With news of the elite European Soccer Clubs forming their own superleague, I wonder if College Football is soon headed that way with basically a tiered FBS?
Link: It's hard to argue that the CFP has been better than the BCS
- Thread starter Redwood Forrest
- Start date
If they want to destroy the sport, that is exactly what they will do.
You can do this with 64 teams; you're comitting suicide if you take 12.
To be fair, I don't think the problem is that there isn't a "perfect system" so much as the criteria can be used as a wax nose from week to week. I think we're probably all in agreement that there are "better systems than other systems."
Urban Meyer - correctly in my view - pointed out the problem with the playoff when Alabama was chosen over Ohio St in 2017. Make no mistake - it was the right choice, and I'd be saying this even had the situation been reversed (if we had lost by 31 points to, say, Mississippi State). But the problem was that the committee insinuated "the distance between 4th and 8th is so incredibly close" - and then the moment Ohio State knocked off unbeaten Wisconsin, the very same people informed us all, "Well, it was never really that close in the first place."
That what they're saying is a literal impossibility didn't keep them from acting like professional wrestling promoters.
I have a VERY simple test I apply when it comes to evaluating the fairness of the method:
"Was any team that SHOULD have been in the playoff excluded from it?" And my criteria STARTS where it should - is the second number in your record a zero (as in 12-0, etc)? If it is then you're going to get into the playoff whether anyone thinks you're the best team in the country or not, and that's exactly as it should be. The other MOST IMPORTANT criterion IN MY OPINION is "head to head results."
So when we look over the seven years of playoffs already concluded:
a) no undefeated Power 5 team has been excluded from the playoff
b) the ONLY unbeaten ever excluded played a total of TWO ranked teams in two seasons combined, beat both by 7 points, and needed double overtime to beat one of them (Note: you cannot count a bowl game against Auburn or LSU that had not yet been played in your evaluation for obvious reasons).
UCF played ZERO teams that were ranked in the top 20 (both ranked teams were in the 21-25 ranking).
By contrast,
2017
Oklahoma - beat four teams ranked in the top 14
Georgia - went 3-1 against teams in the top 20
Alabama - went 2-1 against teams in the top 20
Clemson - went 4-0 against teams in the top 25
These are NOT similar numbers.
Even Alabama, whose schedule was arguably the weakest of the three, faced more ranked teams than UCF did. And oh yes, Ohio State went 3-1 against teams ranked in the top 15 and beat two teams in the top 10. (Isn't it funny how the UCF partisans go with "but we beat the team who beat the teams," but they don't say "Well Iowa St beat Memphis and a bunch of teams beat Iowa State?").
2018
Oklahoma - went 2-1 against teams ranked in the top 20
Alabama - went 4-0 against teams ranked in the top 25, 3-0 against top 16, 2-0 against top 10.
Clemson - went 2-0 against teams ranked in the top 16
Notre Dame - went 2-0 against teams ranked in the top 16
And you can throw in UGA, who went 2-2 against four games against teams in the final top 11.
And UCF played....ZERO teams ranked in the final regular season top 25.
These are not similar numbers.
If you lose a game? Well, you better start figuring out how to bribe committee members.
NO TEAM with zero losses that deserved at least a chance has been passed over. And that alone is why I don't think expanding the playoff is even necessary. If there was ever a single "automatic qualifier" - in m view - it should be this: "Any team that is the defending national champion that runs the table with an undefeated record is an automatic selection."
But that's not even necessary; even with Clemson's lousy 2019 schedule, they were still getting in.
If I ever find myself in court facing serious charges, I'm hiring Earle and you...no team could win against that team.
You want someone with more experience in criminal/trial law.
OTOH, in my few months as a trial lawyer, before going off to tax grad law school, I got a murder conviction reversed before the state court of criminal appeals. One of the justices drew me aside and complimented me. Upon learning my plans, he tried to talk me out of it. Said my destiny was really as a trial lawyer. Personally, I think I'd already be dead, had I taken that fork in the road...
Well I’m not a lawyer BUT my high school classmates assumed I was going to be a prosecutor. That’s the first thing they asked when we met at the 10-year reunion - “where are you a DA?”
Its hard to argue that the CFP has been better than the BCS...
Well we would not have won the 2017 National Championship with the BCS. So from a Bama perspective that is very good.
