(12-14-2018 05:57 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(12-14-2018 04:45 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(12-14-2018 11:22 AM)McKinney Wrote:  

(12-14-2018 11:02 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  If we have an 8-team playoff, best to just have all at-large, no guarantees for any conferences, P5 or G5. That's a level playing field for everyone, and doesn't allow a team to leap-frog others merely because they win a conference - which proves nothing about how good they are versus teams from other conferences. If the B1G or SEC champ is only the 10th best team, then they don't belong in the playoffs ahead of better teams.

If there ever was a time where that excuse of "we'll be arguing why #9 got left out" was valid, it's here. If you do 8 at large you'll be in the same situation we have now. It'll just be with crappier matchups. Teams that should have been given a shot will be left out.

Nope, just the opposite: A conference champ auto-bid model is far more likely to put outrageously questionable teams in than just ranking the top 8. E.g., imagine if the PAC title is between 10-2 Utah and 7-4 unranked UCLA, and Utah's star QB is suspended before their CCG and UCLA eeks out a win?

You'd have a bad 8-4 UCLA team in the playoffs ahead of many teams that were clearly better. You can't ever have that in an 8-team playoff chosen by people, because people will never randomly choose the #23 team to be in the playoffs.

The worst situation you could likely have would be this year - #9 Washington, PAC champ, would be out in favor of #8 UCF. But Washington lost 3 more games than UCF, including losses to Auburn, Cal, and Oregon, none of whom are world-beaters, and all the computers have UCF ranked ahead.

Washington doesn't have much of a case, not worth worrying about. No #9 in an all at large model ever will.

The thing you seem patently unable to comprehend is that subjective quality measures can be wrong. If an 8-4 UCLA gets in---its because they beat the team the committee didnt think could possibly lose to UCLA. It means the committee fell in love with a team and failed to see the weakness that UCLA exploited to beat them.

What? In my example of an auto-bid situation, if 8-4 UCLA gets in as PAC champ, it's because they beat a 10-2 Utah team that no committee had passed judgment on at all, much less assumed couldn't possibly lose to UCLA.

The silly aspect of that would be that the auto-bid would handcuff us, force us to include them over teams clearly better based on actual performance on the field, say a 10-2 Michigan team that lost to 12-0 Ohio State so didn't win the B1G, and beat UCLA 45-0 during the season to boot.

No humans would ever produce such an absurd result.