I forgot the WAC dropped football, but as long as they know there's a vote waiting for them some other nothing conference will spring up eventually.
Someone thought that the bigger conferences should have more votes? :conf2:
Who one earth thought any conference should have votes? The panel should have little to no allegiances, otherwise it's just the UN. An objective observer knows the SEC has earned respect, but a Sun Belt representative has incentive not to show the SEC their due respect. It's no different from giving China or Russia a vote on a committee.
I think the injury clause is the worst part of this all though. They threw out the BCS selection process, which worked just fine (bowl selections aside). Virtually all of the debate was between #2 and #3, but the powers that be felt that the BCS selection process betrayed them by choosing two SEC schools, so they set out to prevent that. This is about knocking off the SEC, make no mistake about it. The conference champ clause is to try and prevent Alabama in 2008, Florida in 2009, and Alabama in 2011 for example from getting into a playoff.
The injury party is just insidious and is arguably the most corrupt, and disturbing aspect I've ever heard any post season selection process introduce. It's extremely subjective, and what's the point? Well, this means if a USC for instance suffers a key injury mid-season, but the committee feels they are a team that could knock off one of the top teams, they can forgive the losses and put them in, over an SEC team, or simply because they feel they have a better chance of beating an SEC team (I know it's not ALL about the SEC, but it's mostly about the SEC and derailing them at this point). The flip side is the most disturbing though.
By introducing injuries into the selection process, they create an excuse to remove a team from the playoff because of injury. By saying a loss is forgiven due to it being a different (injured) team, they are also saying a team with key injuries going into a playoff is a lesser team than they were before. This means, if they caught wind of a G-Mac with broken ribs, that could become a factor now that injuries are part of the process. This all sounds nuts, right? Well, it's nuts to make it part of the selection process, they just want more ammunition, more ways to make the process subjective, and do what ever they want, fair or not.