Colin MacGuire's college pigskin Web site focuses on the football facts

www.gradingcollegefootball.com

Colin “Big C” MacGuire of Greenville contacted me last week to tell me about his very interesting football-related Web site. His Web site “offers an alternate way to grade college football which takes the emotions out and focuses on the facts.”

Each week throughout the college football season, MacGuire and Web developer Ben Shoults update their site, www.gradingcollegefootball.com, to give the latest grade for each team in college football. Their grading system is based on a point system, and it’s relatively simple. Teams get points for winning and have points subtracted for losing. For example, a team gets three points for beating a BCS team and two points for beating a non-BCS team. They loose a point for losing to a BCS team and loose two points for losing to a non-BCS team. Their system also takes into account factors like undefeated regular seasons, conference championships, bowl wins and losses, wins and losses against ranked teams and success and failures at home and on the road.

Many of you will know the 55-year-old MacGuire, who served as a team manager for the University of Alabama football team in 1978 and 1979 under head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. MacGuire is generally considered to be an expert on Alabama football, and his voice has been heard on the radio for years as part of his widely popular high school football radio show. MacGuire is a passionate football fan, and I invite all of you to check out his college football Web site each week during the coming football season. You won’t be disappointed and will probably find it a breath of fresh air, especially in light of the convoluted BCS rankings system.

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Also during the past week, I learned that last Thursday was the 99th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s major league baseball debut. According to the good people at the History Channel, 19-year-old George Herman “Babe” Ruth appeared in his first pro baseball game on July 11, 1914 when he pitched seven innings for the Boston Red Sox against the Cleveland Indians. Ruth gave up eight hits in seven innings and went 0-for-2 at the plate. Boston won, 4-3.

Ruth, aka “The Sultan of Swat,” would eventually move on to the New York Yankees, where he helped lead them to seven American League pennants and four World Series titles. During his career, he hit a record-setting 714 home runs, setting a record that would stand for decades until it was broken by Hank Aaron. Ruth retired in 1935 after 22 seasons in the big leagues and died in 1948.

If you’re interested in learning more about Babe Ruth, I highly recommend that you read “Babe: The Legend Comes to Life” by Robert Creamer. Ranked No. 27 on Sports Illustrated’s list of “Top 100 Sports Books of All Time,” this 1992 book is considered to be the definitive biography of Ruth. This book is so good that Sports Illustrated once called it the “best biography ever written about an American sports figure.”