’s Katrina, where the confusion around an attack on an American embassy was a bigger cover-up than Watergate and a bigger scandal than “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US”. It was a world where rolling the dice on saving General Motors, or on taking the shot at killing the aforementioned Bin Laden, were things that weren’t important when Bush couldn’t or didn’t do them, and then became things that were easy and obvious and no-brainers once Obama had done them.

Mostly, though, it was a world free from objective measurement.  The employment figures and economic indicators are suddenly ticking back the President’s way? Obviously being doctored by evil government bureaucrats.  Polling numbers that showed Romney leaping forward after the first debate are now showing him slipping? Obviously those polls are being manipulated by a biased media. Statistical analysis of the state-by-state by a fastidious statistician, whose math is out there to be checked and who ran 49 of 50 states in 2008, shows Obama in the lead? Obviously he is a mendacious little weasel whose very manhood is open to debate, and whose conclusions have less validity than the gut feelings of a has-been speechwriter.  No, Peggy Noonan just knows how things will turn out.

And yet.

Barack Obama won re-election last night, with electoral college votes and popular votes both in excess of anything George W. Bush ever got when he claimed his “mandate” to spend his political capital on disemboweling Social Security. He won all the critical states that Mitt Romney had to swing in order to win: Ohio, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and (in all likelihood) Florida.  The Romney-Ryan ticket became the first in forty years to lose the home states of both its ticket nominees (Paul Ryan’s much-vaunted hometown of Jamestown, Wisconsin went decisively for the President).  And the Senate – in a year where the Democrats were defending more seats and were in a vulnerable position – will convene in January with at least two more Democrats added to the majority.

Karl Rove created his own reality, sure enough. And last night it collided with actual reality, and the result was…well, the result was a complete epistemic meltdown on Fox News around 11 PM Eastern.  Half a billion dollars lit on fire in the cause of convincing America that the truth is other than what could be measured by reason and logic and empirical evidence.  It didn’t work.

In fact, this really was the last call for the Old Ones, and it showed – things we thought had been settled decades ago were suddenly dredged up as issues that were supposedly in debate. We had to argue about things like whether insurance was obligated to cover birth control, whether rape pregnancies were some sort of divine blessing, whether – again, inevitably – whether the President of the United States was legally entitled to citizenship and eligibility for his office. And the GOP thought these were winning issues, and the party in the electorate convinced themselves they were winning positions to take.

And then the rest of the world failed to participate in their reality.

Look, I endorse Obama for a reason, because he’s like me: liberal in goals and conservative in sensibility. By rights, in a world that didn’t have its head up its ass, I would probably be a Red Tory. But conservatism in this country is entirely bound up with the South and its sensibilities: the big mules, the wealthy and powerful, securing themselves in their position by constantly whipping up the working classes into a fury of bigotry and ignorance to lash out against The Other.  Black, gay, foreign, smart, it doesn’t matter. Right now, in 2012, this is all the GOP has, and as of this morning, it’s officially not enough. And as the nonwhite population of the country grows, as young voters continue to turn out in reliably advantageous Democratic numbers, as the ability to win an election entirely with an aging white base who remembers segregation dwindles, it may never be enough again.

Hippie-punching won’t get you into heaven anymore, Republicans. It’s time to start the 21st century.

More later. Tomorrow might be hell. But tonight…we got this.

If you’re looking for some changes to the way things run in this country, forget that too. The Senate Republicans have shattered the record for filibusters in a single session these last two years, and that’s with a President who could still veto things if they somehow got out of Congress. With a Democrat-controlled Congress (and probably by a larger margin in both houses) and a Democratic President, they’re going to dig in their heels. Scorched Earth, just like 1992-94. Every initiative will be tied up forever in the Senate, while the usual talk-radio scum bellow on about how the GOP is saving America from the depredations of the horrible socialist terrorist-worshipping Democrats…and the political media will bemoan the fact that Obama has failed to change the tone in Washington and cannot get his program through Congress.

