(01-03-2018 11:30 AM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(01-03-2018 11:22 AM)ken d Wrote:  Well, having listened to all the arguments posed here, I'm now prepared to concede that the playoff selection committee is biased - bought and paid for. I think it's time we toss them aside and replace them with a group of unbiased ratings. Let's take the AP Poll, coaches' Poll, Massey, Colley and Sagarin rankings. Throw out each team's highest and lowest rankings, and average the rest. That should take the bias out of the selection process.

To show how well that would have worked, the final four teams would have been, in order from #1 to #4, Clemson, Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama, instead of that holy mess the selection committee came up with.

And the next four teams, who would have missed the playoff under this new system, were, in order, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Auburn and USC. Now, I admit that's pretty much the order the CFP had them. But at least it was arrived at in an unbiased way.

And UCF still would have been #12.

Now that I read this, I begin to wonder if that isn't exactly the methodology the selection committee used to arrive at its ranking. Hmmm.......

The problem is the polls were trying to mirror the selection committee process. The system is fine. Its simply been corrupted by stacking the committee. If the committee is so fair and equitable and is arriving at the same decision that anyone would--then why not make it a 10 member committee with one representative from each FBS conference. Surely, if the committee is so fair and reasonable--a body composed of one representative from each conference would reach the same fair and reasonable conclusions--but withut the apeparance of bias? Right?

The polls can't even try to mirror anything. They are a disparate group of individuals who each vote their own way - biases and all - with no communication or coordination among themselves. And, they announce their results before the selection committee does, both after the committee's first "reveal" and before it, publishing a weekly poll for about 9 weeks before the committee meets.

It seems to me that if hundreds of people are arriving at the same conclusion (and many of those folks announce their votes publicly) we've pretty much taken the bias out of the process. The very idea that having one representative from each conference would be less biased makes no sense. That structure presumes bias - that is, the suggestion that G5 representatives would advocate for G5 teams is the antithesis of impartiality. The idea that ten biased committee members would reach an unbiased decision, but 60 AP voters would not, just doesn't fly with me.