More evidence to file into the we-already-knew-that files. Simply put, the system cannot cope when there are three or more teams vying for supremacy. So if there are multiple undefeated teams in contention, the two with the highest preseason rankings will get to go to the championship game. Or if there are several one-loss teams in the hunt, it will likely feature the two which lost earliest in the season.
Either way, teams–and college football fans–get screwed. And we’ll continue to miss out until the NCAA implements an eight (or more) team playoff.
Y’know, while I think that the silliness of March Madness is, uh, silly…. a damn championship tournament makes sense. And they do it just fine in basketball. Why the hell not for football?
Well, I think no matter what some form of polls/rankings are going to be involved; you can’t really take a college football post-season much farther than 8 team=3 week tournaments. So you might have top and lower-tier tournaments, and there will be grousing about falling out of one tier into the next, and grousing about home-field advantages or lack thereof for the pre-final games.
I happen to think Auburn got about what it deserved with the schedule it took on — bite off a little more next time and check back with us, Coach Tuberville. I think USC would have done more or less the same thing with them that they did with OK.
Also, the satisfaction of a somewhat fairer system will be offset by a shorter conference season. Plus there would be slightly lower-quality finals, I think: on average, more injuries and fatigue will happen in the pre-final games than otherwise, since the opponents will be more evenly matched by design than they would be in the regular season conference games they’d presumably replace.
If that’s true, rational top college athletes would be that much more likely to go pro as juniors or even sophomores before they get injured earning nothing — and the NFL would be rational to take them. I think that lots of people seem to want college football to look (even) more like pro football. I wonder if they’ll like it when they get there.
Thomas,
Good point about Auburn’s non-conference schedule. But any undefeated SEC team deserves a shot at the national title.
Interesting point about playoffs and injuries. But is there any hard evidence that games pitting “evenly matched” teams produce more injuries than otherwise? It’s purely anecdotal, but there are plenty of examples of players getting injured in games against inferior foes. If you have a 250 pound person falling on you the wrong way, it might not make much difference how fast he can run.
The NCAA needs to institute a 16-team, 4-week playoff. Ten teams would be conference champs from the SEC, Big12, Big10, Pac10, ACC, BigEast, ConfUSA, MWC, MAC, and WAC, with room for 6 at-large teams. Sure, there are small conferences included without any chance their champion would win, but it would put them on the playing field as in the basketball tourney. Moreover, I believe that while there’s usually not a realistic shot that any of 16 teams could win a tourney, I do believe there are years when a 10th-ranked 9-2 team that played a tough schedule could indeed be a champion even in a tourney including an 11-0 team that survived a much weaker schedule. An 8-team playoff would leave that team out.
There’s no doubt the current system is absolutely stupid. Had Cal actually beaten USC, then Auburn and Oklahoma would have played a game pretending to match #1 and #2. Auburn may have a beef to make, but there’s no way Oklahoma would deserve to be in such a game when USC would be left out. Had that happened, Cal might have beaten Michigan in the Rose Bowl and been whining about their shot at a national title, when in fact they are so weak they couldn’t handle Texas Tech.
Automatic bids for the MWC and MAC? Just because basketball does it doesn’t mean that football has to. If one of their teams is deserving it should be able to make an at-large berth. Especially if there is a 16-team field. I think you could probably get all the “legitimate” contenders in a 8-team playoff, but I guess there’s wrong with one more week of football.