Irish Trojan in Tennessee

Go Buckeyes! Go Obama! Go McCain!

By Brendan Loy

My two favorite sports, college football and presidential politics, converge tonight. The BCS national-title game is underway (LSU is up 17-10), and the first New Hampshire primary results will be available in less than three hours, as the polls open -- and close -- in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location. I don't know how many people will be flipping between Fox and C-SPAN around midnight, but I know I will be!

UPDATE: LSU was up 34-10, but Ohio State just scored a crucial touchdown to cut the Tigers' lead to 34-17 late in the third quarter.

UPDATE 2: Still 31-17 with 5:43 left, and after two straight interceptions by LSU, it's pretty much over.

Meanwhile, back on the political front, here is some corroboration of what Matt Drudge was reporting earlier today.

UPDATE 3: LSU 38, Ohio State 24, final. (It was 38-17, then tOSU got a garbage-time touchdown with 1:13 left.)

So, um, yeah, nevermind. ;)

The Fox analyst says Ohio State "could very well be back in this game next year." Oh good lord.

Now, over to C-SPAN...

UPDATE 4: WTF?? C-SPAN does not appear to be showing Dixville Notch live!! Why does C-SPAN exist, if not to allow political nerds to watch live coverage of ridiculous, nonsensical, meaningless political traditions?

UPDATE 5: Phew, CNN is live from Dixville Notch!

UPDATE 6: It's midnight, and the New Hampshire primary is underway! Four of the 17 residents of Dixville Notch have already voted absentee, and the other 13 just dropped their ballots into the ballot box. ... And the polls are closed!

UPDATE 7: This is riveting.

UPDATE 8: Duncan Hunter is there. In Dixville Notch. Heh.

And they're about to announce the results!

UPDATE 9: McCain 4, Romney 2, Giuliani 1. No love for Hunter!

UPDATE 10: Obama 7, Edwards 2, Richardson 1. w00t!

Ohio State will win tonight

By Brendan Loy

Back on December 3, the day after the BCS pairings were announced, the always eloquent Sunday Morning Quarterback had an excellent post about LSU and SEC fan hubris in anticipation of the Mythical Championship Game showdown between the Buckeyes and the Tigers. I meant to blog about it earlier, but never got around to it. Now, with the game mere hours away, seems like the perfect time to finally do so. Quoth SMQ:

The worst result of last year's mythical championship game was the growth and perpetuation of this absurd notion of superior "SEC speed," based not on the collective 40 times and shuttle drills of hundreds of players on a couple dozen teams that make up the SEC and Big Ten, but on a handful of plays in a single game that was decidedly outside the season-long patterns of both participants, and not demonstrably decided by "speed" (unless you're willing to suggest Tennessee and Arkansas were done in a week earlier by "speed," too, which was at least as plausible). ...

One would think the false sense of inevitability that followed Ohio State prior to last year's championship (or USC the year before that, or that very, very fast Miami team in 2002, or, I don't know, LSU, Ohio State, West Virginia, USC, Oregon, Michigan, Oklahoma, California, Florida or LSU again prior to stunning upsets over the last three months) would demonstrate the virtues of humility to fans everywhere, and lead them to stop for a second to recognize - last year's anomalous championship beatdown is a great example of this - that anything can happen in one game, on one night, and "anything" will not necessarily reconcile itself with the accumulation of disparate performances that precedes it. It only adds to the accumulation; it doesn't define it. Based on everything we know from the dozen "samples" on both sides leading up to last January, that Florida team couldn't beat that Ohio State team by 27 points again in a whole season of trying. There's a reason the Gators were underdogs, and it's not because they kept the fast guys under wraps when squeaking out wins against South Carolina and Vanderbilt.

Based on everything we know from both teams' performances this season, Ohio State and LSU should be a close, hard-hitting game between two of the few teams that still operate largely from traditional two-back sets on offense and do not hesitate to run old-fashioned isos, counters and traps into the line. It's an interesting collision of style and persona between loose cannon Les Miles and icy, understated mercenary Jim Tressel, and their emphases on emotion, "poise" (as Miles likes to repeat to his oft-flagged charges) and discipline. But it will be decided by the side that executes and catches the right breaks under the specific set of circumstances that unfold on Jan. 7, at which point, of course, that team will be instantly refashioned into gold-drenched superheroes with inherent abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Naturally: We are the champions! These are the myths we make.

But the athletes, the speed, all of that is a given. LSU and Ohio State have both turned in top ten recrutiting classes each of the last four seasons. They've all got the athletes. They've all got the speed. The differences in raw talent on this level are nil. This championship, like all championships, will be about combining management, strategy and execution in the moment, and probably a bounce or timely flag or two. Not as catchy as "SEC Speed," but anything more precise than wrongheaded, bumper sticker hubris rarely is.

Indeed.

Anyway, you may notice that in the title of this post, I'm going out on a limb, aligning myself with the 27 out of 90 Bowl Pick 'em contestants and 25.3 percent of ESPN readers who believe the Buckeyes will prevail. I am predicting this not because I'm pro-OSU but because I'm anti-CW (conventional wisdom, that is), and I see no particular reason to believe that Ohio State can't win this game. This isn't an SEC-Big Ten Challenge (which the former would certainly win), it's a game between two specific teams from those conferences, and while I won't be particularly surprised if either one wins -- such is the chaotic nature of college football, especially this season -- I think a Buckeye blowout would be the perfect conclusion to the season, in the sense that it would turn conventional wisdom on its head one last time. And the Buckeyes certainly have plenty of motivation, while the homestanding Bayou Bengals could easily fall into the trap of reading their press clippings a bit too much. Also, for the love of God, I don't think I can handle the SEC chest-thumping if the Tigers win. So: Ohio State 27, LSU 10.