– me, September 7, 2008

 There you have it. No less a paper than the Des Moines Register, which had endorsed Democrats every presidential election from 1976 on, has succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome and endorsed Mitt Romney because he’s more likely to be able to get a program through Congress.  Because presumably Democrats won’t go the full Braveheart/300, and Republicans definitely will.

It’s fucking nuts.  You have a candidate who has held every position imaginable – one whose manager, in fact, explicitly said that clinching the nomination was like an Etch-a-Sketch, shake it up and start over.  You have a candidate who has made assertions about an “apology tour” and about car companies shipping jobs to China and about the President relaxing welfare rules – assertions that have been repeatedly proven false – and his response is to push those false assertions even harder.  You have, in short, the first ever openly and unashamedly post-truth campaign for the White House.  And at this point, there are people willing to throw their hands in the air and give in, just to make it stop.

This is what “no future” means.  This is unsustainable. When people are endorsing a candidate on the basis that everything he’s said for the last year and a half is false, and what he said before that is true, and obviously he’ll go back to the way he was, and the people who pushed him to the right will go along with this – that is insane.  If logic doesn’t matter, if reason doesn’t matter, if the words coming out of the candidate’s mouth don’t matter, then there’s no point in even attempting to have a democracy or anything like it.  If truth means nothing, if reality means nothing…well, welcome to everything people bemoaned back when I was in college English. Welcome to the truly and completely postmodern world. If we as a nation actually decide that the truth is whatever you want it to be…well, maybe there’s enough medication and booze to help me see the world that way.

I guess we’ll find out.

For the bulk of the 1980s and early 90s, there was a concept known as “the Electoral Lock.”  Because of California and Texas, it argued, and because of the GOP hold on the South and West generally, the Republican party had an inherent advantage conveyed by the Electoral College; no matter how narrow the margin of the popular vote, the states where they could presume victory were sufficient to get over 270 and win the race.  Indeed, in 1992, Carville and Begala merely claimed that they had picked the electoral lock, not smashed it – and rightly so, given that the winner-take-all and first-past-the-post system used most everywhere allowed a commanding electoral college victory with only 43% of the popular vote.

This was the first huge problem with the Electoral College, although nobody seemed to grasp it at the time.  Bill Clinton won fair and square, under the existing rules and system, and he certainly had a stronger claim than the candidates behind him with fewer votes – but because he was under 50%, the GOP promptly decided he was not legitimately President, and embarked on the scorched-earth approach that takes us down the road to…well, to where we are now.  Eight years later, everything went shit-shaped, but the Democrats’ outrage was limited to the shenanigans in Florida.  Once that was resolved, there was still the inconvenient fact that more people had voted for Al Gore than George W. Bush, and Dubya was President only by a quirk of the math – but the Democrats never gave that much of a push, and the attacks on September 11 pretty much swept the whole thing under the rug for all but the most bong-watered granola-shavers.

Now, the polls are getting down to the nut-cutting, and the GOP is back on the Rove plan: keep proclaiming you’re winning until people believe it.  The state-by-state polling suggests something different, and when matched against national polling showing a tighter margin, it’s paved the way for many a pundit to suggest that Obama could win re-election in the electoral college but not gain a majority of the popular vote.

And if you think the GOP would let that go as easily as the Democrats did in 2001, you’re fucking high. But even if it elects Obama, and they do everything in their power to dislodge or cripple him, they won’t campaign to scrap the Electoral College.

Because the electoral college really does skew the board in favor of one kind of state: narrowly-balanced medium-large ones.  California, Texas, New York: off the board.  Pennsylvania, Illinois, Georgia: slightly more competitive but not terribly so. Ohio, Florida, and now Virginia? Well, that’s another story.  Those states get to be the pivot point because they can between them shift about 60 electoral college votes, between a fifth and a quarter of everything you need to win the whole shooting match. If Obama has California, Illinois and New York on lock, that’s 94 right there, or 35% of the way to victory without ever spending a minute or a nickel in those three states.  Similarly, if the GOP can count on Texas, Oklahoma and the old SEC states (other than Florida) that’s a whopping 118, or 43% of the way there.  Get those states plus the Ohio-Florida-Virginia axis, and that makes 178, and you’re two-thirds home while only making an effort in three states.  Hell, those GOP lock states gained 5 votes on redistricting in 2010, so that’s a 10-vote swing – as much as winning Wisconsin or Minnesota, without lifting a finger.

