Michigan: wins against Notre Dame, Nebraska, and Ohio State
Virginia Tech: wins against…Virginia??
resume advantage: Michigan
I actually do have a little bit of a problem with the Michigan invite, just not as much as Va Tech.
Then why did you specifically include BCS rating in your rant? Because Va Tech is ranked higher than Michigan in the BCS.
[QUOTE=divemaster]
The biggest travesty was the Sugar bowl picking Virginia Tech (Virginia Tech?!?) over higher-rated BCS teams.
[/QUOTE]
Welcome to the 21st Century, B1G.
This is exactly the situation that the other conferences have dealt with for years. The Texas-OU-Texas Tech three way from a few years back? SEC football, in general, including the jostling for position for the #2 this year? I’m having a hard time drumming up any BCS rage just because the B1G finally joined the modern world.
I’ll agree the BCS isn’t perfect. But this particular example is a poor argument for it.
No real good reason. Just that once you get below about 8 on the BCS, the rest is like “field” in horseracing. Comparing 3 vs. 5? Meaningful. 11 vs. 13? Meh, down there, one’s about as good/bad as the other. So I moved on to an eyeball test. Michigan just eyeballs better (to me) than Virginia Tech.
IMO, there is no perfect system. And that is why I am OK with the current system.
As soon as someone designs a workable solution that can take in 99% of the possible scenarios, then I will buy into that system.
This year, it would have worked out perfect, if OK State had beat lowly Iowa St. But they didn’t and it created this clusterf*ck.
My problem with a (more than 2 team) playoff system if that in more cases than not, there will be a team that got picked over a team whose advocates say that they should have been picked.
2 teams? Ok State fans think they should have picked. Bama fans think they should have been picked.
4 teams. Either Stanford (1 loss) or Oregon (2 losses but one of them to LSU) gets left out.
8 teams: Which one of these two teams get the last two spots (KSU, Boise, Wisconsin, USCe)
the problem is that there will always be teams that get snubbed and this debate will just continue.
Again, I will buy into a great than 2 team playoff system when that format does not snub any teams. Until that is done, we will be trading one debate for another. Admittedly, that debate may not have the passion as the current system.
its funny, all this hate for the current system, and it would have worked perfectly, if Okie State had just taken care of business in Ames, Iowa.
IMO, teams that lose to 6-6 teams do not deserve a chance to play for the National Championship. and apparently I am not alone. and 4 out 6 computer programs agree.
A couple other things I think about the BCS:
In '99 (FSU and VT), '02 (Miami and OSU), '05 (USC and Texas), '09 (Alabama and Texas), and '10 (Auburn and Oregon), I think it did work perfectly. Granted, Utah and TCU would argue differently, but them’s the breaks. I can only really look at the BCS conferences for teams that are getting screwed. I’ll trade those 5 seasons above for the risk of Nebraska/Colorado/Oregon in '01, and Alabama/OSU (and other years where I forget the other contenders) every time. That gets us a true title game. The previous systems didn’t. And a playoff gives us probably 8 teams, and then you ask, “Do the Big East and ACC get auto bids so that 3-loss Clemson and WVU get a shot at a title?”
Teams just need to win their games. Don’t put it in others’ hands. Auburn '03, Utah '09, and TCU '10 have arguments. But 5 perfect scenarios above, with the possibility of more in the future, trumps that, in my opinion.
FWIW, I was looking at the wrong week (wk 14) for the computer polls.
In fact OK State passed Alabama in two of the computer polls after their win against Oklahoma.
Sagarin and Wolfe like Bama #2
Anderson, Colley, Massey, and Billingsley like Ok St as #2.
Is there a rule that the big 12+ conferences need to split up into divisions to set up the conference title game? Seems a whole lot of heartache could be avoided if they did away with divisions and pitted the top two teams for the conf. games. Then we would have had LSU v. Alabama, with the winner going against OSU.
As Andy Staples points out, don’t blame the SEC. Mike Slive proposed a 4-team playoff in 2008, and the Big 12 nixed the idea.
No such rule, but no conference would want to do this. It would decrease revenue and drive away television viewers.
Also, it would further divide schools into haves and have-nots. Under the current division systems, schools like Vandy or Northwestern at least have a shot at making a conference championship even with a couple losses as long as they win their division. But if was based solely on record, those kinds of schools would be perpetually denied even a shot by bigger, traditional powerhouses.
How so? I’d think an SEC championship game of LSU v. Alabama would have drawn even more viewers than an LSU v. Georgia game.
For one particular game, sure. But what about the last several games of the season for the also-rans?
Example: The last few SEC games involving Georgia or any of the East teams? They’d be effectively out of the conference championship race after 10 games, and there’d be no national title implications for any of their last few games. That’s a huge chunk of Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina that would have few reasons, except intense local fandom, for tuning in.
Under the current system, even if Alabama, Arkansas, and LSU are all really good, you can still have a potential BCS buster or SEC conference champion out of the East, which makes for meaningful games through the entire schedule.
So, you’d be trading ratings for several conference games (in the SEC, no less) against 1 big game.
I don’t think it will be possible to ever have a system that works. Unless, by some miracle, we all come to our senses and realize that there are too many teams, too many variables and too much parity in schedules and records to ever have an objective consensus on a National Champion.
The BCS is broken, it is not really much better in determining a champion then the old system, it just does not suck worse. A playoff would have its own set of advantages, but would still suffer from having too many teams that have legitamate claims to spots and some would be left out.
The best situation would be to have the end game be the various conference championships and stop trying to pretend like there can be a team that truly stands above the others, but that ship sailed long ago.
This is likely my least favorite argument against an expanded playoff system.
