quo vadis
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RE: The College Football Playoff’s 4-team format isn’t going anywhere
(05-01-2019 11:00 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (05-01-2019 08:44 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (04-30-2019 07:55 PM)bullet Wrote: (04-30-2019 12:37 PM)quo vadis Wrote: (04-30-2019 08:10 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: I think it's perfectly intellectually consistent to want a 4-team playoff without any restrictions on creating the field and an 8-team playoff with auto-bids for the P5 and a slot for the G5. It's simple math: a 4-team playoff is too small to start putting in qualifiers, while the 8-team playoff is large enough to accommodate auto-bids along with a couple of at-large slots.
In an 8-team scenario, it boggles my mind how much college football fans get so ornery about the thought of an "unworthy" conference or division champ getting into the playoff. That happens in every other sport quite frequently (*especially* in the NCAA Tournament), but everyone understands it because that is an objective on-the-field determination where everyone knows the rules and it's not based on the eye test or some other subjective criteria based on the whims of some old dudes sitting in a conference room in Dallas. You can have auto-bids in an 8-team playoff without bringing in any subjectivity for those slots while still having at-large bids for those schools that might have been the 2nd best team in the country but just happened to be stuck in a division with the best team in the country. That can all be quite easily accommodated and every other major sport in America has already shown that it can be done.
Two points about the bolded parts:
1) I disagree about the frequency with which perceived "unworthy" division champs make the playoffs in other sports. I think it's extremely rare, and the reason for that is because of how the champs are determined: Crucially, in the NFL, or NBA, or NHL, or MLB, the division champ is the team with the best OVERALL record, not division record. E.g., if the Giants go 8-0 in the NFC East and the Redskins go 6-2, but the Giants overall record is 10-6 while the Skins are 12-4, the Skins win the division, and everyone agrees they deserved to.
But in college football, only conference records count. So it's possible for e.g., Iowa to finish 10-2, with a H2H win over Penn State, while Penn State goes 9-4, but because of how the divisions shake out, Penn State wins the B1G. That is an awful look.
2) Now yes, in college hoops, sometimes a team that had a bad regular season, and say finished 6th in the ACC, goes on a run and wins the ACC tournament, thus claiming an automatic spot. But, that isn't a problem either, because the NCAA tournament is so large that all the ACC teams that had better seasons than them will make the tournament anyway as at-larges.
Not so in an 8-team playoff. In that Iowa/PSU scenario, with 6 of 8 spots guaranteed to champs and just two at-large, it is very likely that the Unworthy champ is the only team from the conference that makes the playoffs.
IMO, that's a big problem: The college system of choosing its conference champs is too flawed, and there are too few at-large spots, to give guaranteed spots to conference champs in an 8 team playoff.
Those who talk about how "all the other major sports" manage to give their division/conference champs a guaranteed spot in playoffs overlook the fact that there are key differences in how those sports choose their division champs which give them far more legitimacy than college conference champs for claiming a guaranteed slot.
You have 7-9 division champs making the playoffs. They won their division. Mets won the National League at 82-80. The teams in the division won their division and won the league/conference championship game. You are trying to split microscopic hairs.
And for that matter, the non-conference schedule in college football may not be anywhere comparable, unlike pro sports where it is at least similar.
"Micro"? No, the problem of not counting OOC games is a HUGE problem. It's 1/3 of the schedule, and conceptually, the more valid aspect for determining playoff worthiness, because these are games vs other conferences.
But then again .. what you say about OOC schedules is also correct. E.g., one SEC team might go 2-2 OOC but they might have played Clemson and FSU while another might go 4-0 OOC while playing nobody but G5 and FCS patsies, which makes the OOC schedule non-comparable. Plus, just as problematic, the schools themselves determine their OOC schedules rather than them being determined by an impartial league office.
Which is why college conferences only count conference games in determining their champs. It would be wrong to count OOC games, for the reasons we've given.
BUT, that still leaves us with the problem of only conference games counting.
And that's why it makes no sense to give conference champs an *auto* bid to the playoffs. For that to make sense, we'd need to count ALL games like the NFL etc. do to determine a conference champ, but for the reasons we've discussed we CAN'T do that.
Ergo, no auto-bids for conference champs.
It's a misnomer to state the non-conference games don't count in an auto-bid system. While you're correct that the non-conference games won't matter for the auto-bids themselves, they would actually count a great deal in practicality in determining any at-large bids. If anything, it would encourage much more risk-taking in playing high profile non-conference games by power teams because they're not going to be effectively disqualified for losing an early non-conference game to a top opponent when they still have the opportunity for an auto-bid with its conference schedule. We can see this in college basketball where the NCAA Tournament format ends up putting a huge emphasis on non-conference games for at-large bids (even when the auto-bids are all determined by conference tournaments played over a few days in March, much less any regular season games).
Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and Michigan State don't worry about playing each other in the opening week of every college basketball season because the NCAA Tournament system legitimately rewards playing tough non-conference schedules... and not completely killing a team if it happens to suffer a loss to a really tough opponent.
The current college football playoff system gives lip service to stating that non-conference games matter, but a loss against a tough non-conference opponent is still generally seen as worse than going undefeated with a mediocre non-conference schedule. As of now, there is basically no benefit for any school looking for a CFP spot to play more than 1 non-conference game of any value. The Alabama formula is to play 1 name brand non-conference game (which is distinguished from whether it's actually a good non-conference game in reality - see their 2017 win against FSU that looked great in week 1 but then was really a middling win by the end of the year if you didn't look at the FSU brand) and then 3 patsies. Granting the P5 conferences auto-bids actually encourages power teams to do more than the Alabama formula with their non-conference schedules because there isn't a de facto elimination from the CFP race with a loss (while you can climb into the CFP race with a win if you didn't win your conference).
Ultimately, there is only ONE thing that a conference member is in complete control of on-the-field: winning its conference championship. (Obviously, this doesn't apply to independents like Notre Dame.) You can't reasonably control your strength of schedule (as even a marquee brand name team like FSU can turn into a statistically mediocre game in a year like 2017) and many of those games are scheduled many years (even a decade or more) in advance.
Once again, if a 7-5 Pitt team upsets a 12-0 Clemson team in the ACC Championship Game, then that's the fault of Clemson because they didn't take care of business on-the-field where they had 100% control of their own destiny. It's at *that* point where a subjective committee does serve a purpose in determining whether that Clemson team deserves an at-large slot based on its body of work, including performance in non-conference games. That spot for Clemson should be in addition to (NOT in lieu of) the automatic spot for Pitt that won in a manner where they had 100% control.
Pretty much all that anyone can ask for in sports is to have 100% control over its own destiny, where if you do x, y, and z, then you're in without any old guys in a conference room in Dallas wondering whether you meet the eye test or some other post-hoc justification to determine if you're worthy. If you fail to do x, y, and/or z, though, then it's fair that such old guys in a conference room in Dallas can now determine your fate because you didn't fulfill the objective requirements to avoid that process.
That is what is bothering me so much here because an 8-team playoff that has auto-bids and at-large bids gives *both* objective on-the-field bids where teams don't need to go through the B.S. eye test crap, while also providing enough flexibility to have at-large bids to acknowledge that there are teams that didn't win their conference that did enough during the regular season and non-conference games to warrant inclusion in the playoff. Auto-bids don't eliminate that 12-0 Clemson team that was upset in the ACC Championship, but rather just puts their fate in the hands of the subjective committee (while the team that fulfilled everything that it was 100% in control of doesn't have to put their fate in such hands). I just want to take as much of the decision process out of the hands of that subjective committee as possible - giving them 2 or 3 at-large bids to determine while the rest of the field is set in stone allows for schools to know that they're 100% in the playoff if they do x, y, and z and the flexibility to include "worthy" schools that didn't do z.
Let's put it this way - the chances of a "worthy" team (AKA a team that is legitimately in position to win the national championship) being left OUT of an 8-team playoff with P5 auto-bids and 2 to 3 at-large bids is pretty much zero. We're generally arguing here about whether we're somehow letting an "unworthy" team IN to an 8-team playoff with P5 auto-bids, and once again, I simply have zero concern about that because those spots are being clinched in a 100% on-the-field objective manner, which is what sports should be all about.
If we are going with a 5-1-2 system, which many who support an 8-team playoff seem to favor, then that leaves just two at-large teams. That is precious few, very few. And the OOC games would only matter in determining those paltry two bids.
Again, a big difference between hoops and football is that there is a plethora of at-large bids, such that it is not uncommon for a P5 conference to get 5, 6, 7, even 8 teams in the tournament.
It's that kind of situation that permits, even encourages, the free-wheeling OOC matchups vs top teams during the regular season. If we were talking a 16-team or 24-team playoff with lots of at-large bids, then my concern wouldn't be much of one.
And IMO, having 'control of your destiny' is only meaningful if the path laid out is rational. E.g., imagine a system in which to make the playoffs, only every third game counts. The other two don't, but if you win every third game, you are in, regardless of whether the third game is any more of a test of how good you are then games one and two. That would be irrational.
That is what we have with conference autobids. You're an SEC team, your game with Ole Miss counts towards an autobid, your game with Ohio State doesn't, for no good reason. Not the way its done in the NFL, MLB, etc.
(This post was last modified: 05-01-2019 04:56 PM by quo vadis.)
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