In one of their manufactured-for-controversy segments, they had college football analysts Craig James and Mark May square off over a series of provoking questions, presumably in an attempt to justify their presence on the Disney company's payroll. The one question that caught my eye was "Does LSU deserve to be ranked higher than Kentucky?". And May's answer completely befuddled me.
It revolved around the generally sound principle of "if Team A beats Team B, therefore Team A must be better than Team B". On its face, this seems perfectly acceptable. Kentucky did in fact defeat LSU, and we'll ignore the fact that LSU had 3 defensive starters injured from questionably dirty play, that a phantom touchdown was awarded to Kentucky, and several dubious pass interference calls went Kentucky's way to aid them in their improbable comeback. We'll ignore that. The problem occurs when we follow this use of logic to its full end. So according to Mark May, we should have it ranked as follows:
Kentucky
LSU
Fine. Let's then take a look at who Kentucky lost to, which would be South Carolina. Continuing with the same logic, here's how they stack up:
South Carolina
Kentucky
LSU
Sounds good so far. But wait, South Carolina has one loss. To whom could that be? Oh yeah, that's right, the Gamecocks got destroyed by LSU. So it would then read:
LSU
South Carolina
Kentucky
The point is, we'd cycle back and forth indefinitely because of these particular results. In other words, either May either didn't follow his logic to its full conclusion, or was too lazy to actually look at the rest of the teams in question. And since we don't have three-dimensional polling (and ties are for pussies), let's instead give the benefit of the doubt to the team that was best described as "a giant purple gorilla with a chainsaw dick" (i.e., the LSU Tigers).
Of course this is all moot if LSU chokes against Auburn tomorrow. Then I will be dealing with my own personal set of problems.