Well we would not have won the 2017 National Championship with the BCS. So from a Bama perspective that is very good.
Same for OSU in 2014 - IMO, you traded a loss in 2014 for a win in 2017 with the CFP vs. BCS.
Who said anything about "any team can win" ? My point was that the best team often does not win - that's quite a difference. IMO, in most cases guessing who is the "best" team ultimately becomes a subjective matter regarding men's basketball. There are not many Cinderellas but there are more good or even great teams who have won when there was another team in the country who was likely better.
Sports are free to choose how they want to select a champion, but choosing a champion and choosing the best team are two different things. IMO, typically, the short dash, i.e., playoffs, is inferior to the long haul, i.e., the regular season. Since in most college sports there are so many teams who often play vastly different schedules that there has to be a mix of both. But IMO, single-elimination game playoffs are the worst way, though sometimes there is no practical alternative.
This is a fair point and further validates my view that CFB is always in equilibrium and you win as many titles as you should. Yeah, we got hosed in 1966 and 1977, but we kinda got away with one in 1978, too.
After reading so many good thoughts on the subject of how many teams should we have and what weight should be given to scheduling I have come back to my original stance which is The BCS was fine with me and the Four Team format is fine with me. I like the Four Team better but either is acceptable to the former system which I call a "non-system" system of just having a bunch of bowl games contracted to conference champions with a one vs. two every blue moon.
One day (given enough chances) some Boise or UCF like team will get lucky and win a couple of playoff games and then we WILL NEVER HEAR THE END OF IT UNTIL EXPANSION INCLUDES 16 OR 20 in the playoff. This lone longshot will be the shot heard round the FBS.
What we have is so much better than before the BCS CG that no one should complain about unfairness if they are old enough to remember the goofy bowl structure. Complain about making the playoff better but NOT ABOUT UNFAIRNESS.
One day (given enough chances) some Boise or UCF like team will get lucky and win a couple of playoff games and then we WILL NEVER HEAR THE END OF IT UNTIL EXPANSION INCLUDES 16 OR 20 in the playoff. This lone longshot will be the shot heard round the FBS.
What we have is so much better than before the BCS CG that no one should complain about unfairness if they are old enough to remember the goofy bowl structure. Complain about making the playoff better but NOT ABOUT UNFAIRNESS.
I don't think anyone is suggesting FBS takes only 12 teams - just the idea of the 'super league' that many of us have been begging for since, well, forever.
Oh I agree, but the soccer league proposed is next-level insane. Personally, I think FBS would be just fine with four 16-team conferences, and I'm even willing to expand THAT playoff to six (the four conference champions and two at-large bids) to allow for certain situations like 2011 Alabama, where a team shows a high level of greatness but fails for one reason or another to win the conference.
I'd also be just fine with some rotating "out of conference" scheduling like the NFL does where, for example, one year the SEC and Pac 12 teams play one another. They can set a stadium benchmark for the money so that the SEC teams with larger venues can play teams like Wazzu or Oregon St in a stadium of "minimum size X" like Seattle or somewhere as a home/home.
They can even match them up by seeds, say the Pac 12 champs vs the SEC champs with a predetermined venue. You could even do this two years in a row to allow for each team to play home/home and then flip leagues.
Of course, I think they should reduce the regular season to ten anyway.
I think what helps in my particular case is all of those exegetical papers I had to write at my evangelical seminary for so many years. The difference there, of course, is that I had to cover the material within prescribed page limits, which was nearly impossible. We once had a paper on a particular word (and it's semantic meaning) in Ephesians 2, and I had to cover ALL SIX MAJOR PROPOSED interpretations of it (succinctly but fully), and come to my own conclusions on "the most probable is X because" and then defend the position, all while footnoting virtually every sentence with multiple references. Even then, my paper usually had a lot of red markings on it, heh heh, because the grader was some intern trying to earn his/her PhD, and they were always far better read on the subject than it was possible for me to be in a compressed time frame.
