With a the current 2 team playoff, there is a better chance of matching up the two best teams.
The more teams that are “in contention”, the more chance that an upset happens. (See Iowa St)
Seldom does two #1 seeds make it to the NCAA B-ball game, let alone a consensus two best teams. It is frequently the team that roared into March like a lion.
This is not really the case.
Please excuse the broad oversimplifications, but let’s say we have 8 teams, and Team A has an 70% probability of beating any single one of the other teams on any given day. And that the 70% is good for any matchup, regardless of venue, injury status, etc.
The probability Team A wins a single game is 70%.
The probability Team A wins 2 straight games is 49%.
The probability Team A wins 3 straight games is 34.3%.
So, if you happen to have a situation where there’s clearly a ‘best’ team, a playoff actually serves to level the playing field by giving that team more chances to lose.
While none of the other teams really gets an improved probability of winning, they collectively get an improved chance to knock off the #1. The NFL playoffs are a pretty good example of this phenomenon.
This is great for sports betting and ratings, but it’s actually a bit unfair if you happen to be a dominant team, like LSU has been this year.
I suppose this begs the question, but how exactly does one decide whether one team is “better” than another? Is it the “whole body of work over a season” (whatever that means), or is it decided on the field in a game?
I would argue that it is not possible to determine which college football team is the best without a playoff because, to use a stats term, college football seasons are not “well connected”. In other words, there are not enough games in the schedule, and teams do not play a diverse enough schedule, to determine whether one team is better than another simply by looking at that team’s list of scores. I know Sagarin says otherwise, but really: most of the BCS conference schools play only one or two other BCS conference teams in a given year. How can that ensure well-connectedness?
The truth of the matter is, I can’t say there is any real statistical method by which Alabama or OK State or Stanford is the #2 team in the country. If there was, we wouldn’t need six different computer polls to be honest.
I never said there was - in fact, in 11-game years, the Pac-10 didn’t have a full round-robin.
However, the more teams you have in a single conference, the more likely it is that two teams in the conference go undefeated and don’t play each other. We’re back in the “which of two teams is better?” boat.
At least with the BCS, you don’t have any more conferences with rules that say “in case of a tie where teams didn’t play each other, the team that has gone the longest without going to the conference champion’s traditional bowl game wins” (in pretty much every case, this has been replaced with, “the highest-ranked team in the BCS rankings”). IIRC, in the last year of the SWC, there was a massive tie, and one school (Rice?) had not been to the Cotton Bowl in something like 60 years - but Texas Tech had never been to the Cotton Bowl, so it won the conference title, despite the fact that the school did not even exist the last time the other team went to the Cotton Bowl.
Interesting arguments above, but I think that this year is especially poor because between LSU and Alabama, we ALREADY KNOW the better team from what happened on the field.
And what does the NC game prove? Let’s say Bama wins. LSU and Bama will now both be one loss teams, each beating the other once. Why does that make Bama a convincing national champion?
Whatever happened to the old bowl rule (custom?) that you never played a rematch in the bowls for this very reason?
Another thing: Why do most pundits think that it is WORSE that Ok. St. lost to a 6-6 team? To me that shows that they had an off day, or maybe was looking past an inferior team, not that the other team was better. Contrast that with a team that loses the “big game” with all of the hype and preparation. That seems more like a “legitimate” loss.
I’m my kingdom, the one loss team that lost to a chump is ranked higher than the one loss team that lost to a quality opponent.
It was more like nearly 40 years for the Cotton Bowl and 30+ years since the last bowl appearance for Rice, but there was a 4-way tie for 1st in the SWC that year. Very strange year. Took another 13 years for Rice to finally get to a bowl game. And another 2 to win one. The proliferation of bowls has helped, in this case. There were a few 8-4 and 7-5 years when Rice didn’t get an invite. Doesn’t help when you’ve got fewer than 5000 students (including the graduate program and business school) and top tier academics.
Not that there’s a snowball’s chance in hell Rice will see a BCS game in the next 10 years.
Go Owls!
No single game can ever prove in and of itself which is the “best” team. A playoff series, such as the NBA, MLB, NHL, etc. comes closer. How often does the “best” team sweep all of their opponents in each round of a playoff?
Single-elimination tournaments don’t decide the best team. They just decide who won the tournament (i.e. who managed through fortune and opportunism not to lose).
The best bet for football is to just admit that bowl games are exhibition games, and always will be, since a real playoff series is out of the question. Polling to determine the winners is as reliable a means of determining a champion as any, certainly as reliable as any single-elimination tournament. Maybe more reliable.
Oh good lord. :rolleyes:
The only reason I don’t like the rematch is because it doesn’t give us a broader comparison between conferences. Its simply the SEC playing the SEC over and over this year. I know Bama beat Penn State and LSU beat Oregon (more or less a home game for LSU) and I know OSU hasn’t beaten anybody outside the Big 12, but I think cross conference play adds far more legitimacy to the final result.