Friday, November 02, 2012

Hoover Street Rag's Top 25 Or So: But We're Using Our Whole Ass

It’s time for a new installment of Hoover Street Rag’s college football rankings. As always, the teams are ranked according to the logic and values of Tom Scocca's weekly Deadspin column, no matter how bizarre or contradictory they may be. We’re making this quick, after a brief pause to wonder how Scocca's writing could decline so quickly after he left Slate.

1. Alaska (0-0)

Undefeated in football, as they are every year.

2. Indiana (3-5)

Some people consider the most horrifying thing about the Big Ten this year is the fact that Indiana still controls its own destiny for a trip to the Rose Bowl. Those people forget the more horrifying thing that makes this possible.

3. McMaster (8-0)

As the highest-ranked team in Canadian Interuniversity Sport football, McMaster is in the driver's seat to win college football's only truly legitimate national championship, provided they can pass through four rounds of playoffs. Canada: it's like a whole other country up there.

4. North Dakota State (7-1)

Similarly, NDSU is back in the driver's seat to defend their national championship, as a loss by Eastern Washington and a 3OT squeaker by Georgia Southern jumped them back to #1 in The Sports Network FCS poll.

5. OHIO! (8-1)

They may not control their own destiny in the MAC East, but they produced a legendary GIF on Thursday, and, in the long run, that's far more important.

6. David Roher

Proved it's still possible to write a decent article on Deadspin. Come back, Katie!

7. [vacant]

The state of mind I tried to reach before writing this post.

8. Alabama (8-0)

Nobody cares if you're ranked #1 if you're going to claim you won the national championship regardless.

9. University of California, San Francisco (0-0)

10. Duke (6-3)

UCSF and Duke demonstrated that you don't need successful football programs to bring home the Nobel Prizes...wait...Duke, when did that happen?

11. Boston College (2-6)

First in the race to hire a new coach once the season ends. THAT'S GOOD HUSTLE!

12. Georgia State (1-8)

As a result of their agreement with the Colonial Athletic Association as they transfer to the SUNBEAST, Georgia State is guaranteed an "official" conference record of 0-0. This is much better than their actual conference record of 1-5, so good move GSU! 

13. Shawn Petty (4-4)

Shawn Petty's recruiting stock was free-fallin' and he ended up at Maryland as a linebacker. Now he's running down his dream as Maryland's starting fifth-string QB. He's in the ACC, so he'll probably win a few games too.

14. Vampire: Blood and Empire (1429-1)

There's no way the course that the three arrested Pitt players were taking wasn't a legitimate academic offering. How do I know? No one teaching a fake course would dare to release its syllabus in Comic Sans (PDF).

15. Florida State (8-1)

16. Arizona (5-3)

17. Rice (3-6)

18. Troy (4-4)

19. Timothy Burke

Provided one of the few moments of amusement last Saturday when he couldn't tell that neatly-trimmed Brendan Gibbons and hairy Brendan Gibbons were the same person.

20. Washington State (2-6)

Mike Leach hasn't been a good hire so far as he's only improved WSU football to the point of irrelevance. When a team is historically awful, people pay attention. When you're just the worst team in your division, nobody cares. This is why Kansas's hire of Charlie Weis guarantees their relevance for years.

21. Anyone who's ever submitted a true Drunken Hookup Failure story (0-9999)

If you don't have time for National Novel Writing Month, at least flex your creative writing muscles by getting a few stories past Drew Magary.

124. Tom Scocca

Try as we might, we did a negligible amount of research for this column and actually bothered to confirm that there are 124 teams in FBS and that each week's biggest loser should be ranked #124, not #120. We thus failed in our effort to put in as little effort as Scocca. You have to try really hard to try that little. It's a Catch-22.

No comments: