Sorta quasi OT - the BCS Computer pollsters

The BCS system HAD TO TAKE the top two teams in 2 polls and computers. HAD TO.

The CFP committee can PUT ANY FOUR teams they want to put in. ANY Four.

That is the difference.

B1GTide said:

The other weeks that they offer their rankings are to please the masses, many of whom are wearing tin foil hats imagining all sorts of things. Those releases are totally meaningless and not a part of their charter.

Click to expand...

Ok, so tell me this. If Auburn doesn't lose to Georgia, at what point exactly would they have corrected their mistake?

Also, since you are using the as long as they got it right in the end argument... why do we need a playoff again? I can't think of a single year the BCS got the champion wrong.

KrAzY3 said:

Ok, so tell me this. If Auburn doesn't lose to Georgia, at what point exactly would they have corrected their mistake?

Also, since you are using the as long as they got it right in the end argument... why do we need a playoff again? I can't think of a single year the BCS got the champion wrong.

Click to expand...

Auburn was already #2 at that point. If they beat UGA again then they probably stay at #2 (11-2) SEC Champions.

The Final 4 would have been:

1) Clemson
2) Auburn or Oklahoma
3) Oklahoma or Auburn
4) Alabama

tusks_n_raider said:

Auburn was already #2 at that point. If they beat UGA again then they probably stay at #2 (11-2) SEC Champions.

The Final 4 would have been:

1) Clemson
2) Auburn or Oklahoma
3) Oklahoma or Auburn
4) Alabama

Click to expand...

Not necessarily. Because at that point, you have put a two-loss conference champion into the playoff (Auburn) and would have a tough time excluding another two-loss champion (Ohio State). I think if Auburn won the SEC Championship, the two-loss excuse goes away for both of those two teams and the one-loss Alabama gets left out of the playoff.

KrAzY3 said:

Ok, so tell me this. If Auburn doesn't lose to Georgia, at what point exactly would they have corrected their mistake?

Also, since you are using the as long as they got it right in the end argument... why do we need a playoff again? I can't think of a single year the BCS got the champion wrong.

Click to expand...

Because a playoff is more fun

RedWave said:

Not necessarily. Because at that point, you have put a two-loss conference champion into the playoff (Auburn) and would have a tough time excluding another two-loss champion (Ohio State). I think if Auburn won the SEC Championship, the two-loss excuse goes away for both of those two teams and the one-loss Alabama gets left out of the playoff.

Click to expand...

It's not just that OSU had 2 losses, it was the nature of the 2. A 2 TD+ loss at home to OU, a 31 point loss in Nov to a 7-5 Iowa team. They had a couple of good wins.

Auburn lost a close game to Clemson on the road, and a close loss to a 9 win LSU on the road. Then late in the year they beat the number two and one team at home 2 out of 3 weeks. If they had beaten UGA in the SECC game, they would have had 3 top 6 wins the last 4 weeks of the season. I.e., there would have been little comparison between the two 11-2 records.

IMO, there was no 2-loss excuse, when they looked at AU they determined that they belonged, when they looked at OSU they determined they did not belong. IMO, they were right in both cases.

I'm with those who believe that losses matter a great deal. I believe the CFPC does as well. But sometimes there are extraordinary circumstances that need to be considered (something the BCS computers would have unlikely been able to do). And AU's late season performance coupled with the type of losses, close on the road, one against a great team, the other vs a good 9 win team, merited them special consideration. I don't care for AU at all, but I try to give credit where it is due.

I don't care for OSU, but respect them and believed that they deserved to be in the playoff the year before, but not last year, even with Bama's somewhat weak schedule. IMO, Bama would have made it in over OSU because the CFPC would have come to the same conclusion and they proved to have the courage to do the "right" thing, not the PC thing.

BamaInBham said:

It's not just that OSU had 2 losses, it was the nature of the 2. A 2 TD+ loss at home to OU, a 31 point loss in Nov to a 7-5 Iowa team. They had a couple of good wins.

