Slate's Dumb Obsession with Contrarianism

[UPDATE: The Onion says it all]

So there's a Slate article arguing that the BCS system shouldn't necessarily set up a championship game between the #1 team and the #2 team. The article argues that we only care about who the #1 team is, so the game shouldn't necessarily feature a matchup between the #1 team and the #2 team.

I wrote a long post examining what it means to be #1, but this passage demonstrates the fallacy pretty clearly:

"Here's what we do know: Michigan is not the best. How do we know that? By the traditional criterion: They scored fewer points in a football game than Ohio State did."

But then, we also know that Florida isn't the best. How do we know that? By the traditional criterion: They scored fewer points in a football game than Auburn did.

That's not all we know. We know that Auburn isn't as good as Arkansas. How do we know that? By the traditional criterion: They scored fewer points in a football game than Arkansas did.

This rendered the SEC champtionship game, held last Saturday, a mere formality. Arkansas is better than Auburn, which is better than Florida. Florida confirmed its inferior status by the traditional criterion: They scored fewer more points in a football game than Arkansas did. Wait, what? How did that happen?

It's simply not true that the better team wins every matchup. We know this from the baseball postseason, in which many series are not sweeps. True, the better team is more likely to win a particular game, but we can't conclude from a single close game, won by the hometeam, that the winner is definitely better than the loser.

What we can do is, bearing in mind all evidence, come up with the two teams most likely to be the "real" #1 and let them play each other for the title. This is why we would normally match the #2 ranked team against the #1 ranked team: they are likely to be the two best teams, and one of them is therefore likely the #1 team. In this case I suspect that Michigan would be ranked #2 except that people are more interested in a Florida-Ohio State matchup.

Admittedly it would be different if Ohio State had blown Michigan away. That would be much more conclusive evidence that Ohio State really is better than Michigan. As it is, though, I suspect people are punishing Michigan based on the same flawed Slate-style logic that would lead us to believe that Arkansas is simultaneously better than and worse than Florida. The BCS is indeed flawed, and the best evidence is that Slate agrees with it.