(09-06-2022 09:15 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (09-06-2022 01:47 AM)JSchmack Wrote: Hear me out.
This is stupid. This is nothing more than when the US Olympic Gymnastic teams barnstorms after the Olympics to get money.
Every conference plays 8 or 9 conference games; out of 12 total games. Some "power" conferences play FCS teams, which are just guarantee, body-bag games. So now you have a 9-game conference schedule (When the league will go .500 against itself) and 2 other games.
There's not enough non-conference play to make conference play mean anything. It's just the perception of who is good, not actual results. You're judging SEC vs Pac-12 on like 3 games max. That's nothing. Baseball is 162-games and the terrible teams win 40% of the time.
College football is a dog and pony show. Anyone with money doesn't have to play anyone on the road OOC, they just host patsys and go 3-0 or 4-0.
Vanderbilt beat Elon an FCS team (barely); and then Vandy bought the worst teams they could with their TV cash. So when SEC teams beat Vandy, they'll beat a 5-7 team instead of 1-12 team, because Vandy bought some suckers.
The conference SOS is just "Who bought the worst teams" and then beat each other up. There is no honor in that. If you cross out every team that sucks from everyone's record, the best teams in college football are 4-0 or 3-1 at best.
I had a coach who knew and trusted me, she said "I don't know how this RPI/SOS thing works, how do we make the NCAA Tournament?" and I showed her the math and how to rig it. And we put together a 28-game schedule to make the NCAA Tournament if we just beat the teams we should beat. I did not know she was telling other coaches what I told her. So half our conference did the same thing. I put together a schedule for #23 RPI and an NCAA bid. We did one game better than I projected and were #9 in the RPI. Two other teams from our "one-bid conference" made the tournament. Best season in conference history.
It was effing easy to manipulate the system. College football plays so many fewer games that SOS is a effing joke.
If every non-P5 school refused to play a road game at a P5 school, college football would be brought to its knees. And they should try it.
The P5 is just a cartel that buys wins. They aren't better. They only have become better because recruits listened to ESPN Propaganda and only want to go to schools ESPN talks up. If everyone else in college football refuses to play them, you'd have a poll of 12 one-loss cartel teams, and 8 undefeated teams. It's just math bull s-h-i-t.
College football is really stupid. It's just Darwinist Capitalism.
Making a threat without any leverage can make you even worse off than before.
Why would the P5 be brought to its knees by G5 schools refusing to play them? The G5 would just be handing the P5 the opportunity to break away from the NCAA entirely without any legal entanglements or damages and thus destroying those G5 athletic departments completely. The P5 would *love* for the G5 to make that "threat" because it gives them the legal backing to separate once and for all.
Maybe I should be posting in the "cable in decline" thread. I am not thrilled with ESPN's delivery mechanisms. I pay too much for DirecTV already, and to receive ESPN3, or whatever added numbers and letters, other than the 2-3 offered, I must download the app and pay something like $9.99 a month. That's too much aggravation and added costs. Monopolize something and corporate greed rears its head.
Jschmack, I concur with much you said. Having some pessimism may be be a good thing in critiquing all this. FBS football scheduling if far from equity, consistency, and anything approaching perfection. While scholarship limits are similar for all FBS, recruitment challenges have enormous variations due to media promotions, locales, resources, facilities, academic/acceptance variables, etc. P5, or what is left of that term, is in a state of turmoil outside what is deemed the P2, that appears to still be in the process of developing.
I heard this past weekend, for example, Mississippi State had the second most difficult schedule in the country. So there are statisticians out there that can rank-order the level of difficulty of 130 colleges/universities playing FBS fb each week following the pre-season rankings. If that can be done readily, surely there could be improved guidelines to avoid some of the asinine scheduling.
Frank, agree that the G5 doesn't have much leverage to force change of the system's upper tier. It appears to be diminishing for the G5, and maybe future P5 remnants. Classifications are becoming more dictatorial by developing circumstances, yet there still remains interdependence, inclusive of even a chunk of FCS. The problem there is that the "lesser haves" are faced with concessions as disbursements and exposure become even more acute. Money fuels power.
Is there a fix whereby everyone is happy? I doubt it. There is no grand plan. It is all stimulus-response mixed with too many decision-makers not affirmatively deciding or have conflicting visions of what is coming down the pike.
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College football is really bad. And dumb. From a configuration standpoint.