As to how this relates to college football, it is important to me for two standards to be met:
1) historical accuracy
2) factual accuracy
I don't mind if someone disagrees with me regarding the CONCLUSION of something so long as we agree upon the facts in evidence. But if we are logical thinkers then most of the time, of course, the facts in evidence will lead us to the same conclusion if we'll set aside our emotional attachment to certain outcomes. Many times I have held an opinion about something (not just CFB but for the sake of this post let's limit it) and then gotten out my Excel documents and Word sheets and papers strewn all over the place running data and taken a very close look at it and then concluded the exact opposite of what I once held to be correct. I had an emotional investment in Georgia Tech winning the 1990 national championship - CU's Fifth Down, my grandfather being recruited to play there back in the late 20s in the Bill Alexander era, the fact Tech is geographically in the south, they were the only unbeaten - and my emotion influenced my conclusion. Having looked closely at the situation, it's very difficult for me to say that Tech was even among the three best teams in the nation that year, and their record in the years before and after that (while not available in 1990 obviously) proves it conclusively. Tech's ascent was very similar to BYU's in 1984 and for the same reason, although to be fair Tech did play a much tougher schedule than BYU did. But it was a fluke year all the way around for them, and Tech basically won because people were upset about the Fifth Down controversy. In retrospect with some watching of games as well as statistical analysis, Colorado was so much better than Tech that the game would likely have been a mauling, and I think Notre Dame and Miami and Washington (at a minimum) would have beaten Tech as well. I don't begrudge them the national title under the circumstances, but they weren't "that" good of a team.
To give one more example (and be done with it), we have to consider what a football coach would be like if you flipped situations. It is ENTIRELY possible that someone like Matt Campbell is actually a better coach than Lincoln Riley or Ryan Day or even (for that matter) Dan Mullen. Not to take anything away from those men but put them in Ames and put Campbell with Blue Blood advantages and what would happen? (Note: I am NOT saying Campbell is better - I'm saying we have to be open to the idea he MIGHT be and consider parallels etc). And I'm just using a name at the moment. This is why I think Don James is a much better coach than a lot of people realize while I'm still willing to say Tom Osborne is at least a little bit overrated, and I think John McKay was substantially overrated, which wouldn't set well (I know) with Coach Bryant, but McKay won his titles in an 8-team conference where he had all the advantages when the game was the most slanted it's ever been. Coach Bryant substantiated his greatness at Maryland AND at Kentucky AND at ATM, where he wasn't the biggest fish in the pond; McKay never did that, which isn't to say he couldn't have, but the fact is for all his advantages, go look at the fact McKay followed three straight top ten seasons with consecutive 6-4-1 years; he followed his first national title with four straight 7-win seasons. Again, this despite coaching in the easiest to recruit school in a non-competitive conference. I'm not saying McKay wasn't a good coach, but he wasn't in the same universe as Bryant, Saban, Meyer, or some others.
Anyway, I have a job interview online in five minutes to I'll see y'all later.
I agree. Last year showed they can schedule games "on the fly" with only four days notice. I have thought for some time that the first round (at least) should be incorporated into the regular season schedule.
On BBC last night, had the league survived, the individual teams would have cleared a half billion more per year. I think they were talking dollars...
I honestly don't think it's that hard to argue that the CFP has been better than the BCS.
BCS "SNUBS"
2000 - why FSU over Miami, who beat them? Or over Washington who beat Miami?
2001 - why Nebraska over Oregon or even (to a much lesser extent) Colorado
2003 - the two teams that should have played didn't even meet
2004 - why didn't Auburn get a chance? Oh yeah, because the other teams BEGAN on top, tough break guys.
2006 - while I AM anti-rematch, it was hard BEFORE the fact to say Florida over Michigan other than "well, they already played"
2007 - while I think LSU was the best team, what a mess.
2008 - why Oklahoma over Texas, who beat them?
2009 - I don't agree but when you have five unbeatens there's a big stink.
2010 - why no TCU?
2011 - do we "really" know that Okie State would lose to Alabama or LSU?
I say "snubs" because there ARE some legit reasons that those teams got "snubbed," but they're not even as strong as the ones that we have for those teams ranked 5 and below.Those teams got "snubbed" because of the way the BCS was designed, which everyone knew prior to game one. So I think that particular criticism of the BCS is somewhat overblown.
By contrast, who can we say REALLY got "snubbed" in the four-team playoff?????
CFP "SNUBS"
2014 - Baylor or TCU (more on this in a moment)
2015 - nobody
2016 - Penn St (I don't agree, more on this in a moment)
2017 - Ohio St? USC? UCF?
