Here comes the sun"We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance." -Friedrich Nietzche
"That's a mean thing to say about Les Miles." -Johnny Ginter
Anyone who ever tells you that humans control their own destiny, that we aren't subject to vague whims and foibles of the universe, or that individuals can be self-deterministic in anything beyond when and where to fart have clearly no experience following college football.
Because here's the deal: life laughs at our pathetic attempts to defeat the hard calculus of chaos. Ohio State is on an incredible winning streak, destroying opponents, winning hard fought games, but ultimately doing everything that they could be reasonably asked to do to show people that they're good. And that really doesn't matter at all, largely due to forces that Ohio State has zero control over.
Put another way, the Buckeyes, one of college football's winningest and most storied programs, could feasibly end up riding a 38 game winning streak with zero national championships to show for it until 2015.
So, knowing that life is a meandering crapshoot, we turn to one of the (Michigan!) men who has fully embraced the insanity and chaos of college football to save us from random chance.
This isn't really a post about Les Miles per se, but it is an observation about the kind of confluence of events that we need to get over the hump in terms of public perception. In other words, if Ohio State wants to play for the crystal football, they have to rely on more or less random happenstance to get where they want to go.
Duh, right? We've known that for a while, but one of the things that I think is so fascinating is the ridiculous minutiae that goes in to every facet of whatever random-ass determinations that people are making to determine which teams are better than others. Small, stupid things end up actually mattering in the eyes of horribly biased individuals.
For example: last night, Stanford was dominant for 90% of their game against Oregon. Their defensive line wrecked havoc on a less-than-physical Oregon offensive line, and quarterback Marcus Mariota was clearly limited by an injury that would turn out to be an MCL sprain (the same injury that sidelined Braxton Miller earlier this season).
Just go with the flow, Urban!Result A, Oregon losing, was exactly what Ohio State wanted. This in of itself is a pretty black and white requirement; at this point in the season a loss on your record is pretty detrimental to your championship aspirations no matter who it comes against.
Result B was a lot more difficult to both define and come by. Stanford has a loss this season, but it was early enough that one could reasonably make the claim that they're a changed team, and a win over Oregon was proof of that. Which is exactly why Oregon making a comeback in the fourth quarter was so important; Stanford needed to win, but not look TOO good, or otherwise that might make some kind of weird dent in Ohio State's resume (somehow).
I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too far into things, trying to discern tea leaves in a bowl filled with chowder. But hell, isn't that what we do all season long when figuring out if Team X from Conference 1 is better than Team Y from Conference 2?
Which brings me back to Les Miles.
Les Miles can (hopefully) make this all academic on Saturday with a win over Alabama, which should secure a spot for the Buckeyes in the national championship should they win out.
I love the irony in this, because I have always considered Miles to be the ultimate antithesis of BCS era giants like Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer and even Nick Saban. Those three guys, who had so much success in the last ten years, are all micromanagers par excellence. Their entire coaching lives were and are predicated on the idea that you can always control an outcome with a given response.
Les Miles, on the other hand, always stuck out to me like the proverbial fly in the ointment, finding success despite incomplete teams, baffling coaching decisions, and sometimes just pure dumb luck. He's an incredible coach to be sure, and on a personal level the differences between Miles and Saban in terms of anal retentiveness are probably nothing like the differences between Miles and, say, me, but on some level I just love that a coach that eats grass can help determine the ultimate fate of an Urban Meyer-coached team.
This is the final year of the BCS. Another year and this article doesn't get written. But it is still 2013, and we all hope King Chaos will provide the most fitting eulogy for a random, stupid system by making or breaking the year for two teams devoted to the idea that all of this insanity can somehow be controlled or be made sense of.
