All the shouting about “how can you take the fifth-best conference champion and leave out the second-best team?” just glosses over the question of who is deciding the “best” teams. Is it just the blue bloods, the squads with the most talented rosters? Then why the hell are we playing games, then? If an upset of an Alabama by Texas A&M shouldn’t matter when you’re picking the “best” teams - why is that game even being played, then?
A playoff or tournament gets you the survivor of that tournament, That’s not necessarily the “best” team of the season … and you know what? That’s fine!
Yes, but recall that the issue with that was the bowl tie ins that I mentioned above. Nebraska and Michigan couldn’t play each other at the end of the year to see who was best because Michigan HAD to go to the Rose Bowl, even if the Pac-10 champion was a 3 or 4 loss team. The BCS ultimately got rid of that, and in most years you had the two consensus best teams play each other for the title, but in some years you had a third or possibly fourth team in there for debate.
My understanding was that the playoff system was there to accommodate for this. Should an undefeated Cincy play for the championship instead of Michigan (under the old system)? We could debate, or we could expand to 4 teams to give Cincy and Michigan the chance—and that was the point, to not shut out teams that had done all they could in the regular season a shot at the title.
But now that we have expanded, we just give the also rans in the big conferences another shot to win the title which we don’t need given the limited number of possible games. It isn’t like basketball where we can have 64 teams.
Right. The number of teams that could reasonably be described as “doing all they could” isn’t going to be consistent from year to year. No matter how many teams we have in the playoff, there will almost always either be deserving teams left out, or undeserving teams that will get a shot at riding a hot streak to a title.
I think the main problem the BCS had was that it should have been an extra game AFTER the traditional bowl tie ins as opposed to #1 and #2 at the end of the regular season polls playing each other.
The third and forth team with the same record definitely causes the issue, but I also agree that also rans shouldn’t have a second bite at the apple before other P5 conference winners.
Fantastic post! I don’t know if you’ve seen this Ringer article but it discusses human tweaking in the BCS computer era:
I always feel bad when kids get injured at the end of their college careers but I don’t think a real playoff would change too many things. We’ve seen top level players opt out of bowl games before.
The FBS (Div-1) should just adopt a true playoff like all of the other divisions in college football. They can match the playoff games with the most “prestigious bowls” and fill out the rest of the bowls with teams outside of the playoff group.
That really is a good article. I had forgotten the BCS algorithms were such a small fraction of the decision making process. And even then, we complained about it.
I love how much people can argue about how a more different arbitrary process will somehow magically fix the problems of the current arbitrary process.
Contrary to our dear departed friend’s opinion, the computers have once again shown that they knew what’s what. They consistently rated the Big 12 in the top 3 conferences, alongside the SEC and the Big 10.
Now that all interconference bowls are over, we see the results.
In their bowl games, the Big 12 beat (yes, that’s 3-0 vs the SEC and all wins beat the spread as well):
Notre Dame
Oregon
LSU
Ole Miss
Mississippi State
They lost to:
Clemson
Minnesota
How many wins did the Pac 12 have? Zero. That’s the number I was looking for.
OK, glad JohnT is pumped, but only two posts today in this thread? Shows how the CFP has screwed up a good thing. People were conditioned to have the college season end on New Year’s, when everyone has the day off anyway. Now it’s some random Monday night in the middle of January and nobody cares except for the fans of the actual teams involved.
I heat this sentiment expressed frequently, usually from people complaining that big football schools like Oklahoma or Georgia pad their records with patsies. But that ignores two things: A) if every Power 5 school schedules a cupcake game - and as far as I can see, they all do - then the competitive advantage of having an easy win is invalidated.
More importantly, 2) when Mercer or Central Washington or Savannah State goes in to Columbus or Tuscaloosa to be slaughtered, they walk out again with a fat check, which helps fund their swim or track or gymnastics team, allowing real student-athletes, the ones who aren’t signing million-dollar NIL deals, the opportunity to play college sports. And the football players get the experience of playing in a high-end stadium that probably cost more than their home facilities by an order of magnitude. The starting nose tackle at Furman has no illusions that he’s going to play in the NFL; the day he lined up at Bryant-Denny or the Horseshoe or the Rose Bowl is one of the high points of his career.
Yeah, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with scheduling cupcakes, it’s only a problem if those are ALL your out of conference games. And really, that’s only a problem since the committee (and the voters before them) don’t seem to penalize schools for scheduling cupcakes. They think 12-0 is better than 11-1, even if the second team went 2-1 against strong OOC opponents and the undefeated team played nobody.
Speaking as an alum of one of the cupcake schools that the likes of Alabama and LSU schedule sometimes (Rice), some of them do hold those illusions and will make it to the NFL. Even lowly Rice has active NFL players right now. But they don’t many illusions about how likely it is or that they’re playing for anything but the fat paycheck the athletics department will get.
We call them bodybag games, and I pray every September that we get through the month without any serious injuries.
I agree with @Slow_Moving_Vehicle . The cupcake games are good for the cupcakes, in that they get a lot of money flowing into the program that otherwise wouldn’t be there.
And every so often, they even win. Remember Appalachian State defeating Michigan?
I used to tutor football players in a Div III school 30+ years ago, and they were obsessed with their pro prospects. I didn’t know anything about American football in those days, but my roommate thought it was hilarious. They had a list of players who had made it to the NFL from obscure schools and that was their inspiration.
My roommate and I were in a D1 school, though it was definitely one of the cupcake ones in a non-major conference. We were thrashed by Liberty in the one game I attended. I also used to tutor our own school’s basketball players. We were a good basketball school, and the coach was an asshole. Basically he expected me to help his players cheat. Somebody else did his dirty work, I just kept my head down and collected my tuition waiver.
Would also like to note that on this Board, yet another SEC vs SEC championship game isn’t going to be met with a lot of excited talk and witty repartee.