2018 - Ohio St? UCF?
2019 - nobody
2020 - Texas A/M? Indiana?
In my view, the ONLY "somewhat legitimate" objection is the first year. And I say "somewhat legitimate" because Ohio State was an underdog to us and seemingly nobody gave them a prayer (and oh yeah, we did lead that game, 21-6, early in the second quarter). Remember, we cannot look at the FINAL SoS rankings that skew the total in OSU's favor because they played two teams in the top four. But what went on PRIOR to that?
2014
Ohio State - 1-0 vs Top 10 (beat Sparty by 9 on the road); 2-0 vs the Top 30 (also beat #11 Wisky, 59-0)
TCU - 0-1 vs Top 10 (lost to Baylor by 3 on the road); 2-0 vs the Top 30 (beat K-St by 21, OU by 4 at home)
Baylor - 1-0 vs Top 10 (beat TCU by 3 at home); 2-1 vs the Top 30 (also beat KSU and OU; lost to WVA by 14)
So if you take the top ten, TCU not only doesn't qualify in terms of BEATING anyone worth a damn, they didn't even PLAY anyone worth a damn other than Baylor, who beat them. When you look at Baylor-TCU, you see "toss up," which hardly helps either team. Ohio St, by contrast, might have only played one Top 10 team, but they beat them ON THE ROAD (Baylor didn't do that). Point for Ohio State.
Ohio State has the worst loss, 14 points at home to Va Tech; they also have the best win. That both hurts AND helps Ohio State. But the part I don't quite understand is this:
Ohio St lost at home by 14 points to a team that ended the regular season at 6-6.
Baylor lost on the road by 14 points to a team that ended the regular season at 7-5.
OK, I'll grant that losing by the same score on the road to a slightly better team is a bit more of a poor reflection on Ohio State, but it's not like Baylor was beating 01 Miami while Ohio St was losing to App State.
I was in shock at the time that Ohio St was chosen, and I'll be the first to admit that I thought (and to a lesser point still do think) it was partly brand name selection. And I also think part of it was the fact that the Big 12 decided to double their chances at the last minute by suddenly declaring BOTH Baylor and TCU champions. Yes, I think that was PART of the subconscious thing.
On the other hand....If TCU wanted to make the playoff then they simply should have beaten Baylor and not let it get to the point of discussion. That committee was made up of a number of very good coaches, including Tom Osborne and Barry Alvarez (Ty Willingham was there, too, so they weren't all good coaches). Yes, we can blame the committee for choosing Ohio State, but I can also blame TCU for not beating the only good team they played, too. As more years pass and I look deeper than I had the chance to do in 2014, the selection of Ohio State looks better even if they had not won the national title.
Once you leave it in the hands of the committee, you lose the right to complain.
2016
Penn State DID beat Ohio State, but anyone who saw that game knew damn well it was one of those 2011 LSU beats Alabama in BDS flukes. If they had played again, the Bucks would have massacred them by 24 points or more.
To remind everyone who forgot, Penn State beat Ohio State:
a) the week after the Bucks played a top ten foe ALSO on the road (Wisky)
b) the Nittany Lions had an extra week to prepare and heal
c) at home
d) despite getting outgained by 137 yards and only getting 13 first downs
e) because of a fluke blocked FG returned for TD with 4:27 remaining
Bear in mind that despite that lucky escape, Penn State STILL managed to lose to unranked Pitt and get blown to pieces by 39 points to Michigan.
Teams who lose to other teams by 39 points deserve zero consideration for national title playoffs.
2017
To me this is simple - Alabama had one loss, Ohio St had two and one was by 31 points. The end.
2018
Yes, I think Ohio St was probably (once again) a good team. But you can't lose by 29 points to Purdue.
2020
ATM lost to Alabama by 28 points and played only one other really good team - and won a fluke that everyone knew was a fluke. Notre Dame DID beat Clemson - regardless of how, they DID beat them.
Well, I'm sorta willing to concede we "got away with one" in 1973 save for the fact we won it WITHIN THE RULES. Sure, they were stupid rules, but so was the time when Notre Dame got one knowing the bowl games wouldn't count and played for a tie.
The issue with the BCS was always when there was a potential "third team." The CFP removes that one issue. If you're number five, you're out. The end.
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