Oh, and the talk about a split national championship? Forget about it. This is, as I keep saying, a Mythical Championship Game in the sense that there's no particularly compelling reason to believe that these are actually the two best teams in the country, but at the same time, nobody else stands out as being worthy, either. The problem this year, unlike in all past BCS controversies, isn't that there are too many championship-worthy teams, it's that there are too few. My USC Trojans, for one, really and truly should not be in this discussion at all, and it's frankly an embarrassment that they are. Yes, they'd probably win a playoff, but who cares? We don't have a playoff system, we have a system where you're judged on your body of work, and USC lost to Stanford and beat next to nobody. As for the others -- Georgia, Kansas, West Virginia, Missouri (!) -- they all, like USC, are nice teams, but none of them scream "national champion" and all have glaring flaws. So will the LSU-OSU winner, of course, particularly if it's the two-loss Tigers. But in this strangest of all seasons, sheer inertia should result in the Mythical Championship Game winner being recognized by both polls. If Hawaii had beaten Georgia, it would have been a different story, but of course, that rather emphatically did not happen. So tonight's game is for all the marbles: BCS and AP. That said, the phrase "undisputed champion" would not be proper. There's plenty of cause to dispute the result. It's just that no single alternative stands out, so tonight's winner gets the consensus title by default.

Go Buckeyes.

When will Hillary drop out?

By Brendan Loy

With New Hampshire's most respected poll showing Hillary Clinton trailing Barack Obama by 10 points on the eve of the primary, and other polls also universally showing Obama in the lead, Drudge is now running a siren with the headline: "TALK OF HILLARY EXIT ENGULFS CAMPAIGN." He writes:

Facing a double-digit defeat in New Hampshire, a sudden collapse in national polls and an expected fund-raising drought, Senator Hillary Clinton is preparing for a tough decision: Does she get out of the race? And when?!

"She can't take multiple double-digit losses in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada," laments one top campaign insider. "If she gets too badly embarrassed, it will really harm her. She doesn't want the Clinton brand to be damaged with back-to-back-to-back defeats."

Key players in Clinton's inner circle are said to be split. James Carville is urging her to fight it out through at least February and Super Tuesday, where she has a shot at thwarting Barack Obama in a big state. But others close to the former first lady now see no possible road to victory, sources claim.

I agree with those "others close to the former first lady." I don't think there is any way she can beat Obama. In fact, I believe that she will not win a single primary. Obama's momentum is already unstoppable, at least by her.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that Hillary, with all her resources, will bow out before Super Duper Tuesday (February 5), or, at the very earliest, Florida (January 29). Who cares about the "Clinton brand"? Bill is termed out, and it's not like Hillary is going to get another shot at the presidency. (If you think those wrinkles are bad now, just imagine how they'll look in four or eight years.) Whose future political fortunes are they worried about, Chelsea's? This is Hillary's chance, this is her moment, and although it's now almost certainly a lost cause, I don't see the Clintons as the gracious, bow-out-early types. I expect them to follow Carville's suggested course of action, quixotic though it may be.

Still, what's really interesting to me is the possibility of Clinton exiting the race before Edwards does. I actually think Edwards has a better chance (albeit still a slim one) to catch Obama than Clinton does, because whereas the central rationale for her candidacy -- experience -- is one that the voters are clearly not interested in right now (pseudo-incumbents don't win "change elections"), and therefore she has no ammunition with which to fight Obama, the central rationale of Edwards's candidacy is change; his is simply a more angry, confrontational message of "change" than Obama's, and there are definitely a lot of liberals who will be receptive to that message (fraudulent and histrionic though it may be) if they hear it directly contrasted with Obama's feel-good take on things. A head-to-head Obama-vs.-Edwards battle could be very interesting, and while Obama's inherent charisma and political/rhetorical skill are such that I think he would still win fairly easily, I can imagine Edwards potentially catching him, whereas I just can't see Hillary making a comeback unless Obama makes some sort of huge unforced error.

P.S. An earlier incarnation of this post said that I don't see the Clintons as "bow out early for the good of the party" types. I modified that phraseology because, actually, in light of my last paragraph, I think an early Hillary exit would not be good for the party, since it would increase the possibility of an Edwards comeback, which would unquestionably be bad for the party, in light of his angry, polarizing rhetoric, which appeals to the very worst impulses of the Left. (In George F. Will's words, "Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity. Each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them and who therefore think that opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.") Edwards is the one Democrat in the race who -- meaningless current general-election polls notwithstanding -- might actually lose to a cardboard-cutout Republican like Romney or Thompson (or even perhaps, heaven help us, Huckabee). So, oddly enough, it's in the Democrats' best interests for Hillary to maintain her quixotic struggle until Obama's coronation becomes inevitable, rather than allowing the election's dynamic and narrative to shift to a head-to-head battle between kinder-and-gentler "change" and mad-as-hell "change," which the latter might just win.