New College Playoff Thoughts

          With the news a few weeks ago that the NCAA will be implementing a four-team playoff for college football starting with the 2014 season, a number of those who screamed death to the BCS seem to be overjoyed.  For me, the only positive feeling I can associate with the news is excitement.  I am excited in the most literal definition possible: experiencing strong feelings of enthusiasm and eagerness – in this particular case, brought about by the unknown of what this playoff will bring.  Yet I remain apprehensive, perhaps even cynical, because the playoff has just widened the number of teams for debate while healing none of the ills that plagued the BCS-only system.  To allow you to share in my sardonic celebration, let’s take a look at the problems with the system we’re enduring for one more year, and how the four-team playoff will (not) correct these issues.

            The process is fairly simple.  At season’s end, a selection committee of important university people will select the four teams that are to participate in the playoff.  One of the advantages of this is that the selection committee will be limited in their choices.  They will not be able to haphazardly throw in Boise State during an undeserving year[1] just to placate the vocal majority (read: all of the country west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line) who tire of the BCS’s role as a closed group within a closed group from which the champions are decided.  On the SportsCenter immediately following the press conference that announced the new system, ESPN displayed a graphic that showed what the three most likely scenarios would have been for last year’s playoff.  The systems included:

            Straight BCS:  LSU v. Stanford, Alabama v. Oklahoma St.
            Conference Winners[2]:  LSU v. Wisconsin, Oklahoma St. v. Oregon

            “Plus 1” or Mixture:  LSU v. Wisconsin, Alabama v. Oklahoma St.

Obviously this would have its detractors and complaints about who should be “first in” or “last out” would fill the airwaves until the games were played (and then the results would be retroactively applied as proof of the original argument).  As a Badger alum, I’m far from impartial, but that seems to me to be a fair pool.  If you told me that the national title playoff in 2011 was going to be comprised of four of LSU, Alabama, Oklahoma St., Stanford, Oregon, and Wisconsin, I would have found no problem with it.  Would the Badgers getting left out have been a cause for sadness?  Sure.  Aside from LSU being skipped, however, I see no other combination of those six teams that would have been bothersome to me.

            While the field will be truly narrowed, and any selection for the most part justifiable, teams will wait to hear their name called while, just like in basketball, having no idea what the true criteria are.  This will be especially nerve wracking for every team that fails to go undefeated, as their pass to the playoff will be qualified with ideas like, “they played a tougher schedule” or “their loss counted against them less because it was on the road”, etc., etc., ad nauseam.  And this lack of selection transparency is the cause of most of the complaints that arise around college football’s championship.  In professional sports, there is a distinct hierarchy of considerations that each team is aware of at all times throughout the season and that is used to determine each league’s playoff teams.  Granted, it can sometimes come down to something as unoriginal as a coin toss, but at least said coin toss is transparent.   But this is privilege of professional sports because the pros play a balanced schedule, in the sense that each team has an allotted percentage of their games played against division, conference, and interconference rivals.  This is not the case in college sports and the result is that the games must be considered instead on a “quality” scale.[3]  Because there are about one-third as many games in college football as in college basketball, and because team winning percentages in college football will have to hover around .850 to even sniff the playoff (no conference tourneys for you sub-.500 teams here), college football teams are not afforded the discussions of both quality wins and quality losses.  Again, transparency fails, as we have absolutely no idea whether wins or losses actually count for more when comparing teams with similar records.

            Take last year for instance.  Four teams – Alabama, Oklahoma State, Stanford, and Boise State – finished the season 11-1.[4]    Boise State, who lost at home to a mediocre TCU team, ranked the lowest of the four teams.  Stanford got walloped at home by number seven Oregon, losing 53-30.  Oklahoma State, amidst the tragedy of the plane crash that claimed the lives of their women’s head basketball coach and an assistant, lost a two-overtime battle against Iowa State in Ames.  And Alabama, as I’m sure you all know, played arguably the most boring game of football involving an SEC team last year, losing at home to the top-ranked LSU Tigers 9-6 in overtime.  If we are to induce anything from these games, then, it is that the BCS formulas seem to imply that road losses are far less harmful than home losses…unless you lose to the number one team in the country.  And if we are to understand that losing is more acceptable if you do it on the road and against better teams (and thus the “quality” of the loss matters more), then the number is the only important thing in the win column. 

How do I make these inductive claims, you ask?  Well, because if the opposite were true, and win “quality” was considered when the number of losses were equal, no rational person could have ever put Alabama in the title game ahead of the Cowboys.  Alabama’s pure numbers are equal, if not better than Oklahoma State’s in a number of places, but the qualification process proves them to be against far weaker overall competition.  This is especially true as the Tide played one game against the FCS Southern Conference’s Georgia Southern Eagles.  In said game – in Tuscaloosa by the way – the Tide gave up the most points all season (21 when they were averaging 7.1 per game up to that point).  For a conference that brags continually about earning its right in the title game, the SEC sure goes out of its way to take on at least one cupcake every season.  In 2011, every one of the teams had at least one FCS opponent, and Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Mississippi State, and South Carolina managed to fit that game into the last four of the season.  Meanwhile, Oklahoma State and Stanford both played all twelve of their regular season games against Division I/FBS competition.  Better numbers against better teams makes for a no-brainer in my opinion.

Whether you favor the BCS system and its ‘every game matters’ approach, or the plus-one format (or plus-n format, depending upon the number of teams that will eventually be participating in the playoff) and its ability to provide redemption after one loss – but probably not more than that, understand that this is likely the best situation for the college football postseason that we’re going to have for years to come.  The overlordship of the NCAA is enough to prove that the NCAA is a model is broken all the way to its root.  So, being as greedy and selfish as I am usually, I’m glad to see the NCAA deliver a playoff format that is going to make more of the games actually matter.  My ill-advised bet that the Wolverines would win a National Title before the Badgers won a Rose Bowl may either land me some cash…or my Badgers a National Title.  49 days until college football, ladies and gents, let’s enjoy the hell out of it.

(PS: Look for the college football preview, coming soon!)

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[1] I’m not against Boise State getting their chance, but so far they haven’t been much more than a twinkle in a mid-major lover’s eye.  Their chances to go undefeated the last two years – and as a result shake up the national title talk – have been squelched in heartbreaking fashion both times, resulting in consecutive trips to the less-than-prestigious pre-Christmas spectacle that is the Las Vegas Bowl.

[2] I did not research, nor do I know offhand, how they determine the top four conferences, but my educated (and probably correct) guess is a combination of that conference’s teams’ winning percentage and the overall strength of schedule those teams faced.

[3] I will pontificate in a later post about the stupidity of the method of “quality” figuring, which is very much the fault of college basketball mid-majors.

[4] The Houston Cougars went 12-1 but got trounced by Southern Miss in their conference championship game, effectively ending any BCS hopes or consideraitions.