Plan C: the first round is the week after the bracket is announced (on what is now Army-Navy Game day), and the second round is the week after that.
And that hurts the men’s basketball tournament in what way, exactly?
But if your record is all that matters, then you are rewarding teams for playing creampuff schedules. If being the best team at tournament time isn’t important, then why bother having any teams that weren’t conference champions in the first place?
One problem with seven 9-team conferences; what happens to the other 65 FBS teams? Wait, don’t tell me, let me guess: that’s why FCS is there.
The obvious problem is there are 128 FBS teams, each only playing 12, maybe 13 games. What’s the point of being in the FBS if you’re Memphis and you have zero chance to make the playoffs no matter what you do? I could live with expanding to eight teams, but agree 16 is probably too many.
OK, I guess Bob’s proposal wouldn’t be the end of the world. There are enough weekends in December to squeeze in two more weeks of football. You could match the power 5 champions against the other champions in the first round, which is a big motivation for winning the conference. If we are pretending that all the conferences are of equal status, let’s not seed them but assign home field for those games at random, giving the little guys a better chance to pull an upset.
Still, I personally would prefer to preserve more importance of the regular season by having an 8 team playoff with the power 5 champions and the best mid-major champion, leaving only two, rather than six, wild card spots. I don’t like the idea of finishing second in a power conference being probably good enough to make the playoff.
Once TCU - OSU was essentially decided I switched to Arkansas - Ole Miss. Glad I did…that was freakin’ awesome. The craziest thing in at least 2 weeks.
Well, at least my 'Noles didn’t embarrass themselves today. Until late in the game, I really thought we had a shot at it although it was obvious that Clemson had the better offense. I thought Jimbo called a VERY mediocre game and didn’t stick with the things that worked (we started to use tempo and it worked, then we stopped and the drive stalled immediately).
That said, we’re about where I expected to us to be at this point in the season (based on my pre-season prediction of 9-3). We’re a young talented team and next year could be very interesting.
Go Tigers! ACC represent! I hope the sons-of-bitches run the table and win it all (even though I can’t STAND Dabo Sweeney).
Another five TDs and 497 yards for Wazzu’s Falk today. You have to wonder what the Cougs would have done against Stanford last week if it hadn’t been pouring rain.
We have the Utah/U-Dub game on here. The Huskies are wearing white helmets with an American flag “W” on them instead of the piddle-colored one. Is that some sort of Armistice Day tribute thingy?
My thoughts too. I didn’t see how that receiver was forced out of bounds. Of course, they should never have been in position to win the game, MSU played far too conservatively at the end. I’d like to see the Big Ten office come down on the replay official for blowing it.
You can’t blame the replay official because the call was a judgement call. The call on the field was that the receiver was forced out of bounds (the judgement part) and then reestablished himself in bounds. The only way for the replay official to overturn the call was to see no contact between the receiver and the defender or determine the receiver was not back in bounds legally.
I thought Sparty got jobbed. There was some hand checking going on as they went up the field, but the WR wasn’t shoved. He went out of bounds because the CB played great defense and beat him up the field and got in his way.
How about Navy just pouring it on Memphis, who some were lamenting would be left out of the playoffs because they’re not in a power 5 conference. No need to worry about that now. Navy is damn good and especially unique, which is why nobody wants to play them.
As a Husker fan, it was nice to see a bad call go our way. After Penn State '82, Kansas State '98 and Texas '09… no, we don’t hold grudges against bad calls
So, yes, we fully acknowledge that call would be different in East Lansing. To quote Miami vs Duke from last weekend: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
On a more serious note, I was pooping bricks when we squibbed-kicked to MSU at the end of the game. BYU, Illinois, and Wisconsin were all able to come back and beat us with less time.
My Oregon State buddies tell me this Riley’s MO: lose to Eastern Washington and Portland State but upset Oregon/USC en route to a 7-5 season. Don’t bet too much on NU vs Rutgers this weekend…
I made a slight tweak to the formula this week, although too late in the season for it to have much of an effect. I am now giving teams 2 points for taking a bye week, the same as they would get for a run-of-the-mill victory. Of course, these points will all cancel out by the end of the season, but it should improve the signal-to-noise ratio by preventing teams from dropping as far after a bye as they would have after a loss.
