I agree completely. I’m not saying that they don’t.
There’s a difference between deserving a #1 (or higher) ranking, and being the best (or better) team.
By remaining undefeated in the SEC, when Florida didn’t, Alabama deserves to be #1 in the SEC. If there wasn’t a SEC CG, 'Bama would be the SEC champs (assumming they beat Auburn).
But they’re not the best team in the SEC.
They deserve a top-2 ranking (TTech is just as deserving), but they’re not one of the best 4 teams in the country. This is the conundrum that pollsters have to deal with.
There’s the rub. There are 2 completely different mindsets at work; both valid, but sometimes at opposition. The Rose Bowl is still operating in the pre-BCS mode, where they take conference champs. Period, end of story. No pollsters required to decide who goes; it’s just who has the best W-L record within the conference. I will certainly agree that this model doesn’t work very well for determining who’s the “best” team in the conference, or the country, but the Rose Bowl doesn’t really care about that.
It’s not just the Rose Bowl. All 6 major BCS conferences send their champion to the BCS bowls. Three of the conferences have championship games and three do not. And even then, the conferences with championship games might not send their “best” teams to the CCG, like last year where Tennessee represented the SEC East instead of Georgia. Tennessee “deserved” to go to the CCG based on the criteria set by the conference but most people thought Georgia was the better team.
So, a CCG is a more fair way to determine the conference champion but hardly flawless to truly find the “best” team in a conference since W-L record (something jsc1953 doesn’t like) still creeps into determining a division winner.
The most fair way is to have a playoff, but thinking of how to implement such a large playoff gives me logistical nightmares. Let each conference choose how they want to crown a champion. If they want to give to the team with the best homecoming float, that’s their business since everybody in the conference agreed to it.
Putting aside the whole National Championship - BCS thing, and discussing just conference championships: I think the Pac-10 is perfect (the only thing they do right, IMHO). Everybody plays everybody else, and best W-L wins. Simple and irrefutable. Sure, you may think USC is “better” than Oregon State. But if they both finish 8-1 in conference, and Oregon State beat USC, it’s hard to argue that Oregon State shouldn’t rep their conference as champion.
What? You don’t think we have one of the greatest reffing crews in the nation? Come on, I mean, sure they miss a lot of calls. Sure, they mess up in every game. Sure, they don’t really know what they’re doing. Sure, I think most of them are legally blind. Sure… what was I saying?
Plus the Pac-10 has two of the top ranked teams in the nation this year. University of WA and WASU are numbers 115 and 116 respectively of 116.
Yes, the smaller a set of teams you have, the more likely that a situation like this occurs.
The important thing is that the SEC CG determined that LSU was “SEC #1”. After LSU got sent to the NCG, the Sugar Bowl was free to choose Georgia.
It was mentioned upthread that [Conference] #1 is certain and absolute. But #2 through #11 are a matter of opinion.
So you’re saying that maybe Georgia or Florida would have beat LSU if given another chance? Maybe. I think any of those teams would have beat Ohio State. But in the end, it all worked out OK, because Tennessee didn’t go to the NCG.
I was saying that conference championship games only do a marginally better job determining the champion since the best teams can still slip through the cracks. As you pointed out in an earlier post USC wouldn’t even make it to a theoretical PAC-10 CCG if they were in the same division as OSU. You should want the best possible representative for your conference, and last year there was the possibility of Tennesse being that team for the SEC (maybe if Les Miles abandoned LSU before the SEC-CCG to take the Michigan job). Meanwhile, Georgia is hanging off to the side saying “No, we’re much better than Tennessee,” but not getting the chance to prove it.
The main advantage to CCGs is that they pit two of the best teams in a high-stakes elimination game (to appeal to the voters) and pad their strength of schedule (to appeal to the computers). This gives a conference champion the highest possible platform to send a representative to the NCG and hopefully if they get there, to bring esteem to the conference (or shame if you’re Ohio State).
CCG - good for making your champion the prettiest they can be
CCG - only slightly above average for finding the “best” team in a conference
There seems to be some idea here that the “best team” is the one with the most talent. Sorry, folks, but Florida is easily the most talented team, but in the end the game comes down to you either win or you lose, and they lost once. They don’t deserve BCS right now.
