Is there a message being sent to the Big 12?
- Thread starter Loam
- Start date
I agree.
My ideal football weekend:
1. Alabama wins
2. Awburn loses
3. ND loses
4. any of the other trendy, flavor of the week favorites lose ie Boise St., TCU, AZ St, Baylor etc.
If your scenario held up, then the SEC would be left out. With so many one-loss teams, it is win or go home at this point. Mississippi State is in an interesting position right now at #4. I believe it is possible for them to get jumped by a team that wins an extra game for a conference championship (OSU) after the bulldog's season is over. But I also think the committee is saying that right now MSU is better than OSU, and if they can really dominate against Vandy and Ole Miss, they can solidify that final position for the playoffs. Of course, there are still a few potential spoiler games for the others in the top 4 as well, so it's fun to speculate but too early to get too frustrated.
Fair enough - I won't argue the point. But consider this - we hear about them every day up here. They are only about 4 hours from Columbus. They sit in our homes, eat in our restaurants and teach our children. You may have been harmed by them more, but we have to deal with their "greatness" every day. It is like having Lou Holtz as a neighbor, and he just won't leave you alone.
OSU fans were all Alabama fans last year on January 7th, even the SEC haters.
If the Big 12 -2 continues to refuse to play a conference championship game, they should get left out. Same goes for Notre Dame.
I really hope tOSU can make it in Meyer against CNS again, that would be Great, but li seems the love goes to TCU & Baylor so this will be used to bring it to 8 teams I think.
No message sent. They just don't have enough teams according to NCAA rules. OSU is on a roll right now as well. That was a bad loss by them with VT, and I don't know if I could count Minnie Soda (Disney jk) as a quality win, but they are and it means to me that OSU is on a roll. I still think that everything will shake out in the end.
I feel like if you are part of the Power 5, you should be required to have a Conference Championship game, just as the other 4 do.
The rule REQUIRES a conference to have a minimum of 12 teams before it will ALLOW the conference to play a CCG. The rule was never intended for Division 1A. The NCAA had a meltdown when the SEC expanded to 12 teams and used the rule to put in a CCG. The revised rule below authorizes both FBS and FCS. That was not in the original rule.
17.9.1.2 (c) Twelve-Member Conference Championship Game. [FBS/FCS] A conference championship game between division champions of a member conference of 12 or more institutions that is divided into two divisions (of six or more institutions each), each of which conducts round-robin, regular-season competition among the members of that division;
17.9.1.2 (c) Twelve-Member Conference Championship Game. [FBS/FCS] A conference championship game between division champions of a member conference of 12 or more institutions that is divided into two divisions (of six or more institutions each), each of which conducts round-robin, regular-season competition among the members of that division;
No, it's only because it's TCU and Baylor. Either Texas or Oklahoma would be in the top 4 if they were in the same position as TCU/Baylor.
Is there a message being sent? Yes, but not to the Big 12. It’s being sent to the college football world at large. That message is, “We don’t really know what we are doing.”
This is an over simplified look at the teams, but if you were to judge the entire body of work to date of the top 6 teams (since those are the ones being debated here) it becomes clear that one school doesn't belong: Florida State.
Are they undefeated? Yes. But is that more impressive than what the other 5 have done? Not really.
Opponents win %
Alabama – 57%
Mississippi State – 56%
Ohio State – 55%
Oregon – 55%
TCU – 55%
FSU – 50%
# of currently ranked teams faced
Oregon – 4
TCU – 4
Alabama – 2
FSU – 2
Mississippi State – 2
Ohio State – 2
So what messages can we draw from the rankings and these two items?
1) By releasing rankings weekly, the committee is swayed by what happens week to week. Did TCU narrowly beat a bad Kansas team? Yes. Does that diminish their other accomplishments in the season to this point? No. They were dropped simply because of what happened in a specific week. Otherwise, they've played winning teams and more ranked opponents the 4 of the other 5. The same can be said for Alabama. Beating #1 jumped us from 5 to 1; that appears to be “what have you done for me lately”.
2) Strength of schedule doesn't’ matter. FSU has a greatly inferior schedule compared to the others, yet they sit at #3. Is 1 extra win over a bad/mediocre team really more impressive than having 1 loss to a ranked opponent?
3) Being undefeated is more important than other factors. See previous point. 1 win over a crappy team is more important than playing difficult teams and losing once.
4) Your name and what you've done in the past matters. Given the crappy schedule, this can be the only possible explanation for FSU remaining in the top 4. It’s also a contributing factor in why Alabama jumped from 5 to 1 in a week.
None of this takes into consideration that FSU has trailed against many of these crappy teams and barely squeaks by.
If you were to ask me right now, my top 4 would be:
1 – Alabama
2 – Oregon
3 – Mississippi State
4 – TCU
Given remaining schedules, if everyone wins out, I’d probably give the nod to Ohio State over TCU, but barely. And that would be my bias towards OSU playing the conference game. I’d probably even have Oregon and Alabama flip flop, as Oregon will have faced more ranked opponents.