Auburn lost a close game to Clemson on the road, and a close loss to a 9 win LSU on the road. Then late in the year they beat the number two and one team at home 2 out of 3 weeks. If they had beaten UGA in the SECC game, they would have had 3 top 6 wins the last 4 weeks of the season. I.e., there would have been little comparison between the two 11-2 records.

IMO, there was no 2-loss excuse, when they looked at AU they determined that they belonged, when they looked at OSU they determined they did not belong. IMO, they were right in both cases.

I'm with those who believe that losses matter a great deal. I believe the CFPC does as well. But sometimes there are extraordinary circumstances that need to be considered. And AU's late season performance coupled with the type of losses, close on the road, one against a great team, the other vs a good 9 win team, merited them special consideration. I don't care for AU at all, but I try to give credit where it is due.

I don't care for OSU, but respect them and believed that they deserved to be in the playoff the year before, but not last year, even with Bama's somewhat weak schedule. IMO, Bama would have made it in over OSU because the CFPC would have come to the same conclusion and they proved to have the courage to do the "right" thing, not the PC thing.

Click to expand...

Thanks for this. It's exactly what I was thinking but I didn't feel like typing it all on my phone.

RedWave said:

Not necessarily. Because at that point, you have put a two-loss conference champion into the playoff (Auburn) and would have a tough time excluding another two-loss champion (Ohio State). I think if Auburn won the SEC Championship, the two-loss excuse goes away for both of those two teams and the one-loss Alabama gets left out of the playoff.

Click to expand...

I don't think so. tOSU was ranked #8 going into C Weekend. I think the Committee sent a message that they needed to blowout Wisconsin to have a shot. Auburns losses were ranked #1 and #16 and were 1 score road games. TOSU's losses were blowouts to #2 and an UR team.

KrAzY3 said:

Ok, so tell me this. If Auburn doesn't lose to Georgia, at what point exactly would they have corrected their mistake?

Also, since you are using the as long as they got it right in the end argument... why do we need a playoff again? I can't think of a single year the BCS got the champion wrong.

Click to expand...

I have facts to support my conclusion that the committee has gotten it right every time, but you still want to argue semantics? I'll pass.

:cheers2:

KrAzY3 said:

While the committee hasn't made any egregious errors yet, the biggest issue is there is nothing at all to keep them in check. Should they do something illogical, there's nothing to point them back in the right direction like the computers did for the BCS.

Click to expand...

The BCS botched year six when Oklahoma wound up playing for a national championship they absolutely did not deserve to play for.

As my analysis of each year showed, the BCS was FAR BETTER than the hype-fest against it (including my own pre-2012 harangues).
And the BCS did not function materially different than the committee in that they didn't get overly bogged down in head to head results
to the exclusion of everything else. But what's really INSANE about that 2003 game is not the fact Oklahoma played in it - it's the fact they
lost their last game by TWENTY-EIGHT points.....while ranked number one.....and stayed number one. What a lot of people forget is that
it damn near was LSU that got hosed in that whole deal. LSU was sitting helplessly by when two other games - Boise State beating
Hawaii and Syracuse crushing Notre Dame - put LSU into the national championship game.

And given where Nick Saban now sits, we're talking about changing history in truly bizarre fashion.

To be fair to the BCS, that was the only insanely egregious decision they made and - more to the point - they changed the formula enough the next year to resolve that particular issue.

And I would point out that entire debacle wasn't caused by the human polls, it was caused by the computers. In fact, had just one of the computers flipped USC and LSU, the title game would have been OU vs USC. It's not that OU didn't win their conference, it's that they got blown out by a three-loss team by 28 points, and they didn't even look like the game was as close as that margin.

B1GTide said:

To be clear - they have NO mistakes. None. Get back to me when they make one.

Click to expand...

I agree they've not made any mistakes. They've done an absolutely awesome job. To me the only sticky one was Ohio State the first year,
and they correctly judged the Buckeyes.......better than Vegas, Tidefans, and virtually all the pundits.