We can raise this to a very philosophical level, about the definition of “best”. A perfect example is the 1960 World Series. The Yankees outscored the Pirates 55–27 in this Series, outhit them 91–60, (.338 to .256), hit ten home runs to Pittsburgh’s four (three of the latter’s coming in Game 7), and got two complete game shutouts from Whitey Ford. The Pirates won the Series, 4-3. Who’s the better team? Who’s the World Champion?
In the absence of a playoff, the CCG format is much worse than the round robin format.
It doesn’t work. The Big 12 has recently sent two teams that LOST the conference to lose the national championship. So what was the point of having a CCG? It was meaningless.
Unbalanced schedules. Kansas in 2007 supposedly played in the Big 12. But they didn’t play Texas, Oklahoma, or Texas Tech the entire season. With schedules that unbalanced, it is ridiculous to directly compare records… and yet they do.
Undeserved chances. If 2-loss Missouri beats Tech or Oklahoma in the CCG, do they really deserve to be champion instead of 1-loss Texas… who already beat them?
The CCG partially makes up for the unbalanced schedules of large conferences, but not completely. The best system, if possible, is just to have everybody play everybody else.
It is a million times better than the Big 11 system though. They have unbalanced schedules and no CCG. It has actually happened that there were two undefeated teams in conference, and no way for them to play to decide it.
A.)
1.) In every conference with <11 teams, every team plays every other team,
and has 3 or more non-conference games.
2. In every conference with >11 teams, you play every team in your division,
at least half in the other, and have ~3 non-conference games.
3. The Big 11 gets their shit straight.
B.) You have the regular bowl matchups. That's essentially round 2, but
everybody with a winning record gets to play alongside the real contenders.
c.) Round 3 is between the post-bowl season #1 and 2, and would take place
on a Saturday around Jan 14 (about 10 days after the last bowl game.)
So, typically getting to the NCG would involve
1.) doing well enough in the regular season to get to win your conference, then
2.) beating another conference chamption in a major bowl, then
3.) beating yet another in the NCG.
Sorry. That was kind of a low blow. When I was up a couple of years ago I ran into some really rude fans, although this season everyone was really nice.
Plus, I just feel bad for the state in general right now. Your NBA team was stolen, your MLB team was, well, just horrid… I really do feel bad.
Don’t worry. All this talk about OSU going to the Rose Bowl just means that we’ll lose either this week or next.
I really like the idea of “conference champions squaring off for the national title.” A can see a lot of people could get behind their conference’s representative, even if a rival. My own system is similar.
However one problem you have is this in no way solves a 3-way (USC, LSU, Auburn IIRC) situation. You’ll also have the strong conferences whining their #3 team is better than another conference’s #1.
My own playoff system:
[ul]
[li]The six BCS conferences choose their champion however they wish.[/li][li]Two “at large” teams are then selected and the 6 conference champions and the “at-large” bids are seeded according to their BCS rankings. (Maybe throw in a guarantee or a top 8 team from a non-BCS conference).[/li][li]Round One: At the home field of the higher ranked team.[/li][li]Round Two: Two of the BCS Bowls[/li][li]National Championship game.[/li][/ul]
If you can’t win your conference and STILL can’t be one of the top two that DIDN’T win their conference, you’re not in. Sorry. This would also allow an exceedingly good conference to get as many as THREE TEAMS in the playoff as well as reward fans by a home playoff game which would be extremely exciting.
Downsides are that a lower ranked team would end up playing three road games against Top-8 talent to win the National Championship. Even a consensus #1 would likely fail in such an attempt. However this does give value to your regular season record. Second, a Cinderella school may have logistical trouble preparing for such a large game in round one. You could conceivably have a BCS-level bowl game held in Boise, on the smurf-turf in front of only 32,000 instead of 90,000+.
Rucksinator and Cyberhwk’s plans are quite good; better than what we have now. I personally like the “Plus 1”:
Return to the classic bowl alignments, where each bowl takes one or two conference champions, and high-ranked at-larges. All bowl games are played on New Year’s Day.
Use a ranking system (the BCS will do) to determine the top 8 teams prior to New Year’s Day.
After the dust settles on New Year’s, the 2 highest ranked winners square off for a championship game.