Do you hear the 69th and 70th teams complaining that they were snubs if they are excluded from the NCAA basketball tournament? They might argue they had better credentials than some other team in the field, but neither are actualy national championship contenders.
As you expand the field, each additional team has less of a claim to being the best team in the country (or being national championship caliber, whatever). Obviously this means that if you expand the playoff too much, you include teams that shouldn’t be there. So they key is making the field large enough to include actual contenders without making to so large as to dilute the field.
As you said, look at this year: a 4-team playoff has a neat cut on the 1-loss teams (save for Boise State and Houston, but play a real schedule why don’t you).
The 8 team playoff cuts two two-loss teams from the equation. Now, I’m sure those teams would complain about being cut (human nature), but do 2-loss teams really have a leg to stand on if they assert they are as good as LSU, or even Alabama or Oklahoma State?
I personally think a 4 team playoff would be best. Most years you would have a 1-loss team on the outside looking in, but it’s better than having several 1-loss teams in that situation.
Actually, you do get fans and teams complaining about it. Not because they think they’ll actually win, but they want to be part of the show. It’s like getting to 6 wins so you can get a bowl berth.
Besides, there are plenty of teams that think “what if?”. If the 10-6 2007 Giants can beat two 13-3 NFC teams in the playoffs and 18-0 New England, why not them? If Butler can make it to the Final Four, why can’t a 2 or 3 loss college team win a college football playoff?
So, yeah, there’ll still be complaints, but I wouldn’t mind a +1 playoff system. This is college, so you can’t have multiple rounds of playoffs, but it wouldn’t take too much to have a +1.
In my view, you’re trading one arbitrary system for another, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. If they’re both this arbitrary, I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another about switching to a different system.
One thing it has in its favor is if the 4 seed gets a couple very fluky wins. Then, the internet would explode from the arguments about how “deserving” it was. The arguments surrounding the BCS and its fairness are more entertaining than most of the bowl games, themselves.
I’m not a statistician but, it seems to me that the more teams you match up in a playoff, the lower your error would be.
I can’t measure 100% of the trees in the forest, it doesn’t mean I give up and just measure two. Instead I come up with a sampling system that balances the values I need to measure with a realistic timeframe and cost. To simple say we shouldn’t do anything because there will always be schools that get snubbed is ridiculous.
I still say, college football should have tiered divisions, with promotion and relegation, like European soccer leagues.
My proposal is that a team can play two games against teams outside of their tier (so we can still have traditional rivalry games), but they don’t count for standings. The 20 or so level I teams can have a two-team playoff at the end of the season so there’s still a big bowl game. Then out of those level I teams, the worst two get send down to level II next year, replaced by the best two level II teams. The worst level II and best level III teams also swap, and so on down. By level III or so, you can split into regional conferences to cut down on travel.
It solves the problems of comparing strength of schedule, gives real games among top teams each week instead of the creampuff of the week scheduling top non-SEC teams do for 75% of their schedule (SEC teams only get to schedule creampuffs 50% of the time), allows a top team to have a single fluky loss and still have a shot at the championship, creates meaningful seasons for mid-level teams (will they get pushed out of tier III? Can they move up this year?), and (this may or may not be a feature for you) eliminates most of the argument about whether the BCS is screwing particular teams.
The only drawback is that it means the vast majority of teams are eliminated from national championship contention before the season begins – even a perfect team might take several years to work their way up to the top level. But so what? Realistically, that’s how things are right now anyway-- ask Boise if a team (no matter how good) from a program without a storied history has a realistic chance at the national championship under the current system, without spending several years building up their reputation.
Actually, there is one way for a conference to get three teams into BCS bowls, and it could have happened; had Georgia beaten LSU in the SEC Championship Game, but somehow LSU ended up #2 behind Alabama in the BCS standings, it would have been LSU-Alabama in the BCS title game, and Georgia would still have the SEC’s automatic bowl berth.
No, but there is a rule saying that you need at least 12 teams in the conference (well, actually, smaller conferences can have a championship game, but it would count against the 12 regular season games each team is allowed, so either every team in the conference schedules only 11 games, or the teams in the game get severe NCAA sanctions for playing too many games).
No 12-team conference is going to have a full round-robin (this would leave only one non-conference game (or 2 if one game is at Hawaii) per team. With 14 or more teams in the conference, a full round-robin is impossible. Having divisions makes scheduling easier.
Besides, there would still be arguments about who the best team in the nation is. Things like this are just human nature - we need to know who is “best”. (In 1965, Rod Serling, as head of the National Academy of TV Arts and Sciences, said that he was tired of what he called “horse races” for Emmy Awards, so the 1965 awards would be different; instead of one winner per category, every show and person would be given a “yes or no” vote on whether or not it deserved an Emmy. So many people saw this and asked, “Yes, but what was the ‘best comedy series’ and who was the ‘best comedy lead actress’?”, that they went back to the “one winner per category” system in 1966 and haven’t looked back since then.)
I suppose one solution to the question of “deserving teams” in a playoff–although there’s obviously zero chance it would ever be implemented, for a whole host of reasons–is to have a floating number of teams in the playoffs. Give a committee of, say, 100 experts eight votes to use on picking the playoff participants…with the catch being that the experts can choose to use between four and eight of the votes. Every team that gets at least 50% (or the top four if team #4 gets fewer than 50%, or the top 8 if team #9 gets above 50%) of the vote gets a playoff spot, and if five, six, or seven teams get in the top team(s) get a bye.
Yeah, I know, scheduling nightmares and all that. But it seems to me the main complaint to every system so far has been “doesn’t team X have a valid complaint to not making the playoffs?” At least the above solution sets a guideline for who gets in and who doesn’t.
There is nothing about doing away with divisions that dictates having a 12+ team conference’s schedule be round robin.