Snarky and Proud

Here is an excerpt from an e-mail I received today:

Jeff D'Alessio at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution here. I'm working on a
quick story on the best way for college football to decide its champion
and reaching out to a few folks from all walks of life -- people in
college football and other sports -- for quick insights.

I'd love to include you.

I don't need to do the interview in person, an e-mailed response sometime
between now and Wednesday would be fantastic. The question: What, if
anything, would you change about the sport's controversial format if you
were in charge of it? Could be the polls, the computers, the bowl system,
the BCS, anything. Just looking for a few sentences or a paragraph. Feel
free to have fun with it. I picked you for your math background, given
all the goofy math that goes into the college football formula.



And here is the vignette I gave in response:

I think the fairest thing to do is just to trash the whole BCS and rank
all the teams using a bunch of monkeys---maybe 500 or so. Just give
each of them a biased coin and determine the rankings from lots and lots
of coin flips. If one wants to retain some measure of elitism, one can
always take the top monkey from each of the premier zoos in the country.
(Of course, that opens up the problem of ranking monkeys and zoos, which
is another can of worms entirely...) You can find more information about
this proposal at http://www.amath.unc.edu/Faculty/mucha/BCS/.