Idiots Write About Sports

Sports Illustrated presents their Pac-10 preview, in which they predict that USC will win the conference at 9-0, with Cal second at 8-1.

This would, as you might guess, suggest that SI believes that USC will defeat Cal the Saturday before Thanksgiving in a late-season showdown that will determine the Pac-10 title. There’s no other possible explanation.

Except… the same piece lists three “Can’t Miss Games” for the Pac-10. They are: Oklahoma at Oregon, Arizona State at Cal, and Notre Dame at USC.

Um, guys? If that Cal-USC game does involve two teams that are 7-0 in conference play, in what conceivable way would that not be the biggest “Can’t Miss Game” in the conference this year?

Mystifying.

More mystifying? Cal at USC is listed at No. 6 in SI’s Top 15 Games to Watch. So while you can miss the game, you must watch the game. Or something.

(For the record, SI predicts that Cal will finish 10-2 overall, suggesting that they will lose to USC and Tennessee.)

The more I read sports stuff the more I think that they are full of it. I think they all suffer from national coverage where nobody can really focus on a reasonable subset of the teams. SI would do much better to split their columnists and have one for each conference. This would have two benefits:

1. Conference coverage would be better and more cohesive.
2. National coverage wouldn't have the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen where all kinds of mixed messages get sent out.

Ken, I believe the magazine you are looking for is the Sporting News. I have always found them to have more regionally focused stuff than SI. Though for the most part, I still find SI's writing to be more thorough and less scatterbrained. In terms of SI and the Pac-10, I don't see how two of their "can't miss" pac-10 games are out of conference or why Oklahoma/Oregon is more important than Cal/Tennessee, especially since the former takes place on the 16th with all the other big games.

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