Culture
Ding dong, Miami’s dead, but did Ole Miss deserve the CFP rankings nod over Alabama?
The College Football Playoff selection committee made the words of their chairman from a week earlier look silly, and they should all be commended for it.
To a point.
To the point of the Miami Hurricanes being eliminated from CFP contention with Tuesday’s penultimate rankings. That’s the big thing the 13-person committee got right Tuesday, and it came off as a pleasant surprise after several weeks of overrating the Canes, after chair Warde Manuel seemed to telegraph that the relative weakness of Miami’s profile would not count against it.
“Teams can only play the (conference) schedule that’s in front of them,” Manuel said after the previous rankings. “They can only play the opponents that they have. So we take the stance that we’re going to really look at these games, we’re going to look at the stats, we’re going to look at the strength of schedule, but we’re also going to look at how teams are performing against the competition that they have. From our perspective, if it was just about strength of schedule, we wouldn’t be needed.”
That comment came before Miami lost 42-38 at Syracuse. Still, it could have been used to justify keeping the 10-2 Hurricanes in, and it almost did. They dropped from No. 6 to No. 12, with 9-3 Alabama jumping two spots to No. 11 and taking the last at-large bid as of now — if No. 17 Clemson beats No. 8 SMU in the ACC title game, SMU could hang in and bump Alabama out.
In penalizing Miami, the committee thought beyond the simplicity of counting loss totals, valued good wins over “good losses” and ejected a team with a poor strength of schedule and no ranked wins. It’s not Miami’s fault that it didn’t play Clemson and SMU this season, but it’s not to Miami’s credit either.
It is to the credit, or good fortune, of The SEC Three — three-loss Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina — that they played and beat better teams than Miami. The Hurricanes should have dropped below all of them, which has nothing to do with ACC/SEC and everything to do with body of work.
Also, the more I look at it, the more I think No. 13 Ole Miss should have received the nod over Alabama. That one is very, very close. No. 14 South Carolina has a case, too, but when it’s this tight and the Gamecocks lost to Alabama and Ole Miss, the head-to-head results should register and differentiate. And they did.
Really ?? ….what put Bama over the top of Miami for the last spot in is that Miami went 1-2 in their last 3 games (by an average of 4.5 pts, to a ranked Syracuse and GT team that just took UGA to 8OT). Bama went 2-1 (to 5-7 Auburn, destroyed by OU, and beat FCS Mercer)
— Dan Radakovich (@DanRadakovich) December 4, 2024
First, let’s celebrate the positive, all due respect to Miami. The committee seemed in previous rankings to be valuing those confounding “good losses” over quality wins (that’s still the case with Penn State, for the record). As someone who has done the mock NCAA men’s basketball selection process and has observed that process for a long time, wins mean more to that committee than losses. That committee, in essence, asks: “Can this team win games in this tournament?”
Miami could have done damage. Certainly, Cam Ward and the Hurricanes can score, leading the nation at 44.2 points per game. ESPN’s Heather Dinich, who covers the committee, noted it “likes this offense and Cam Ward” in predicting Miami would make the cut Tuesday.
Ward is second in the nation at 343.6 passing yards per game, behind only Syracuse quarterback Kyle McCord — has anyone mentioned recently he once played for Ohio State? — at 360.5 per game. McCord helped those numbers with a cool 380 and three touchdowns in Saturday’s upset of the Hurricanes to push 9-3 Cuse into the rankings at No. 22.
That dropped Miami to 60th nationally in scoring defense (23.9) and 42nd in yards per play allowed (5.19). Against a schedule ranked No. 68 in The Athletic analyst Austin Mock’s metric.
Sure, the most recent outing to cost Miami a spot in the ACC title game was a close loss, just like a 28-23 loss to 7-5 Georgia Tech on Nov. 9. But the Hurricanes’ best win this season continues to be a 52-45 escape of a Louisville team that couldn’t quite sneak back into the rankings after thumping rival Kentucky.
The SEC Three also could only play the schedules that were in front of them, and Ole Miss came away with a 28-10 home win over No. 5 Georgia and a 27-3 road win over South Carolina. Alabama beat Georgia 41-34, South Carolina 27-25 and No. 19 Missouri 34-0, all at home.
South Carolina might be playing as well as anyone — and that’s something the committee should be discussing as well. Is a team getting better or worse? South Carolina and Miami, for example, would appear to be teams going in different directions. South Carolina just beat Clemson 17-14 on the road. The Gamecocks also beat Missouri 34-30 and newly unranked Texas A&M 44-20.
All of those wins from The SEC Three are better than any of Miami’s wins. Transitive football does tell us Miami crushed 7-5 Florida on the road, 41-17, while Ole Miss blew it by losing 24-17 at Florida on Nov. 23. That counts as the other mentionable win on Miami’s schedule, but anyone who has watched Florida this season also sees dramatic improvement from September to November.
Ole Miss also lost at home to 4-8 Kentucky, which is bad. And had a 29-26 loss at LSU, which isn’t. I give Ole Miss the edge over Alabama (which is a change from the 12 I submitted after Saturday’s results, for the record) based on current quality of play.
Alabama lost 40-35 at 6-6 Vanderbilt, 24-17 at No. 7 Tennessee and, recently and alarmingly, 24-3 at 6-6 Oklahoma. That one pushes Ole Miss ahead in my mind. South Carolina actually has the best losses, to the other two of The SEC Three, and to LSU. Again, wins beating losses. Yay, committee.
Strength of schedule rankings? South Carolina 12, Alabama 19, Ole Miss 51. Maybe that’s the difference for Alabama. I don’t think it’s brand name, though I expect Lane Kiffin to amplify all such complaints from Ole Miss fans in the days to come.
It’s just so close. Certainly closer than Miami compared with any of the three.
(Photo of Mario Cristobal: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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