KrAzY3 said:

I find myself in complete disagreement with that statement. Their final results I have no major issues with, but they have made mistakes. Big ones... their ranking Auburn over Alabama last year was atrocious. Now, we have the benefit of hindsight so we know Alabama was the champion, who beat three teams that beat Auburn, while Auburn suffered four losses. So, of course it's easier to tell how absolutely absurd that ranking was, but it was wrong when they did it. I argued that very thing here.

Click to expand...

I know you know this, but they did it because Auburn beat us head to head - and probably because that win won them the West.

KrAzY3 said:

The problem was the committee took two teams with similarities in their schedule, one with two losses and one with one loss, and simply because the team with two losses was better for one week they ranked the two loss team ahead of the one loss team.

Click to expand...

Alabama at that time had the 34th SoS, Auburn 2nd in the entire country.

Auburn had beaten us head to head.

It wasn't "similarities in the schedule," the two schedules were not even close in difficulty.

Furthermore, look a little closer:
we beat Mercer substantially more than they did (Alabama 1-0)
and we beat an LSU team they should have beaten but somehow lost (Alabama 2-0)

They beat MSU by 39, we struggled (Alabama 2-1)
They beat ATM by 15, we by 8 (2-2)
We beat Arky by 32 AT HOME, they beat Arky by 32 on the ROAD (Auburn 3-2)
They beat Ole Miss by 21, us by 63 (should this really even be rated? If so, 3-3)
They routed 7-6 Mizzou from the East ON THE ROAD, we routed the 4-8 Vols at home (Auburn 4-3)
They blasted #1 Georgia (Auburn 5-3)......we beat Vandy......

And I'm not even sure Mercer should enter the equation at all, nor the other tune-up games.

And their loss was only by eight on the road to the team the committee ranked #1.

I can't even argue with the ranking.

Auburn played a tougher SoS.
They played a tougher SEC SoS.
They actually did better against common foes than we did
They beat us head to head.

I respectfully disagree with you on this one.

KrAzY3 said:

That's nonsense, it erased the fact that LSU beat Auburn and Alabama beat LSU, it made that loss simply not count and it was not just a mistake, but a huge mistake. I can't think of the BCS doing that at any point for the entire time they existed, I can't think of a two loss team being ranked ahead of a one loss team with that much in common (I mean they both played in the same division), so... sorry but yeah, the committee screwed up badly. They ranked a two loss Auburn ahead of a one loss Alabama team, which ended up being a four loss Auburn and a championship Alabama team. Their bad. It was a bad move that looks even worse with the benefit of hindsight.

Click to expand...

Since I don't agree it was wrong, I'm assuming there's no point in responding to this.

The BCS ranked Nebraska #2 ahead of a Colorado team that mauled them, 62-36. 26 points isn't enough to get the obvious right? I'll give them a pass on that one since 9/11 caused it, but they also had two-loss Colorado ahead of one-loss Oregon in the very same poll. But here is where it gets ticky: one can argue, "Well, Colorado played a tougher schedule than Oregon." That's true.....but Colorado ALSO played a tougher schedule than Nebraska AND beat them like a drum, too.

The 2001 situation can at least be written off as an anomaly that was nobody's fault. I mean, you can't exactly program a computer to allot for terrorist attacks that cause games to be cancelled. But you also have a team ranked #1 that loses and stays #1.

THAT one, I can't imagine the committee will ever do - unless all the teams directly below them also lose.

RedWave said:

While I certainly agree with the part in bold, I believe the fans of Baylor, TCU, Penn State, and Ohio State (and possibly a few others) would not say the same.

Click to expand...

Baylor should have beaten 7-6 WVA.
TCU should have beaten Baylor.
Penn State shouldn't have lost to Michigan by 39 points.
Ohio State shouldn't have lost to Iowa by 31 points.

And yes - if we had failed last year, it was our fault.

RedWave said:

From our perspective, having not yet missed a playoff, we think they got it right every time. And even though we won out this year, I could see an Ohio State fan making the argument that, given the opportunity, they could have done the same.

Click to expand...

