Something From The Ancient Archives When This Site Spent Plenty Of Space Predicting A Major College Nation Champion

By Ronan Saint John

In a sports-crazed nation it is hard to get worked up about the doings of one Joe Jordan, average sports guy maybe ten, fifteen years ago and then he went cold turkey. Almost. He just couldn’t give up following the major college teams that had gotten him started down that road when he was a kid. In those days, unlike now, the major colleges did not have a play-off style tournament to determine who was king of the hill but got the “mythical” national championship settled by various coaches and sports-writers’ polls with number one and two in the ratings fighting it out for the prize. (That polling system is still in use today to determine who the final four will be in the playoffs). In short the college associations have met the demand half-way for some kind of definitive play-off system to determine the champion. Fair enough.        

What has Joe Jordan continuing to plug away is that polling business, the rating of teams by various standards to see who has a say top five, ten or nowadays twenty-five team. That intrigued him as a kid interested in numbers but also interested him in how he would rate his own selections. So minus the selection of the final four he is still in business. Of course probably the main initial impetus for Joe getting involved at all was that he was the son of a “subway fan” of the famous Notre Dame football teams, the Fighting Irish, a natural choice in a mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood where the adults, including that father would have drinks and bet on the games come Saturday afternoon at the local Dublin Grille. (And spent the weekly paycheck, including Joe’s father on more than one occasion, on a misplaced wrong bet but that is a story for another time when we are speaking about wanting habits down at the base of society.) That “subway fan” by the way has its own tradition since the working-class guys who followed the Irish had no relationship to the college or anything else except they all took the Redline subway to work in Boston and hence the name.         

The rating system, systems really, Joe used in his own calculations consisted of predicting the weekly match-ups (for money) and then on Sunday grabbing the newspaper and see what had happened to the various teams. Then, at least in the old times, he would wait for say the AP or Coaches poll to come out Monday morning during the fall. That was the fun part particularly when you got down to the selections for say the last five or ten spots on the now standard twenty-five spot roster. Should a good 9-2-Navy team get the number twenty spot over an 8-3 Rutgers team. Even further up the food chain controversies would abound when Joe and friends did their friendly wagering at the self-same Dublin Grille.      

Which brings us to today (2019) and the latest rankings for the coveted final four spots which are still up for grabs-this just before the various league championships which factor heavily at the end. Clemson, undefeated, looks like a lock against Virginia, Ohio State, undefeated, ditto, LSU though may have all it can handle against a fired-up Georgia team that has a flunk loss earlier in the season. Which might let say Oklahoma or Oregon in. We shall see. What we shall not see is our Joe Jordan worrying over the actual playoff picture or results. That part is boring he says.