This is why the GOP won’t argue to get rid of the electoral college.  They’ll argue to get rid of Obama, but they’re not about to give away a system that lets them gain 2/3 of the votes to win the White House by merely waving a rebel flag and campaigning in three states.  There may not be an electoral lock anymore, but there’s an electoral latch, and the Republican party has everything to gain by making sure it’s intact.

It rather makes you ask why we even need the electoral college – why not just use, you know, the popular vote?  Well, the biggest reason is that right now there’s really no such thing as a national popular vote (barring perhaps Dancing With The Stars or the like).  What we have are a bunch of aggregated state and local elections, which in may ways prevent bigger problems: how do you administer an election from the federal level? Imagine Florida in 2000. Now apply it to every single polling place where it might be possible to swing a hundred votes.  Imagine a bunch of teatards trying to shake down voters here and there, and suddenly the numbers look a lot more fungible.  The Electoral College has the effect of abstracting away the effects of tens of thousands of locally-administered elections, and for all its limitations does simplify things inasmuch as it makes tampering with any one local election pointless.

But it also sets up a very difficult problem: inasmuch as the white vote in the South is probably going to go at least 75% for Mitt Romney, it creates a real non-zero chance that Obama can win the electoral college and the non-Southern popular vote, but lose the national popular vote off the back of wildly disproportionate balloting in the old Confederacy.  And thus does the Civil Cold War grind on.

” [You] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality….That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Eight years ago, that unnamed Bush administration aide – reputed to be Karl Rove himself in some circles – essentially laid out the entire template for what it means to be a Republican in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Twelve.  Being Republican now means you create your own reality.  That’s how it’s possible for a majority of the GOP in the South to believe that Barack Obama was born somewhere outside the United States and is actually a Muslim.  That’s how it’s possible for Paul Ryan to accuse the President of slashing a huge amount from Medicare when those cuts appear in his own budget.  That’s how it’s possible to say that the Obama administration has raised taxes and expanded the government to unprecedented levels, when in fact taxes have gone down every year and the level of government employment has been reduced so far it has a material impact on those pesky unemployment figures. That’s how it’s possible to sweep eight years of Bush mismanagement under the rug, provide nothing but scorched-earth obstruction for four years, and then claim that Barack Obama is on the verge of destroying America.

Look, there’s plenty to criticize with this President.  Did he bring about the progressive liberal New Jerusalem? Not remotely.  Are there serious concerns about the long-term prospects for civil liberties in a world of unregulated drone warfare? Naturally. Should he have done things differently that first year? Almost certainly. And yet, in a world where grandstanding conservative Democrats had to have their feathers preened (looking at you, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu), where moderate Republicans sloughed off their own recorded preferences and fell into lockstep with their party (looking at you, Maine women), where the GOP opened 2009 stating that their highest hope was for the President to fail (that’s you, Rush) and their foremost goal was to make Obama a one-term President (that’s you, McConnell, and fuck the Wildcats while I’m at it) – in short, in a world where everybody dug in their heels and said “Not it,” Barack Obama accomplished at least as much as could be reasonably expected of a President.

Was the stimulus large enough?  No, because it was arbitrarily reduced by Senate Democrats.  Did Gitmo close? No, because GOP Congressmen pissed themselves at the thought of evil magic terrorists crossing the border. Did the United States lose its AAA credit rating? Yes, because the Republican party decided to play chicken with a credit limit that few of them credibly understood. Did we get a public option for health insurance for all?  No, because Ted Kennedy died and the Wise Old Men of Washington decided that a routine sixty-vote threshold for all Senate votes was right and proper and normal and not at all an unprecedented feat of delay and obstruction.

It’s the age old story, sad but true: the first black guy had to be twice as good to get half as far.

I’m not going to reward obstruction. I’m not going to reward bullying. I’m not going to reward rampant douchbaggery. I’m not going to hand the reins over to the people who drove the car off the cliff and then spent four years slashing the tires on the tow truck before blaming the tow-truck driver for the wreck.

