You can call it arbitrary all you want but the fact is that you want to say "rah rah, my school is #1" and the ONLY way you can do that is by going back into the mists of ancient history.
That may be how you see it through the rival lens, but I'd rather call it an unfortunate disservice to our conversation that I can't realistically switch to a different fanbase for a moment. Because then my
objectively solid point couldn't be superficially torn just because "meh you're a fan; this feels predictable; my fingers go in my ears; I can't hear you."
Just as I prefer that we cite the global view of the 247 Composite rather than biasedly cherry-picking a single site (that favors our interests), I prefer the global view of "take all the years," rather than biasedly selecting boundaries within those years. Just as with a good experiment of some factor measured over time, I'd never cover up the first half of its graph, electing to disregard it as "less informationally dense than the second half."
I consider myself consistent in that respect.
You might read that and wish to counter-argue that the second paragraph was merely a reversed example of "meh you're a fan and this is predictable" (where I take that hose you pointed at me but point it at you), but the important distinction is bolded above. Taking an all-time scale is
objectively less arbitrary than every chosen scale of smaller size.
This isn't to say that interesting trends and the value of recency can't be better gleaned by selecting boundaries that highlight some number fewer than "all the years," but it is to say that such boundaries (even benign appearing ones like "ever since the inaugural AP poll") are always more arbitrary than taking them all together.
If you asked any even remotely neutral fan "which is the best program in the B1G right now?" they would say Ohio State without hesitation.
I don't understand why that is relevant. I don't disagree. It's also a different topic.
Perhaps you are sensitive to the possibility that I am claiming that arbitrarily drawn lines are meaningless or wrong, but I'm not making that kind of value judgment. I had tried and hoped I was clear in this regard. Maybe not.
I'm merely acknowledging semantically that arbitrarily drawn lines are arbitrarily drawn. I'm not trying to demean them. I'm just trying to give them that contextual stamp. To me, that's a quite small but incontrovertibly true matter.
