RE: Cincinnati makes playoffs if...the following happens
[quote='quo vadis' pid='17169477' dateline='1608323089']
[quote='jedclampett' pid='17169150' dateline='1608316485']
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[quote='jedclampett' pid='17168984' dateline='1608313020']
A: No. It is a matter of credibility.
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You emphasize ranking. as in we shouldn't leave out a "highly-ranked" unbeaten, say between 6-8. But if rankings are what matter, I think one should go strictly by rankings.
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The reason why I disagree is that rankings are far from being perfect. If they were, there would be no upsets, and there would be much less doubt than there actually is about which team will win or lose any particular game.
The argument isn't that rankings are uninformative. They do have a useful function, by preventing any undefeated team with a very weak strength of schedule from making it onto a list of the 6 or 8 ranked teams.
However, a team that has gone undefeated despite playing a rigorous schedule, clearly, can make its way onto a top 6 or top 8 list such as the AP Top 25 or the CFP ratings.
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This seems like your method would "screen in" a team like Cincy, but "screen out" a team like Coastal. But the rankings might be biased worse against a team like Coastal that has less status and pedigree than Cincy. Personally, I see Coastal and Cincy as having basically identical worthiness for NY6, or whatever. They have very similar overall profiles, as of now.
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You may be right, and we have no way of knowing which is better.
I used Cincy in my example because the Bearcats are ranked above Coastal, have been ranked in the top 10 for most of the season, and are the only team that would qualify if only undefeated teams that that are in the top 6 or top 8 could get AQ status for the CFP.
If Coastal should remain undefeated were ranked ahead of Cincy and were ranked in the top 6 or top 8, I would hope that they would qualify for the CFP.
[quote='quo vadis' pid='17169477' dateline='1608323089']
If it all comes down to credibility though, as I said, removing a top-4 ranked team to put in an unbeaten #7 is likely to cause public credibility to fall, not rise.
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To me, that just seems like the "conventional wisdom" on the topic, and it's generally the view of those fans who are either ardent fans of P5 teams or who have convinced themselves that "P5 is better."
I'm a researcher, and one thing that trail-blazing researchers have in common is that they tend to pay little or no heed to conventional wisdom. To do that type of work, one has to think outside the box all the time. Otherwise, it's hard to come up with new discoveries.
Another thing that gives me a sort of unique view on this topic is that I actually remember the days of the old American Football League and as a kid was one of its early fans, back when their teams were considered almost as obscure as, for example, the Saskatchewan Roughriders or the Toronto Argonauts. I became a KC Chiefs fan during their rivalry with the Raiders, and remember watching AFL teams playing on NBC with Curt Gowdy announcing. It was a wilder brand of football, and it was rough around the edges, so it was more exciting and more dramatic.
That's how I feel about the non-P5 conferences today. It's very much a deja vu kind of experience. I just feel it in my guts, exactly the same sensation, actually more of an intuition that there's something exciting going on here that I can't quite describe. The P5 are the NFL of college football, the old guard with a sense of superiority. The G5 are the AFL, the up-and-comers, the hungry ones with something to prove.
So, having lived through it before, and seeing what appears to be a very similar phenomenon today, and judging by the markedly improved quality of the G5 conference games, I've got to say that I think that the conventional wisdom about the way things have always been done before may be about to give way to something very new and different.
If I had to give a "year equivalent," I would say that the G5's situation is probably most similar to the AFL's situation in about 1964 (Super Bowl I was played after the 1966 season -- in January, 1967). The AFL had really struggled in he early 1960's, and came close to collapsing, with attendance averaging below 20,000 per game (ring any bells?).
But something changed in 1964 - - the AFL teams that survived the crisis years suddenly started to catch on with the fans. They were the underdogs, the everyman, the kind of guys that most kids and a lot of adults could identify with, and they started to capture our imagination.
Suddenly, the NFL began to seem incredibly stodgy, boring and predictable by comparison. Then, viewership started to notch higher, and it became a more and more discernable trend. Teams like Houston, Kansas City, Oakland, and NY (Jets) emerged from the pack and began to generate legions of fans.
By 1965, the NFL started to notice what was happening, and there were reports that some of the owners were starting to worry about losing viewers to the competition. Not coincidentally, the first Super Bowl was announced before the 1966 season. By 1969 or 1970, the AFL era was over, when it was announced that the AFL teams would transition to the NFL, to form the core of what became the AFC.
So you had, in the AFL, a league that went from barely managing to pay its bills as late as 1963, to a league with such high viewership that it threatened the strongest professional league in the nation just three years later and was promptly "bought up" to end the competitive threat that it had posed.
The parallel today is that, in a similar number of years, the G5 conferences have gone from barely having 1 or 2 teams in the top 25 shortly after the P5/G5 split to having 5, 6, 7, or 8 teams in the top 25 in 2019 and 2020.
The situation is very much like it was with the AFL in 1964, which was just a couple of years before they really "took off."
I can't predict the future, and the potential upside for the G5 may not be quite as brilliant as it was for the old AFL, but I just can't buy the conventional wisdom, because it's getting harder and harder to make the case that P5 football is head and shoulders above G5 football and is bound to remain that way for the next 10 or 20 years.
If anything, all that money that the P5s have been raking in may well have resulted in making them fatter, happier, and more complacent, while the hungry ones have all the drive and motivation that they may need to overtake them.
(This post was last modified: 12-18-2020 04:25 PM by jedclampett.)
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