I live in the real world.  And in the real world, the guy who’s done his best under preposterous circumstances shouldn’t be punished for it…especially when he’s delivered results.  For this reason, yes, I endorse Barack Hussein Obama for re-election as the 44th President of the United States.

* World Series time again. I don’t have an emotional investment in the Giants that begins to scratch the surface of Vanderbilt, or for that matter Cal football or the Redskins, but I enjoy having the World Series in town and I’d love for the guys to get another one.  San Francisco doesn’t get the kind of run St Louis or Boston or New York do in the “great baseball town” department but I’ll put it up against any of them for sheer fun factor.

* Autumn has fallen like an anvil. Scant days after a mini-heat-wave took the lower Peninsula within an eyelash of 90 degrees, the rain arrived and took the highs down into the 60s.  And since it coincided with being on call for jury duty, I’ve been driving to work in it all week, complete with sunrise times around 7:15 AM (thanks for nothing, Dubya).  And I’m enjoying it. I missed fall, and now I have fall color plus cool and damp plus the pattering of raindrops out the window at night plus an ironclad excuse for jackets.  Now if only I could settle on choosing between the Levis/Filson black tin cloth trucker jacket and the fog-colored ScottEVest Standard jacket…

* Jackets and fitting into them made me reflect a little more on yesterday’s announcement.  Between an iPhone 4S (with a 5 on the way) and a third-gen iPad, I have absolutely no justification (or desire) for an iPad mini.  However, the Nexus 7 is still tickling the fringes of my interest, because a) it’s an Android device that, by its Nexus nature and unlike most Androids, will get updated and b) it should fit in any ordinary jacket inside pocket in a way the iPad doesn’t, and c) it has Wi-Fi and GPS built in and could easily be tethered to the iPhone in a pinch. Given that the pixel space isn’t that much different from the iPhone 5, though (1200×800 as vs 1136×640), I wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze, especially when I already have a Kindle to handle the problem of the iPhone not being optimal for books.

* Speaking of books, I have two endorsements: Straphanger, by Taras Grescoe, a survey of the history of public transit in America and the current state of transit around the world, and Attention All Shipping: A Journey Around The Shipping Forecast, by Charlie Connelly, which I am about halfway through. It appears that my reading material has started to intrude on my jacket/footwear/bag glee as yet another indication that I’m ready to leave the country again.  Or maybe it’s just a certain stuffed turtle poking me with his little flipper-paw-whatever and cocking his head toward the atlas.

* Or maybe it’s lingering election panic.  Look, I moved as far as I could from Alabama, it’s not allowed to follow me. I’m not sure I’m ready for the prospect of governance by the Confederates.  And the irony of it is, as a straight white male of Protestant extraction and reasonable affluence with a well-remunerated job and health insurance, I stand to make out like a bandit if the other crowd gets in.

* Well, I say health insurance.  It’s only Blue Shield. Fuck those guys.

* The neck’s fine, it seems, or certainly less of an issue. Although I did go back on the diclofenac once I slept wrong and then raised my arm wrong and pulled a muscle on the OTHER side.  In fact, right now my shoulders ache like I did weights. Which I didn’t. Getting a review and ruling next week and seeing what happens, and then it’s back to the gym because I need to strengthen up.  Or maybe what I need is a long soak in the hot tub, a long soak in the steam room, and about 90 minutes of somebody who knows their way around deep tissue massage trying to beat the location of the Rebel base out of my back.

* The less said about Big Game, the better – I’ve said my piece elsewhere and stand by my assessment following the Holiday Bowl: Jeff Tedford is not fit for purpose as head football coach at the University of California and has not been for some time.  A move is long overdue…

* Meanwhile, one shitty win over Auburn later, Vandy is a homecoming victory over hapless and winless UMass from turning its 1-3 start into a 4-4 record.  Believe it or not, the possibility of winning out and posting an 8-4 regular season record and 5-3 in the conference – the first outright winning season on either since 1982 – is still out there and not unreasonable.  As a matter of fact, get me that and I won’t need anything else for Christmas…

Every single rumor appears to have paid out today. 13-inch retina MacBook Pro. New Mac mini, new iMac, updated iPad, and – of course – the long-awaited iPad mini, complete with 7.85-inch screen to use the same display resolution as original iPad apps.

