(05-15-2019 10:33 AM)Attackcoog Wrote: (05-14-2019 11:45 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (05-14-2019 10:53 AM)loki_the_bubba Wrote: (05-13-2019 01:02 PM)quo vadis Wrote: (05-13-2019 12:54 PM)loki_the_bubba Wrote: Any undefeated team can put a banner as far as I'm concerned.
I don't think undefeated means anything - anyone can go undefeated against a soft enough schedule.
But anyone can put up a banner anyway. It's a free country. If Arkansas State wants to declare themselves 2018 national champs just because, well whose to stop them?
You go undefeated in most other sports and you win the championship. Only in CFB do we pretend differently.
It's not a 'pretend'. It's just that in other sports, if you go undefeated, you have completed a process agreed to by yourself and the other competitors as determining the championship and thus have grounds to claim that you are their champion.
But in college football (FBS) you can go undefeated without completing such a process, and thus have no claim to a title. See UCF in 2017, Tulane in 1998, etc.
Its still kind of a pretend title. Until the 1990's they literally prefaced the words "national championship" with the word "mythical". Now we have something thats less mythical---but it clearly excludes any possible access by half the teams in the division---so its still an imperfect vestige of the old bowl system that may or may not have #1 and #2 play each other in the final game of the year. Until every team begins the year with a realistic path to the playoff, it wont really be totally legit. Instead of having polls and bowl committees create the playoff---we now have largely eliminated the public sector national polls and gone to a selection committee made up of the same kind of guys that make up bowl committees. Its kinda more of the same. Right now its a bit like the early Bowl Coalition where the Rose Bowl didnt participate (meaning the system could never match #1 and #2 if either were in the Big10 or Pac12). Now, all the power conferences are included, but that still excludes over half the teams in the division. As long has a huge portion of the division is completely frozen out, its cant be considered completely legit FBS champion--regardless of what its defenders say. Virtually every national sports writer alive knows that no G5 has a chance to get into the playoff. It is what it is. Are we really going to use an "agreement" signed with essentially a gun to their head as proof of legitimacy? C'mon. It is what it is.
Until the 1990s, the title was called "mythical" by the media, because it was mythical - the schools themselves did not recognize any process or entity as conferring a national title, even though informally, schools did recognize the AP and Coaches polls as conferring a title, and celebrated them as such.
Since then, a formal agreed-on system has been put in place by all the FBS conferences to crown a champion.
I mean, the CFP agreement is a fact.
If you want to talk informally, there's also no basis for calling the title "pretend", because even if one agrees that the G5 is excluded (I don't, but if), it only excludes those schools and conferences from which the actual national champion *never* comes. I mean, if you look back over the history of college football, the only time a non-P5 has been the best team was BYU, 35 years ago. Before that, you have to go back basically forever, because e.g. when teams like Army won the title in the 1940s, they were a power program of that era.
It's like if the NCAA tournament suddenly excluded the Sun Belt, MAC, MWC, etc. from the tournament. That wouldn't make the tournament a "pretend" title because schools from those schools literally never are the best anyway. No "non-power" school has ever won the NCAA hoops tournament. Ever.
So there's nothing worth mentioning being excluded. Proof of this is your claim that the G5 signed the CFP "with a gun to their head". How on earth could that happen, if the G5 were in fact a legitimate contender for the national title? E.g., the P5 know that Notre Dame is a valid threat and are viewed as such by the public, so they can't hold a gun to ND's head in these negotiations. They know their playoffs would be regarded as invalid by large swathes of the public if ND was somehow excluded.
But the G5 aren't, and thus have no sway in the matter.
So saying the CFP winner is 'pretend' would be like me claiming that the Warriors were a "pretend" basketball world champion because my local club team was excluded from the NBA playoffs. Absurd.
Plus, look at the results of the processes: Is there more doubt in your mind that Clemson was the 'real' best football team last year or UVA was the 'real' best hoops team?
I'm a lot more confident about Clemson, the product of the CFP. I think if we look back, we would see that the CFP produces a champ that passes the smell test at least as often as the NCAA tournament does.