I know that this leaves out a lot of variables, but I just needed to rant a bit about the selection committee. There needs to be more transparency and they need to quit publishing rankings. They don’t do it in basketball and the world continues to turn. Judge the season objectively as a whole, not week to week.
<\Rant off>
This is an over simplified look at the teams, but if you were to judge the entire body of work to date of the top 6 teams (since those are the ones being debated here) it becomes clear that one school doesn't belong: Florida State.
Are they undefeated? Yes. But is that more impressive than what the other 5 have done? Not really.
Opponents win %
Alabama – 57%
Mississippi State – 56%
Ohio State – 55%
Oregon – 55%
TCU – 55%
FSU – 50%
# of currently ranked teams faced
Oregon – 4
TCU – 4
Alabama – 2
FSU – 2
Mississippi State – 2
Ohio State – 2
So what messages can we draw from the rankings and these two items?
1) By releasing rankings weekly, the committee is swayed by what happens week to week. Did TCU narrowly beat a bad Kansas team? Yes. Does that diminish their other accomplishments in the season to this point? No. They were dropped simply because of what happened in a specific week. Otherwise, they've played winning teams and more ranked opponents the 4 of the other 5. The same can be said for Alabama. Beating #1 jumped us from 5 to 1; that appears to be “what have you done for me lately”.
2) Strength of schedule doesn't’ matter. FSU has a greatly inferior schedule compared to the others, yet they sit at #3. Is 1 extra win over a bad/mediocre team really more impressive than having 1 loss to a ranked opponent?
3) Being undefeated is more important than other factors. See previous point. 1 win over a crappy team is more important than playing difficult teams and losing once.
4) Your name and what you've done in the past matters. Given the crappy schedule, this can be the only possible explanation for FSU remaining in the top 4. It’s also a contributing factor in why Alabama jumped from 5 to 1 in a week.
None of this takes into consideration that FSU has trailed against many of these crappy teams and barely squeaks by.
If you were to ask me right now, my top 4 would be:
1 – Alabama
2 – Oregon
3 – Mississippi State
4 – TCU
Given remaining schedules, if everyone wins out, I’d probably give the nod to Ohio State over TCU, but barely. And that would be my bias towards OSU playing the conference game. I’d probably even have Oregon and Alabama flip flop, as Oregon will have faced more ranked opponents.
I know that this leaves out a lot of variables, but I just needed to rant a bit about the selection committee. There needs to be more transparency and they need to quit publishing rankings. They don’t do it in basketball and the world continues to turn. Judge the season objectively as a whole, not week to week.
<\Rant off>
You're absolutely right. The big 12 petitioned the ncaa in 2012 (and possibly before and since then) regarding having a championship which was turned down as the minimum # of conference teams is.....ironically enough......12
This stat can be incredibly misleading. Playing highly ranked teams is far different than playing a fringe top 25 teams. It also doesn't take into account that beating a currently ranked team may knock that team out of the rankings.
There's also not much of difference between teams that are somewhere in the 15-40 range. Cutting it off at 25 is completely arbitrary.
The same can be said of opponents' win percentage. There is a big difference between playing two 5-5 teams and playing a 0-10 and a 10-0 team. Both average out to the same winning percentage, but the second scenario is much more likely to result in a loss.
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True. Number of ranked teams can be. But how is opponents win percentage misleading? Either you play teams that win games or teams that don't.
I'd be interested to hear what metrics you would use to judge the teams. These were just the two simplest to use since I didn't want to do a full blown analysis.
I enhanced my original post to better explain what I was getting at.
To elaborate, opponents' winning percentage can only be useful if it also takes into the strength of schedule of their opponents as well. For example, playing a 9-2 Northern Illinois shouldn't yield the same strength of schedule as playing a 9-2 SEC or PAC-12 team.
To be useful, opponents' winning percentage calculations should also eliminate counting any cupcake games as they greatly skew the results. Home and away also needs to be considered.
The college football season has such a small sample size with little relative crossover that it's hard to build a really good mathematical model.
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If you play in the SEC West then win percentage can be misleading in determining the quality of a football team. Take Arkansas for example. They have five losses. So does NC St, Temple, Michigan, and Navy, just to name a few. Teams with less than five losses: Penn St, Maryland, Rutgers, UCF, Memphis, Boston Col, Clemson, et. al.
I believe Arkansas is better than all of those teams but you wouldn't know based solely off of their win-loss record.
With the playoff in place, isn't it time for the NCAA to back off of the 12 team requirement and let any conference that wants to do it have a title game? I know the SEC has staunchly opposed changing this, but there really is no point to the 12-team requirement. It was originally put in to weed out D1 eams, then the SEC expanded to expose a loophole in the rule and the rest is history, but that's 1992 logic and it simply does not apply today. The NCAA and the SEC need to let the 12-team rule go IMO. I'm an SEC fan, my teams play big-boy football, I am not afraid of the Big 12 teams or those from any other conferences Give them their title game.
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