Now…do I wish I’d held out and waited? You can’t do that with technology. You have to get what you can and get the full use out of it. And I have. From a pure jacket-ology standpoint, would I like an iPad that fit in all my coats? Sure. But that’s what the iPhone 5 is going to be for…in a month. Probably. Hopefully. 🙂

More to the point, it may be time for me to take the plunge and replace the Mac mini at home, which is three years old and showing its age. It wouldn’t suck if we could get the entirety of everything on a hard drive without dragging an external drive to handle the video storage.

But back to the iPad mini – why? And why now?

I think it goes to the Kindle Fire. Amazon gave the world its first 7-inch tablet that didn’t suck. They did so by following the Apple path: pare it down, include only the stuff you really need, and optimize it for doing the stuff that users want from it. Then, Google handed out the Nexus 7 and proved you could do a full-function tablet in that form factor that didn’t suck. So rather than leave a gap in the market between the iPhone and the full-size iPad, one that its primary rivals could exploit, Apple slid this thing in – the screen less than two inches smaller, but cut down in form factor to get in that 7″ tablet spot.

Himself said you needed to file your fingers to a point to use a 7-inch tablet. But he’s not in charge any more. Things change. And Apple’s starting at $329 for a wi-fi 16 GB model, almost $100 more than the Nexus 7…and counting on the Apple ecosystem and reputation to be worth an eighty dollar premium. Because that’s where they’re playing: affordable premium, instead of lowest cost.

Can they keep it up? Who knows? It hasn’t stopped yet.

In the early-mid-1960s, Clyde Lee was the greatest prep basketball player in Nashville. He was choosing between Vanderbilt and David Lipscomb for college, and was advised that he needed to decide whether he wanted to be a big fish in a little pond (at Lipscomb) or a little fish in a big pond (at Vanderbilt).  He chose Vanderbilt and only became the greatest player in the history of the program (barring neither Adcock, Perdue, McCaffery, Byers, Foster, Jenkins, Ezili nor Taylor). 

This came to my mind during the furore about Vanderbilt getting out of its Big Ten games next year.  We’re merely doing what the rest of the league did long ago: pull up the ladders and schedule only chum for out-of-conference games (barring rivalries OOC, something that seems to be an SEC East-only phenomenon), on the pretext that the SEC is so difficult to navigate that we don’t need anything else to improve our strength of schedule.  Personally, I question this for a team like Florida or Alabama (not to deny Alabama credit for the Saban-era practice of a marquee opponent in a neutral-site season opener), but for a team like Ole Miss or Kentucky or Vanderbilt, the notion that we’re wimping out if we don’t stack another big-ticket foe on top of three top-10 opponents in-conference doesn’t deserve the dignity of a reply, especially to programs that won’t face a ranked opponent all year.

This is the fish problem, and it’s one that Vanderbilt has struggled with in football for fifty years.  We’re a contender and a title winner in the conference in almost every other sport we play (baseball and men’s basketball both played in the conference title game last year, the hoopsters won it, and the women have multiple SECT titles on the mantle in the last decade, plus women’s cross-country won the SEC last year).  But as I’ve said before, over and over, the SEC is about exactly one thing, and it’s the one thing we as a university do worse than anything else.

The talk comes up periodically about how we should be traded to the ACC for Florida State, or Clemson, or maybe even move to the Big Ten (there was some talk about Vanderbilt as a possible 12th before Nebraska made the move) and across the board, it looks more suitable.  Better academics in both, basketball first in the ACC, the possibility of a Rose Bowl berth in the Big Ten.  And while it’s true that we’re not that good at the SEC’s one thing, is that a reason to pull out when everything else is first-class?

