(10-15-2025 05:17 PM)YNot Wrote: Some valid points. Totally agree that LSU is overrated and rankings inertia is a real thing. The recent admissions of pollsters that they didn't observe a particular result or didn't feel that their vote really matters discredit the polls and the rankings systems.
The USC and Illinois examples are poorly selected. Illinois didn't just lose to one of the best teams, they lost by 53 points! That matters. And, what is USC's big win? Michigan? Why was Michigan ranked? Because of a solid 11-point road loss to Oklahoma? (who didn't look so hot on Saturday) Or, was it because of Michigan's brand and conference affiliation?
And it was the Big Ten's own Penn State that made a mockery of the polls by sitting in the TOP-TWO for a month, without a single P4 win...because of.....brand and conference affiliation...only to nosedive into mediocrity. Seems like that should have been a primary exhibit to support his thesis that the polls are inherently biased, but he conveniently left them out because of....his own biases.
We all do it. And with so few cross-conference games, it's extremely subjective and often based on the eye test. I support a reasonable increase in the number of autobids. Settle things with actual games, not by beauty pageant.
I have never made a secret of the fact that I dislike polls. All polls.
Polls and ranking algorithms have two things in common. They are all flawed and they are all biased. When it comes to college football we have never really had a playoff that had a field that everybody agreed was the "right" one. That isn't to say we have never had a "champion" that was overwhelmingly believed to be the "best" team that year after the playoff ended.
We all know that, in other college sports, the winner of the national championship tournament is not always the best team. But their championship is not disputed, because the nature of those sports is such that all teams capable of winning the tournament have a path to enter the field, even though some teams in the field who have no chance of winning are also included.
Now that we have a larger CFP field we are getting close to a point where there aren't any teams capable of winning it that are excluded. But there are still likely some teams who would be capable of upsetting a team that could be the champion who don't get a bid. Because of the money involved in just getting invited, flawed polls or other subjective processes for selecting teams, there needs to be a way, IMO, for selecting teams based on performance on the field, not in polls.
Even though it is subjective in a way to award more autobids to some conferences than others, I still prefer that to polls or committees. Very few people involved in or fans of college football would dispute that the SEC and B1G have more resources and more good teams than any other conferences, and that the other two P conferences have more resources and more good teams than G conferences do. That should be reflected in how many autobids each conference gets.
I believe that the best way to decide who gets to play in the CFP is by having CCGs and WCGs among teams based on where they finish in their conference standings, regardless of where those teams are ranked in human polls or computer algorithms. I hope we are moving in that direction.
