(07-01-2018 07:22 AM)quo vadis Wrote: Good point about how the NFL schedules. IMO that makes analogizing to college football even sillier. If anything, the NFL has a stronger basis for counting only division games in determining the division champs, because the divisional teams play home and away, a much fairer test of who is best than in college, where you only play your conference mates one time, so someone has home field advantage. But the NFL counts all games, like all pro leagues do.
As for the SEC, as I've said before, what matters is overall SOS, not OOC SOS. Because overall SOS tells us the strength of the entire schedule.
E.g., both LSU and Louisville play Alabama this year. Conceptually, it makes zero sense to give Louisville great credit for playing what we expect to be a tough team like Alabama because it is OOC while LSU gets no credit for doing so because it's a conference game. Conference game or OOC, you're still playing Alabama.
So forget about OOC and look at overall SOS. That's what should matter. And last year, the SEC teams that made the CFP had SOS of 3, 6, and 27.
A lot of your things that "make no sense" seem to make absolutely a lot of sense when you get down to it. Ultimately for determining the conference champion, it makes sense to only do conference games. The NCAA does this on every single sport.
The professional leagues have games each year that don't count as well. The NFL runs 4 games that don't count and don't get factored into the overall result. MLB runs an entire month that does the same thing. So, by your own definition, they don't determine their division winners by including all the games.
The NFL sets up their scheduling so that teams in the same division have vastly similar schedules. Out of the 16 games, 14 of them are against the same teams.
The NBA does the same thing out of the 82 games that NBA teams play, they play every team at least 2 times, and out of the 82 games, 78 match up against the same teams if you're in the same conference.
Here's the scheduling rules for the NBA:
Divisional Opponents x 4 (16 games)
6 Conference Opponents x 4 (24 games)
4 Conference Opponents x 3 (12 games)
15 Non-Conference opponents x 2 (30 games)
Mathematically, that means that teams within the same conference must play the same schedule for all but 2 games
So, out of the 82 games, teams within the same division (which automatically go to the playoffs) play the same schedule for 78 out of the 82 games. There's only 4 games that don't match up with the same schedule.
I don't have the scheduling matrix for the MLB, so I can't confirm that they do the same thing.
So, presuming that the cross-conference opponents are going to be different for each team (there may be some overlap, though between teams), that leaves
But professional leagues have a few things that the NCAA doesn't. The first is more games. The NCAA season caps out at 12 games, (13 with conference championship and 15 max if you include the playoffs). The NFL season starts out with 20 games (4 preseason, 16 seasonal games), with 4 additional ones for playoffs.
The second is fewer teams. The professional leagues have a maximum of 32 teams (NFL has 32, MLB and NBA both have 30 teams), Division I has 345 institutions, with 130 being in the FBS.
The third is no control over their schedules, and the ability to schedule virtually the same schedule. Out of the actual sesaonal games, the NFL has 14 out of 16 games (87%) against the same opponents, if you're in the same division. In the NBA, 78 out of 82 games (95%) are against the same opponents.
In NCAA Division I Football, as few as 6 out of 12 games (50%) are against the same opponents. If you take it down to only conference games, then 6 out of 8 games (75%) are against the same opponents, or 7 out of 9 (78%).
Your argument that the conferences should go to the overall schedule to determine the conference champion, or that there should be no conference championship births, because of it is ridiculous.