Running CFB playoff thread

To be clear, I don't really have a problem with the 12 selected. I just think they serve as evidence that 12 is too many.

If we're knocking it down to an 8-team playoff I'll dismiss SMU, Indiana, Tennessee and Ohio State without a second thought. I think that still leaves too many teams.

 

Not disagreeing at all.

Thing is, Ohio State was probably the second-best best team in the Big Ten, I think they would have easily handled Penn State. Texas might be the weak link. Talk about no real quality wins.

 

I think the edge for Texas is that they only lost to Georgia, twice. OSU lost to Michigan. But if I’m paring it down to four, Texas is the next one out.

 

College basketball gets it right that a team with x wins is not necessarily better than a team with x minus y wins. It isn’t even remotely controversial to think that way.

And for some football conferences we are willing to make that distinction as well. Nobody was much arguing for Army to nose into the conversation or even UNLV or Memphis.

But for other conferences we treat that algebra as sacrosanct, even if it is based more on whether your school is east of the Rockies and/or had a turn as a national contender before color television. And even if you qualify on neither account, you can probably still have a shot if the majority of your conference meets those terms.

Also, making a conference title game is as much about schedule luck as true excellence in a conference with 16-plus teams.

 

Yeah. In a season with a 30-33 game sample size, you can afford to think that way.

Not so much with 12-game schedules in megaconferences with nothing like round robin play. Even inside conferences, there’s wide differential.

 

SEC Shorts sure didn't ignore it, and it probably has more views (and definitely more shares) than any of those "national media" stories that picked on poor Indiana.

Gee, sounds like an excuse.

 

>>>>> Built-in, on a tee.

 

If you want to argue that eight teams is enough, I'd buy it. But four was certainly not enough. The last decade showed that the fifth team in the rankings, and occaisionally the fifth, were/would have been title contenders. There were arguments they should have been included.

Once you get past eight, the year is going to be hit or miss. At 12 unless it's a really crazy year with 14 undefeated/one-loss teams, I'm not going to cry over a three-loss anybody being left out.

You go to a setup with 14 and the top two get byes or 16 seeded with no byes and eight first-rounds on campuses, whatever. If there's upsets everyone will go nuts. If all the home teams advance, well I guess the committee knew what they were doing.

 

I think part of this whole discussion is the ambiguity of who gets in/ is out. You have blowouts in the NFL as well, but there is a metric that you have to meet to get to the playoffs. If the Broncos beat the Bengals, they are in the playoffs. They may get boatraced, but at least there is a clear cut definition of why they were in. In the CFB, its left up to a committee, who has quality wins, better losses, strength of schedule, etc.

 

I think you'd have to look at the second worst FCS conference in this context, as the worst FCS conference is the Pioneer, which is a non-scholarship league that rarely fields a competitive playoff outfit. San Diego won FCS playoff games in 2016 (at Cal Poly) and 2017 (at Northern Arizona), but otherwise, that league champ has lost in the first round by an average of 31.7 points per game.

The Big Sky in the last couple of years has been Montana heavy, but Eastern Washington and Weber State have fielded really good teams in recent years, and Idaho has been pretty strong since coming back from FBS. For all of Montana's history and tradition, the Griz's trip to Frisco last year was its first appearance in the title game since 2009.

Will be curious to see where the Ivy League champ slots in. I used to vote in the FCS poll and it was almost impossible to get a feel for the good Ivy teams, because they only played 10 games, didn't start until like Week 3 or 4, and in the non-conference, they usually played like-minded schools from the Patriot League or maybe the Northeast. Princeton or Harvard would go 10-0 or 9-1 and you had no freaking clue how good they were.

 

Yes, the Ivies also should have gone to a full FCS schedule. Their prejudice against football borders on obsession.

 

I have always assumed that feeling toward football stems from a desire to distance themselves from history: their outsized role in the sport in the early 20th century.