(01-07-2018 01:23 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-07-2018 01:17 PM)Love and Honor Wrote:  

(01-07-2018 10:37 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  Second, it's always been that way in college football nothing new, and it's that way in college hoops as well. Tune in to ESPN the day before Selection Sunday, and you'll see loads of interviews with coaches of 20-12 teams that finished 6th in their conference explaining (lobbying) why they think their team did enough to get off the bubble and in to the tournament.

And no football playoff system will be any different.

Except what you didn't see last March was Steve Alford of 29-4 UCLA (ranked 11th overall in the tourney) making his case that they should've been in the ten-team March Madness. Which as stated before, is how large it would be if you took the current proportion of CFP spots to FBS teams and applied it to college basketball. After all, why should Texas Southern be included in the tourney when the SWAC is awful and all the bubble teams left out would probably beat them by twenty?

Sure in a football playoff there'd be lobbying by coaches to get in, but if you determine at-large bids and seeding exclusively with a transparent formula (like college hockey has done for years) the only way to legitimately complain would be to argue over how the equations are set up. That's a system I'd like to see basketball to move to as well, any time you have people making the decisions with so much money at stake you'll get a lot of human bias involved; while there's inherent 'computer bias' in how a formula is set up, at least everyone knows the rules and the best path to get in.

We've already been down that path: Before 2004 or so, the computers had a heavy influence on the BCS formula, and outcries happened because the formulas would produce results that beggared belief from an "eye test" point of view, like choosing 2001 Nebraska and 2003 Oklahoma to play in the BCS title game even though they just got clobbered in their conference title games. So in response the formula was tweaked such that even though the computers were still in there, it was very unlikely that anyone but the #1 and #2 in the human polls would make the title game.

Formulas can produce outcomes that can seem weird, e.g., last year, at least 30 computers in the Massey Composite declared Alabama, not Clemson, to be National Champ even though Clemson beat Alabama in their title game.

To be more accurate, they didn't declare that Alabama was National Champ, but rather that they were the stronger team. And there is nothing inconsistent or incongruous about such an assessment.

In 1983, after NC State won the NCAA basketball tournament, I would certainly have voted for Houston as #1 if I had a poll vote. And, unless somebody rigged the results, I suspect most computer models would have had the same result. It wouldn't have been surprising if NC State didn't make it into the top five.

There is no arguing about who is the tournament champion. That's settled in the arena. But who is "best" is almost never settled.