Frank the Tank
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RE: The College Football Playoff’s 4-team format isn’t going anywhere
(05-07-2019 07:33 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (05-06-2019 07:08 PM)bullet Wrote: Going back to 1985 (the year after BYU won the title), there are only 35 schools that have finished in the final AP top 4 even once. 11 of those 35 only did it one time. 20 schools (the 17 national champs in those 34 years + Oregon, Washington and Georgia) have 117 of those 136 top 4 slots. They are even more dominant with 94 of the 102 top 3 slots.
So you have Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, USC, Nebraska, Michigan, Ohio St., Penn St., Notre Dame, Florida, FSU, Miami, Clemson, Colorado, Auburn, Tennessee, LSU, Oregon, Georgia and Washington dominating the top. TCU, Arizona St., Stanford and Utah have each been there twice. The other 11 are Michigan ST., Oklahoma St., Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech (Coach's national champ-#2 AP), Boise, Missouri, West Virginia, Syracuse, South Carolina, Oregon ST. and Wisconsin.
So you have 35-45 members of the P5 who have a lot to gain by expanding the playoffs with a guaranteed autobid.
How many schools since 1985 have won an outright P5 conference title, the kind that would auto-qualify for your 8 team playoff?
I bet it's a pretty small number as well. And e.g. just looking at the B1G, some of these schools that have, like NW and Illinois, have done so once. Not sure that's having a lot at stake here in any system.
We don't even have to go back to 1985 to show the impact. Let's just look at the Big Ten. Since 2000, 6 of the 11 pre-expansion Big Ten schools have won *outright* conference titles. 9 of the 11 pre-expansion Big Ten schools have won at least one shared conference title since 2000, with the only two exceptions being Minnesota and Indiana. Nebraska has also won a division title since been added to the conference.
It's not just about those who actually won conference titles, either. The bigger impact is simply if your team is in the hunt at all even if it doesn't win. Minnesota is one of the 2 pre-expansion Big Ten teams to not have a conference title this century, but they still played for the Big Ten West division title on the last game of the season against Wisconsin in 2014. An 8-team playoff with P5 autobids turns that footnote game into a huge game with legitimate playoff implications and that drives interest accordingly. There's a huge psychological effect when your *own* team is still in the playoff race and we can see that in every other sport. More schools may or may not actually win more conference titles or national titles compared to before, but many more schools will be in the playoff race in any given year than before, which is what keeps fan bases returning year after year.
The *chance* to win, however unrealistic it might be, is what drives interest in watching sports in the first place. Otherwise, there would be no Cleveland Browns fans in the world and the Chicago Cubs certainly wouldn't have had any fans prior to 2016. I believe that the college football fans that support the playoff-by-committee selection process vastly underestimates the power of "We need to do x, y and z and then we're in the playoff with no questions asked" (and note that this needs to be something other than just flippantly saying, "Just go undefeated!") in terms of driving fandom.
In a weird way, both the CFP and BCS systems actually took away a lot of the objective "x, y and z" path in the sense that regardless of rankings in the pure poll era, the Big Ten and old Pac-10 champs always went to the Rose Bowl, the SEC champ always went to the Sugar Bowl, the old SWC champ always went to the Cotton Bowl, etc., so schools used to have a very clearly defined path at a certain level and the national rankings were determined by off-the-field polls out of their control. Today, the off-the-field national rankings are still out of their control, but the difference is that such national rankings directly determine the path of the on-the-field games that they play in the postseason. A team like 2018 Ohio State would have never felt slighted 25 years ago with its ranking because, no matter what, it was always going to go to the Rose Bowl if it won the Big Ten championship and that achievement was something that was completely in its control on-the-field regardless of rankings. A school ranked #5 could feel completely in control of its destiny in 1990 in a way that it doesn't feel in control of its destiny today. Once again, I think that all that most sports fans and teams themselves ever want is control of their own destiny, which inherently can't occur when the playoff selection process occurs in a conference room with some old guys in Dallas.
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