(01-07-2018 07:54 AM)_C2_ Wrote:  

(01-06-2018 10:11 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-06-2018 08:30 PM)_C2_ Wrote:  

(01-06-2018 07:01 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-06-2018 06:17 PM)_C2_ Wrote:  What we know is there is no system in place that assures that every team controls its own destiny if they win all their games.

True, and we have never had that. Probably because the costs of doing so exceed the benefits. The current system has an extremely high chance of crowning the 'best' team as champ so why change it?

Based on what? The biases of a few people in a room? Not even the NCAA Tournament does an airtight job of getting it right, how many legit snubs have there been over the years and ridiculous seedings?

Crowning the best team, or at least the most accomplished team, begins and ends with making sure all conference champions get a shot.

Not necessarily. There's nothing magical about being a 'conference champion', it just means you beat out 10 or 11 of out 130 teams. Doesn't prove anything versus all those other teams that aren't in your conference.

So being champion of conference A doesn't necessarily mean you are better, and therefore more deserving of a spot in a national playoff than a team that didn't win conference B.

The most obvious example of this is OOC games. Team A might go 8-0 in its conference and win it, but be 8-4 over all thanks to losing four OOC games. Another team might be 7-1 in its conference and lose it, but be 11-1 overall thanks to OOC games. There's no reason to think that 8-4 team A is more deserving of a playoff spot than 11-1 team B. Quite the opposite.

(First paragraph) And neither does winning the college football playoff. Neither does winning the championship in general. Games aren't played on paper, otherwise they would just award the champion in college basketball before the NCAA Tournament rather than after it. Sure, the best team doesn't always win their conference but now days every team in football controls their own destiny. That's what at-large bids are for and if you don't get one, tough sledding. Team B, from your bottom example likely had a chance to beat team A but didn't. They had their chance.

College football has a small sample size of games and since a 64-team tournament or even a 32-team tournament is unrealistic, the best thing to do is field a playoff with the most accomplished teams in college football. That should mean all ten conference champions and some at-larges but at least 5 champions, maybe 1 other conference champ and at-larges so that a really good team that failed to win it's conference is not left out in the cold.

A few things wrong here, bolded above:

1) Nowadays in college football everyone doesn't control their destiny. Formally, nobody does. Theoretically, even a Michigan can go undefeated and not make the playoffs, and we know UCF didn't.

2) Maybe I wasn't clear, but in my bottom example, Team B was from a different conference than Team A, not the same conference, so Team A did not beat out Team B in conference play. Imagine comparing an 8-4 MWC champ Fresno with an 11-1 ECU that did not win the AAC.

3) Again, winning a conference doesn't make you necessarily "more accomplished' than not winning one, especially when comparing two teams from different conferences. Assuming similar SOS, it would be silly to argue that 8-4 MWC champ Fresno is 'more accomplished' than 11-1 ECU that did not win the AAC.

Given that, as you say, a football playoff can never be as big as a hoops playoff, we can't make conference champs an auto-decisive thing for playoff entry. At best, it should be a "plus factor", kind of like it is in the CFP system. But just one factor among many.