No offense to our B1G brother here, but Ohio State has less reason to complain about the CFB than any other four teams combined. They get in the first year on what looks for all the world like name recognition and win a national title. They get in without winning their division in 2016 and despite losing head to head to the B1G champion, Penn State. I didn't mind - I thought it was the RIGHT decision, even though I'm no Buckeye fan. Last year, the Ohio State propagandists wanted to suddenly make Mercer an issue. They wanted to argue the old, "But we played Oklahoma and lost" while hoping everyone would ignore Iowa. Remember this - SoS ONLY enters into the equation with two EQUAL teams. Same with conference championship arguments. They ONLY matter if you're trying to compare two teams that are mirror images.

Alabama and Ohio State were not mirror images. Or as one UGA fan put it so memorably on Twitter when she downed a Buckeye for the count, "Alabama and Ohio State both played (bad word) teams; unlike Ohio St, Alabama didn't lose to any of them."

It was a mic drop moment.

RedWave said:

Penn State could claim they would have done much better in the playoff than Ohio State did the year PSU got snubbed, and how could we prove they were wrong?

Click to expand...

Get back with me with their answer to my return question: "How many other teams can you name that would lose to Michigan by 39 points?" Penn State didn't get snubbed, they lost to an 8-5 Pitt team in a close one and got drilled (probably shouldn't use that word talking about Penn State, but I digress) by Michigan. It's not like they beat Ohio State by 31 points. Go back and look at that Ohio St-Penn St game again. Hell, just look at the stats.

Ohio State had more first downs (19-13), 137 more yards total offense, and fewer turnovers. They held the ball for 15 minutes more.
What lost them the game was:
a) they got flagged for 8 penalties to PSU's one
b) when they attempted a FG with less than 5 min remaining to put themselves up by six, PSU blocked it and returned it for a TD

The Buckeyes led, 21-7, entering the fourth quarter. Oh, and the game was in Happy Valley, so a ranked home team beat a ranked visitor by the general home field point advantage, suggesting if they played anywhere else, OSU would have won.

And in all honesty, they would have.

RedWave said:

Baylor/TCU, while I don't either had much of a chance, how can we definitively state that they wouldn't have earned their spot given the opportunity? But this will always be true, regardless of the method of choosing or the number of teams taken.

Click to expand...

Any team that wants to argue, "Well, who's to say we couldn't beat Alabama," has to answer, "But you couldn't even beat 8-5 West Virginia,
7-5 Iowa, etc etc."

The irony is that if Wisconsin had beaten Ohio St last year, they were NOT one of the four best teams - but they would have gone BECAUSE they are a P5 unbeaten. Same with Iowa in 2015. Win your games or don't complain.

That goes for everyone, including us.

PA Tide Fan said:

What happened this past season seemed to validate the BCS. Many people thought the BCS was flawed the year it was Alabama-LSU. Everyone thought "How could any team play for the championship when they didn't win their division?"

Click to expand...

Me talking to these people:
"Because the BCS has never required a conference championship to play for the national title. They didn't require Nebraska to win one in 2001, and they didn't require OU to win one in 2003. Why do you suddenly have a problem now that it's Alabama?"

PA Tide Fan said:

But the BCS got it right and we won, so last season the committee picked us after not winning the division and we won again proving the committee also got it right. The committee and the simulated BCS rankings are almost identical. I remember last season I posted the final BCS rankings that put us #4 just moments before we were picked by the committee. I always liked the BCS when it was being used and continue to have a favorable opinion of it.

Click to expand...

Yeah, B1G has made this point that the committee has literally mimicked what a BCS setup would have provided.

My hunch? The committee is designed to keep out the Boise States of the world.

Go back to 2010. The week before the infamous Camback Iron Bowl, here's your rankings:

1) Auburn
2) Oregon
3) Texas Cash Unlimited
4) Boise St

If Colin Kaepernick doesn't lead Nevada over Boise in an upset, TWO non-AQ schools would have made it in a four-team BCS setup. Not one - two.

There was NO WAY the cartel was going to let that happen. Hence, committee.

Remember this: Boise St was only there in the human polls because they started the year at #3 (AP), beat an overrated Va Tech team in the opener, and then ran up scores on Cupcake U. Even in the first BCS standings, Boise was #3, despite not having played anyone worth a damn. And keep in mind that on October 31, 2010, spots 3-4-5 were TCU/Boise/Utah.