Maybe. But before we do, I’d say it’s incumbent on us to do everything we can to compete without compromising ourselves.  Keep going to class, keep graduating players, keep off probation, keep away from NCAA sanctions. But there’s no need to try to out-schedule everyone else, to get by on older facilities, to avoid making a play for the best recruits.  And yet it’s possible we may never grow big enough for the pond.

This is something I wrestle with myself from time to time. The single biggest mistake of my life was in where I went to undergrad. Had I left the state and been exposed to the wider world, maybe I would have grown to fit the pond. Instead, I went to a place that specialized in fitting you for a life in the small pond.  And when I finally did leave, it was with my growth stunted in a way I never really recovered from.

The question I have to ask myself is – could I have been happy as the tallest dwarf in the circus? Would I have strained against the constraints of a more circumscribed life?  And the answer is: I wasn’t. And I did.

Would Vanderbilt football be a happier place to be if we were playing in a conference of, say – Rice, SMU, Tulane, Army, Navy, and hell, maybe Wake Forest and Notre Dame? I don’t know. Is the Ivy League happy playing I-AA ball with no postseason?  Can you elect to step out of the big pond and find one just right?

Something to think about going forward. Because even though we’re going to do everything in our power to be an SEC school without compromising who we are, it occurs to me that we might not get away with this one.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

First, go check this out. It’s an article in the Sporting News last June about non-conference scheduling in BCS conferences in 2012. It’s several articles, actually; I merely linked the one pertaining to the SEC.

Finished? Good. Just to have it here where we can look at it, I’m going to paste that table in here again:

1. Missouri: Southeastern Louisiana, Arizona State, at UCF, Syracuse
2. Vanderbilt: at Northwestern, Presbyterian, UMass, at Wake Forest
3. Arkansas: Jacksonville State, at Louisiana-Monroe, Rutgers, Tulsa
4. Alabama: Michigan (at Dallas), Western Kentucky, FAU, Western Carolina
5. Florida: Bowling Green, Louisiana-Lafayette, Jacksonville State, at Florida State
6. LSU: North Texas, Washington, Idaho, Towson
7. Ole Miss: Central Arkansas, UTEP, Texas, at Tulane
8. South Carolina: ECU, UAB, Wofford, at Clemson
9. Auburn: Clemson (at Atlanta), Louisiana-Monroe, New Mexico State, Alabama A&M
10. Georgia: Buffalo, FAU, Georgia Southern, Georgia Tech
11. Tennessee: NC State (at Atlanta), Georgia State, Akron, Troy
12. Kentucky: at Louisville, Kent State, Western Kentucky, Samford
13. Texas A&M: at Louisiana Tech, at SMU, South Carolina State, Sam Houston State
14. Mississippi State: Jackson State, at Troy, South Alabama, Middle Tennessee

 

You notice that this year’s Vanderbilt OOC schedule is considered second of fourteen in degree of difficulty. That’s all the word of credit we get for scheduling two BCS-league OOC opponents, both on the road. Missouri has two, but they’re both at home – and frankly were probably booked before they joined the SEC. (Only the Big 12 has more appalling OOC scheduling than the SEC, and where did our two newbies come from? Texas A&M’s OOC lineup certainly has a high glycemic index.)

Florida gets dinged for the fact that it’s been 30 years since they went west of the Mississippi for an OOC game. Well hell, when’s the last time they left the very state of Florida for an OOC game? They plead Florida State, Georgia pleads Georgia Tech, South Carolina pleads Clemson – you can see why we locked up a series with Wake Forest back in 2006, and not a softball either – last year was our first win over our “rival” since it became our season-ending matchup. In the SEC East, though, once you have your permanent OOC rival, it’s apparently just fine to schedule troops of Girl Scouts and last year’s frat league champion the rest of the way. Except for us, apparently.

Look, something had to give. We had five OOC games for four spots on the slate in 2013. And the SEC promptly moved conference games into the weekends where our newly-dropped matchups were scheduled. We could have done some shucking and jiving and tried to make it work so that we could still play three BCS OOC opponents, despite the fact that pretty much every team in the league competing for a bowl slot will only be playing one. Or we could do what we did, and accept the fundamental truth of the situation: we gain absolutely nothing by playing a tougher OOC schedule than the rest of our conference.

