I assume you're talking about the BCS here? Asking for clarification.
Yes, the BCS. Which, as I
may have mentioned once or twice...
WAS IN FACT about as "objective" as could be imagined in the evaluation of something so VERY Subjective and difficult to evaluate as College Football.
That's because there is no formula. More on this in a moment.
And yet - the BCS
IN POINT OF FACT DID HAVE A FORMULA.
No, it was not "Perfectly" objective, but it WAS very Transparent, (Which means it was subject to AUDIT to Test whether it's being applied fairly).
Objectivity is important, IMO, because ANY time you mix Large amounts of MONEY with Human Beings and
SECRECY, you can be assured that Mischief WILL occur. We seem to understand this in the realm of Politics - hence the "sunshine" laws that we find in EVERY STATE and in the Federal Government.
Yet we seem to lose site of this FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE of human behavior when it comes to sports......
You mean it was ESPN that told the committee to pick Michigan State over Ohio State in 2015?
That's an odd choice for a network to make and harm its own interests.
Do you mean the same 2015 Michigan State team that lost only One game, by One Point, on the road, and didn't lose after the first week of November, then Beat O$U on the road AT Columbus, then won their Division AND the B1G Conference Championship Game, and in the process won TWICE against Top-5 ranked teams in their last three games of the regular season?
THAT Mich State team?
Yea, that's the one.......
1) We know every single person on the committee.
2) We did not necessarily know who exactly was voting in the BCS. A lot of coaches have the SID or someone else do the vote in their name.
Regarding the BCS - we knew EXACTLY who was voting in the AP Poll, and how they voted. Then when the AP decided to stop participating, we knew the same thing for the Harris Interactive Poll.
We also knew exactly which Computer Polls were being used, and EXACTLY how the computer "consensus" was calculated.
Your complaint applies only to the "Coaches" Poll - BUT EVEN THERE - we knew that every final ballot
WAS DISCLOSED. Maybe "Joey" the GA in the SID department is the guy actually filling out the ballot for "Coach" at State U. But "Coach" also knows that "HIS" ballot (at least his final ballot) WILL BE PUBLISHED, and if he votes his rival extra low out of spite, he's at least going to be exposed as having done it.....
That a "Darn" sight MORE Accountability than any member of the "Double Secret Committee" faces!!!!
I'm reminded of a novel I read some years ago. Part of the story was set inside a penitentiary. The prisoners set up their own informal "Prisoner's Court" to settle disputes rather than settling grievances by stabbing the other guy. The prisoners selected three judges, and the "judges' agreed in advance that every decision would be 2-1.
That way no one would be motivated to kill any of the judges, because they could never be sure which one voted against them.......
Here's the problem (and it's not just with you, Tom, it seems to permeate this board): the problem is that there IS NO FORMULA that can tell us in advance what will happen except if you're a major conference team and go undefeated, you go to the playoffs. A lot of fans and pundits don't seem to grasp the hard to grasp idea that the stated criteria of the CFB playoff committee ONLY is invoked if......
well, here's the key instruction:
. . . . .
You can't have a "formula" because as even the committee says, it's ART, not SCIENCE.
Look, I don't DISAGREE with what you are saying here - You are Right, SO FAR AS IT GOES.
But here's my point - IMO it is BEYOND RATIONAL DISPUTE that the decision about who gets "IN" versus who is left "OUT" - regardless of whether the "Bracket" is 2, or 4, of 65 - is a Decision with
Multi-MILLION DOLLAR CONSEQUENCES - Perhaps even into the Hundreds of Millions if you include all the TV and marketing revenue. Do you agree?
But the premise you are forwarding is that we should trust 13 people, working under a cloak of absolute SECRECY, in a body that I (half) Jokingly call the "Double Secret Committee": A body that discloses NOTHING about it's process, it's rationale, it's rules, it's practices, or anything else OTHER than it's DECREES.
And that this SECRET System is just as Trustworthy, if not more so, than the BCS System - which included the opinions of
- SIX independent Computer Models,
- 19-20 NAMED Coaches (who we all "know") AND
- an Expert panel - not of 13 people working in secrecy, but of 115 NAMED Experts (who we all "know"), voting on ballots which were disclosed, in a poll operated by a KNOWN and RESPECTED Professional Market Research Company.
We could TEST the Coaches poll AND the Harris interactive Poll to see if the BCS calculated the right result for each team. We could also see if any specific Coaches or Harris "Experts" were making absurd votes.
We could test the Computer results in much the same way. And we knew the FORMULA already had a mechanism to limit the effect of absurd computer results.
AND,
We could TEST the final BCS poll to see if they tabulated and weighted each of the three components properly.
If some component or individual voter was out of whack, OR if some nefarious character in the back room of the BCS decided to CHANGE the actual BCS results for any reason, these things could be easily detected.
Compare that to the Committee.
Oh wait - that's right - we can't do ANY of that, can we. ALL we can do is "TRUST THEM"...... :biggrin2:
See my point?