College football 2016 Week 14/championship week running thread

True. When it's only 4, though, there will possibly be some really good teams left out (e.g., Michigan or Penn State this year, or TCU/Baylor two years ago). At 8, however, the blemishes on the records of those teams that just missed the cut will be a little more striking.

 

No three-loss team ever "has" to get in anything. It might work out for them to finish in the top eight someday, but they will remain entirely at the mercy of others.

 

I think the difference here is that the fifth team has both a legitimate case for inclusion and a legitimate chance to win it all. OK, maybe not a legitimate chance to win it all this year, since anybody but Alabama will qualify as one of the biggest upsets ever.

But if you're getting down to 8/9 and choosing between Wisconsin and USC, there's nothing wrong with leaving either of them out.

Even though USC is the Second Best Team Ever.

 

We do in basketball. But the difference, to me, is that at least in basketball there is a reasonable path to certain inclusion: Win your league tournament. I wish there was some such path in football. Alabama, Penn State, Oklahoma, Washington, and Clemson should all be playing in this thing. Of course, I hate the unbalanced schedules in conference play. Ohio State and Michigan, for example, get punished because they play each other every year. Purdue sucked this year, but what if they had been good? They didn't have to play Michigan or Ohio State, but Wisconsin played them both. How is that fair?

 

Seriously ... a three-loss season is one in which you lost one-fourth of your games! #thisain'tbaseball

 

Or both. Let Western Michigan have that final spot.

 

I would go for that, yes, dixie. And all sketches of an eight-team playoff have included that, right?

 

We've been trained to think that these college football results are definitive, when they aren't. As has been noted here, Alabama clobbered LSU in the BCS title game after losing to them in the regular season. Penn State got left out of this because it had two losses, but also because it got drilled 49-10 to Michigan on a bad day. NFL teams split their games all the time, but it's like we don't believe that could happen in college football.

 

Western Michigan can go pound sand. Congrats on its victory in the Illinois Chapter of the Big Ten Round Robin Invitational Championship in September.

 

In my pie-in-the-sky version which is just as valid as any other, yes.

 

Go to 6 teams, top 2 teams get a bye.

 

True, but the NFL sets forth the factors that will determine who gets into the playoffs in writing in advance. The tiebreakers are cut and dried, stated definitively. They don't use a committee and some nebulous eye test to determine who gets in, and the goalposts aren't on wheels depending on who meets those standards.