Stanford might have replaced one of those two unbeatens......maybe......but remember that they didn't win their conference, either. At least one of the two system gamers would have made the tournament despite not playing anyone worth a flip.

B1GTide said:

The CFP is there for a single purpose - get the final ranking correct. They have never erred in that. The other weeks that they offer their rankings are to please the masses, many of whom are wearing tin foil hats imagining all sorts of things. Those releases are totally meaningless and not a part of their charter.

Click to expand...

And this is where krazy is right with his other objection.

Every single ranking the whole season NOW.......is meaningless until the end.

So when CBS shows #1 Alabama against Texas A/M in September 2018, everyone remember - it's meaningless.

That's something we have lost.

KrAzY3 said:

Ok, so tell me this. If Auburn doesn't lose to Georgia, at what point exactly would they have corrected their mistake?

Click to expand...

If Auburn had beaten Georgia, what "mistake" would there have been either in theory or actuality?

KrAzY3 said:

Also, since you are using the as long as they got it right in the end argument... why do we need a playoff again? I can't think of a single year the BCS got the champion wrong.

Click to expand...

Because he's talking about the final rankings getting the PARTICIPANTS right, and you're talking about them getting the CHAMPION right but one of the participants not right.

So y'all aren't arguing the same thing.

TBF - there ARE fans on this thread arguing that point, but he wasn't one of them or at least not right there.

RedWave said:

Not necessarily. Because at that point, you have put a two-loss conference champion into the playoff (Auburn) and would have a tough time excluding another two-loss champion (Ohio State). I think if Auburn won the SEC Championship, the two-loss excuse goes away for both of those two teams and the one-loss Alabama gets left out of the playoff.

Click to expand...

But we're all ASSUMING that the reason Penn State 2016 and Ohio State 2017 weren't selected is "the two-loss excuse."

Auburn didn't lose by 39 or 31 points like they did. And they played a substantially tougher schedule than either did.

So the committee would not have been under any constraints to say, "Well, since we're letting in a two-loss team with losses by
11 points combined, we NOW have to let in one with two losses by 55 points combined."


Not knocking you in any way, but I think it has become clear that not a single fan (and I include myself in this) knows how this committee will vote. I thought their Ohio St selection was a money pick not a best team pick. Right after Wisky beat Ohio St I was on the phone with a buddy and told him - "IF this committee is REALLY about best team and NOT about pedigree, they will pick Alabama tomorrow."

I was shocked, but I was also wrong to think I knew. And almost every poster here has been wrong on them.

PA Tide Fan said:

What happened this past season seemed to validate the BCS. Many people thought the BCS was flawed the year it was Alabama-LSU. Everyone thought "How could any team play for the championship when they didn't win their division?" But the BCS got it right and we won, so last season the committee picked us after not winning the division and we won again proving the committee also got it right. The committee and the simulated BCS rankings are almost identical. I remember last season I posted the final BCS rankings that put us #4 just moments before we were picked by the committee. I always liked the BCS when it was being used and continue to have a favorable opinion of it.

Click to expand...

I think many forget that once the first CFP ranking comes out that the AP and Coaches poll are mirrored with it because they are irrelevant polls. Point is we don’t have a true bcs poll with the AP and coach’s following suit with the CFP.

selmaborntidefan said:

And this is where krazy is right with his other objection.

Every single ranking the whole season NOW.......is meaningless until the end.

So when CBS shows #1 Alabama against Texas A/M in September 2018, everyone remember - it's meaningless.

That's something we have lost.

Click to expand...

Those games are not meaningless. It is just more difficult to see the value. But ask any Buckeye fan how meaningless their games were last year. A poorly played game cost us a shot at the title. But well played games against everyone except Auburn kept Alabama in the hunt. Flip any win to a loss from the top 4 teams and they are out of the playoff. So every game mattered last year, even if it is more difficult to see it.

B1GTide said:

Those games are not meaningless. .

Click to expand...

I think Selma is talking about being AP #1 in game 6 is meaningless, not games.