Last year we had two BCS teams and Army. Now one of those was a Big East team, and that league’s next deserved BCS berth will be its first, but it is what it is. The year before, we had Northwestern, UConn and Wake, and lost all three. In 2009 we had Georgia Tech instead of Wake, and lost to them and to Army while beating Rice and Western Carolina. And in the 6-6 year of 2008, we split our OOC games – beat Rice and Miami of Ohio, lost to Duke (!) and Wake. Or to put it another way: last year was the first year in as long as I can remember where we swept the board in OOC games. If that’s the case in 2008, we go 8-4. In 2009, we go 4-8. In 2010, we go 5-7. On average, we’re playing multiple BCS OOC teams every year and going .500 against them for the privilege.

Now, another question: where are these teams that are going out to take on all comers? Northwestern had a respectable slate this year (Syracuse, BC and North Dakota in addition to us) but Ohio State? Had a weak Cal team (and got played within an inch of their lives), Miami of Ohio, Central Florida and UAB – all at home. Look the Big Ten schedule up and down – every single team except Indiana plays at least three of their OOC games at home, and Ohio State and Iowa never leave home for an OOC game. And how many of those Big Ten schools are playing more than one BCS OOC opponent in 2012? Here’s the list: Northwestern. That’s it and that’s all.

Here’s the thing: we’ve finished the regular season over .500 three times since the scheduled expanded to 11 games in 1970. The SEC actually only played six conference games a year from 1964 to 1988, but even then, the last time we finished over .500 in conference play was 1982. Before that? 1959, when we went 3-2-2 in the SEC en route to a 5-3-2 overall record. Why do I bring this up? Because we aren’t Auburn in 2004, trying to squeeze into the BCS title game with Louisiana Tech, Louisiana-Monroe and the Citadel as its OOC opponents. We aren’t Boise State trying to get #1 votes with one splashy BCS win and a WAC schedule. We’re not the ones trying to play a national championship schedule. If anybody in this league should hang their heads in shame, it’s the Gators, who the BCS computers think the best in the land off the back of Bowling Green, Louisiana-Lafayette and freakin’ Jacksonville State.

Look, let’s not mince words. Art Guepe left with the parting shot “there is no way you can be Harvard six days a week and Alabama on Saturday,” and he was right. If he wasn’t, Northwestern wouldn’t have had the longest losing streak in the country nor gone almost five decades between Rose Bowl appearances. We have a football program which, in the main, has been a dumpster fire since JFK was assassinated. We are accustomed to seasons when we go winless in the conference. We haven’t seen a bowl game outside the state of Tennessee in almost thirty years – hell, until last year, no Vanderbilt football player in the entire history of the program had ever been to two bowls.
You know how much credit we got for those harder non-conference schedules? You know how much regard we received for trying to punch above our weight? Hell, go back and look at that Sporting News article again – you know what we got for having the second-toughest OOC schedule in this conference? We got Presbyterian name-checked as another laughable piece of SEC scheduling.

No one in this conference is doing us any favors. No one. Not in scheduling, not in officiating, not in television, nothing. We already handicap ourselves in the SEC by honoring both halves of “student-athlete” and refusing to compromise our academic mission. The notion that we have to keep playing tougher OOC games than our conference foes – it is, as I said elsewhere, risible. To what end? To make sure we stay down below the salt in the pickle barrel? To keep various blogger and Twitter jackasses from making fun of us? To atone for the rest of the league’s deficiencies in scheduling? To make the league look like it plays tough, and thus do the SEC a favor it doesn’t do us?

Apologies for language: Fuck. That.

There’s no reason we have to sacrifice ourselves for the SEC’s sins. None. You know what will improve this program? You know what will get us noticed? You know what will get us respect? Winning games. Going to bowls. Once we’re not a doormat, once we’re not a punchline, once we’re not a reason for teams to fire coaches when we win – then we can raise the bar and play the kind of schedule that gets you to New Years Day and beyond. Until then, we shouldn’t apologize for doing exactly what every other team in this league – and others – tries to do: maximize our opportunities for wins.