(05-04-2021 07:34 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(05-04-2021 01:48 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(05-04-2021 12:28 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(05-04-2021 12:06 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(05-04-2021 09:49 AM)JRsec Wrote:  It's the underlying influences behind the prevailing thoughts that concerns me the most. Championships should be about who has the best team. With the CFP it seems sometimes to be about which 4 solid teams gain us the most viewers. So maximizing profits can conflict with fairly deciding a champion. And there is this growing socialist sentiment that no matter what you have done or failed to do in order to get in that every school who gets close deserves to be in and this is more about fan attitudes than team ability. Inclusion is in my mind a word anathema to the purposes of allowing a champion to win it on the field. I want to see teams that earned the right to play by being their conference's champion play. But I want those schools to have had better seasons than being the tallest midget in a weak conference to get into the playoffs. And quietly in the back of my mind is the relationship between the gambling industry and the NFL where the house wins 3/4ths of the time more or less. Gambling is always looking for angles to control the odds on outcomes. More teams in make injuries a wild card, with targeting it makes players ejections a wild card, and it provides match ups in which fans make big wrong assumptions.

We don't often truly consider the motivations behind these pushes. But gambling and TV ratings feed off of one another. And they can use the angle of "inclusion" for their purposes as long as it is part of the popular mantra of society. Championships are about winning, not do-overs, mulligans, or public sentiment, and they really shouldn't be about who garners the largest market share either!

To be honest, I actually think the CFP committee has done a pretty good job of picking the best 4 teams in most years if "best" is defined as, "Who are the 4 teams that would be the biggest favorites?" It's interesting that you bring up gambling because I believe that the CFP committee has been essentially applying the gambling standard: the CFP picks and the Las Vegas picks for the top 4 would likely be completely aligned.

The issue is that sports fans also want to see "deserving" teams (those that had objective achievements) in the playoffs, but those aren't necessarily always the "best" teams. Look back to my example above of where Ohio State was taken over Penn State for the 2016 CFP even though PSU won the Big Ten *and* even beat OSU head-to-head. IMHO, PSU was the more deserving team, yet OSU was looked at as the "better" team. The CFP committee clearly valued the latter, which is their prerogative, but then that brings up the accusations that the CFP is applying the subjective "eye test" instead of on-the-field results or the brand bias that you're referring to here.

So, I wouldn't ever call a system with auto-bids or some other requirements that takes power away from a committee as socialist. To the contrary, that's really the only way to mitigate real or perceived cronyism. The "deserving" teams are the ones with auto-bids and the other "best" teams are the at-larges. It doesn't have to be this "all or nothing" or "one or the other" straw man situation. This isn't exactly revolutionary: every other US pro and college sport has this type of playoff system at some level.

About the bolded parts - I'd go beyond that and say that the CFP has picked the best four teams in as close to an "objective" sense as we can get, as their four picks have also uniformly been the four teams chosen by computer composites as well.

As for Ohio State vs Penn State in 2016, as a B1G "outsider" with no horse in that race, I was very comfortable with the CFP choosing Ohio State. Yes, Penn State beat Ohio State, but H2H is typically not a determining factor, it's a tie-breaker when records are the same. But records weren't the same, Penn State lost two games whereas Ohio State lost only one. The conference title is also, IMO, an "internal" thing to the B1G that Penn State was rewarded for at that proper internal level - they got the B1G championship trophy and the celebration with the confetti and all that. But from a national POV, a conference title doesn't mean anything. Winning the B1G doesn't mean you did anything to deserve a spot over an SEC team, a PAC team, etc. So I don't mind that being disregarded either.

And comparing conference title auto-bids with pro sports like the NFL misses one critical factor - in CFB, OOC games are ignored for determining a conference champ whereas they are not in the pros. So in CFB you can have an absurd situation where team X wins their conference and gets an autobid despite losing 3-4 OOC games, while a one-loss team from another conference that doesn't win its conference is left out. IMO, the latter team is much more deserving than the conference champ, because if anything, OOC games tell us more about merit for a national playoff than do conference games.

Now true, in other college sports, such as hoops and baseball, OOC games do not count towards the conference title either. But the damage of a lousy conference champ getting in to the playoffs automatically is mitigated because there are enough at-large spots such that more deserving teams that won more OOC games can still get in. But CFB will not be like that. So I am not a fan of conference autobids from a merit POV, though I admit that seems to be where things are heading.

Just my 3 cents.

And the results in the actual on the field games show they have done a bad job in seeding and not necessarily a good job in picking the best 4. TCU was clearly one of the best 4 in 2014 and possibly the best team. Yet they were #6.

In fairness to the committee, TCU was also outside the top 4 in the human polls as well, though the Massey computers did have them at #3.

TCU faced a problem of their own making - Baylor. You couldn't put Baylor in the playoffs because their SOS was so weak. But you couldn't put TCU in ahead of Baylor because Baylor beat them.

Plus, we had a unique situation with FSU. FSU had played an even softer schedule than TCU or Baylor and was the playoff team that was outside of the computer top four. But as the defending national champs with the Heisman Trophy winner and the only undefeated team in FBS, FSU simply *had* to be in the playoffs. There was no two ways about that. So TCU was out.

Beyond that, let's not get carried away about the TCU myth. Yes, TCU routed a lot of teams, but they also played a pretty soft schedule. The only really good team they played was Baylor, and Baylor beat them. The next best team they beat, Ole Miss, finished #19 in the polls and lost four games. They never proved themselves against top-flight competition. Texas was a 6-7 team that year, and Oklahoma had arguably their worst team of the millennium.

Nor did they have overwhelming talent. Looking at their draft picks the next couple years, we see that in 2015 and 2016 drafts, the years from which the 2014 talent was largely drawn from, TCU produced picks that went in rounds 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6. That's respectable, but none of those guys has done anything worth mentioning in the NFL. The guy who went in the first round, WR Josh Doctson, has a grand total of 81 catches in the NFL over four seasons.

In contrast, in the same two drafts Ohio State produced guys who went in rounds 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 6. That's way more NFL talent, and that includes guys like Ezekiel Elliot, Joey Bosa and Michael Thomas, arguably the best RB, WR and DL in the league today. And we don't even need to look at Alabama's picks to know they had a lot more talent than TCU, one of their guys in that year's playoffs was Derrick Henry.

There's little doubt Ohio State had way more talent than TCU and they also beat way better competition. Ohio State was clearly the deserving 2014 national champions.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to post a box score from the FSU/TCU playoff game than write that whole thing?