(08-12-2019 10:40 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(08-10-2019 01:46 PM)Carolina_Low_Country Wrote:  Picking the "Top 8" schools uses the eye test instead on the field results. Conference Champs won their games on the field. If Penn State is 9-4 and wins the Big Ten by beating 12-0 Wisconsin good for them. Wisconsin had a chance to win their conference but lost, however they would most likely still get the at-large spot.

Only if we decide to ignore the results of OOC games played on the field. Which to me makes very little sense - playoffs are predominantly a national competition between members of difference conferences, so if anything OOC games tell us more about who deserves a playoff spot than a conference game does.

And no pro sports league does it this way. E.g., in the NFC South, if New Orleans is 7-1 in divisional games and Carolina is 5-3, but Carolina is 12-4 overall and New Orleans is 11-5, Carolina not New Orleans is the division champ and gets the automatic bid to the playoffs. All the games count, not just divisional/conference games.

College conferences are too ramshackle to use winning a conference as the standard for *automatic* entry into a playoff. We need a human judgment, or computer, element to adjust for these flaws.

There is a flaw to this logic. In college football comparing OOC schedules is an apples to oranges comparison because there is no standard for scheduling. Let’s say in your example that Penn St played Alabama, USC, and a Temple team that went 11-2 while Wisconsin played Indiana St, Kent St, and a 1-11 Kansas team. Overall record is not a fair comparison. For a 4 team NFL division that plays 6 intradivision games the other 10 games are coming from a pool of 28 teams that are much closer in skill level and resources from top to bottom than the 130 FBS teams plus FCS opponents. In fact, 8 of those 10 out-of-Division opponents are the same teams