The most notable change this week, of course, is the return to (relative) glory of the Oregon Ducks, fresh off an impressive dismantling of Cal and now with a three-game winning streak. Let’s raise our microbrews in celebration!
Stanford-- not gonna drop after a big road win, even if it is only Colorado
Clemson – big statement conference win
Alabama – ditto
Iowa – hurt by Pitt’s demotion
Utah – Oregon win looks better
OSU
the other OSU – see what I did there? Hint: neither of these are the one that has trouble beating Oregon
Oklahoma
Michigan
LSU – ain’t gonna go undefeated
TCU – ditto
Michigan State – ditto, but cheer up: Oregon now quality win!
Baylor – still might go undefeated, but will need to play some actual teams at some point
UCLA
UNC – put up basketball score against Duke
USC
Wisconsin
Florida State
Florida – winner of this week’s Barkis Award for least impressive win, 9-7 over Vanderbilt
Notre Dame
Northwestern
Ole Miss
MIGHTY OREGON!!! – just in time for Stanford next Saturday…
Texas A & M
Mississippi State
new this week: TAMU, Miss St, and, just in case you missed it, OREGON!!
dearly departed: Pitt, Houston, Memphis (hate to say I told you so…)
on the bubble: Bowling Green
An interesting SEC cluster has developed at the lower end of the standings. I tried to use my tiebreaking authority to put in Bowling Green (who have won their last three games by a total of 135 points!) over TAMU or Miss St. But if I say that Miss St are #26, that costs A & M a quality win, dropping them from the rankings and pushing the Bulldogs back in. If I say, then, that A & M are #26, Ole Miss loses a quality win and drops below A & M. So I can’t drop either of them! It’s a conspiracy!!!
We do it right in basketball. The 1979 Indiana State-Michigan State final would never have happened in football as ISU would never have been considered worthy of the playoff. Yet the Johnson-Bird game brought college basketball up a notch and saved the NBA when they took their rivalry to the pros.
With so much emphasis on the “Power Five”, we act as though a win over say Vandy, Illinois, Kansas State, or Oregon State is worth more than a win over Memphis. The upper echelon of the mid major conferences would be quite competitive in the P5. The big programs exploit the hell out of the mid majors by bringing them into their stadiums for essentially practice games, padding their records and puffing up the reputations of their own conferences. “Hey, look at our OOC record!” Yeah, but you get that by bringing in creampuffs into your own stadium.
I know you’ve explained how this poll works in the past, but do you look at this now and think, yep, that looks about right? And while I’m glad to have an award named for me, it’s too bad it’s the least impressive win award!
I’m pretty happy with this system; overall, yes, I would take it over the AP or CFP lists. My biggest concern is that it may underrate the best of the mid-major teams (though I’m not convinced of that).
Obviously this isn’t an exact science; I certainly wouldn’t say that you’d have to be a complete raving fool not to see that Stanford is better than Clemson or Alabama – but I do think I can make a compelling argument that they aren’t clearly worse, and deserve to be thought of as in a group with those teams rather than with Notre Dame and LSU.
I’m not seeing any case in which my rating differs significantly from the AP where I would say that they are clearly closer to being right than I am, but if you’d like to suggest some, please do!
I’d like to see 8 teams in the playoffs - the champions of the Five Exalted Conferences, and 3 more to be chosen by a committee, who would also do the seedings. With the possibility of a non-conference loss no longer affecting eligibility, the top programs would no longer be scared of scheduling each other. The conference championship game (and let the Big 12 have one, too) would matter even more. There would still be openings for independents and for non-champs or smaller-conference champs to show their worthiness. The size of the tournament would not be unwieldy. And, if you can’t say you’re one of the best 8 teams in the country, you certainly don’t belong in it - but at 4, you can make a case.
