The Beauty of the CFP

Last night, the College Football Playoff Selection Committee released their updated rankings going into conference championship week.  And it looks a little funky.  The only undefeated Power 5 team (Florida State) is fourth, while TCU is third, not only ahead of the Seminoles but a whopping three spaces ahead of Baylor, an in-state rival that beat the Horned Frogs.  Throw in the one-loss Ohio State Buckeyes (seemingly doomed to a purgatory equal parts QB injuries and anti-Big Ten bias) in fifth, and a muddy picture emerges.

One thing, however, is clear: this is the best way to figure it all out.

The true merits of the four team playoff structure is the chance of undefeated teams being left out at the top is essentially nil.  Remember Auburn in 2004?  A 13-0 team forever wondering what might have been.  Thankfully, they’d be part of a playoff.  While the BCS made things simpler in deciding two teams, it relied on an unstable mixture of journalists, coaches, and computers.  While apparently an appropriate basis, the tripartite plan had large problems.  As in all sports, computers are never able to fully predict results, particularly in the “Any Given Saturday” atmosphere that seems to dominate college football now.  Add to this the coaches’ poll, a relic of bygone days, which allowed coaches who hadn’t seen every team play to rank the best programs (despite acknowledging the impossibility of this task).  Throw in the moral temptation for a coach to overrate their team in the poll or defer to conference foes, and the coaches’ poll became a joke.  The journalists eventually wanted out, so they were replaced by the Harris poll, a listing put together by a market research firm.

The entire paragraph above can be summed up as utter silliness.  I’ve written here before about the problems with a Selection Committee, especially one that includes non-football people, but the current system is infinitely superior to the past attempts at rankings, including the BCS and the straight reliance on polls that the sport used for so many years.

Some would favor expansion of the playoff to eight teams.  I sense this idea may have its biggest constituency in Big Ten land (and understandably so), but an expansion to eight teams in almost any football season will result in the inclusion of two-loss teams.  It might make for fun television, but the one-loss crowd presents a natural dividing line between top teams and those who don’t belong.  This isn’t to say the eye test might still be used to determine the top 8, and thus some two-loss teams in tough conferences might have a legitimate chance to be in, but such a discussion will cheapen the regular season.  If there’s one nice thing the BCS had, it required teams to win every game to prove they belonged.  The current playoff doesn’t do that as strictly given the increased amount of slots, and allows the appropriate amount of wiggle room, but winning is what needs to be valued above all else. 

When wins are equal, it’s worthwhile and correct to look at the nature of losses.  Makes sense that the best teams will beat teams they should beat and at least be competitive against teams they shouldn’t.  The true beauty of the rankings released this week?  None of the top four teams has an ugly loss.  That regrettably can’t be said for Ohio State (losing at home to a now 6-6 Virginia Tech team) or Baylor (a 41-27 loss to an unranked West Virginia team).  In that sense, I think the Committee has done an admirable job making sure the teams that have no such losses are in, and they’ve ranked them appropriately.     

The College Football Playoff is a beautiful thing.  No beauty is perfect, and the system may need some tinkering at some point.  But the playoff has achieved a remarkable success: it’s fairer and more fun.  While any system based on personal judgments (like the Selection committee) will be accused of overwhelming bias, we no longer need to dig into the computer models to find the target of our anger.  Not to mention, these people have their one job when it comes to the rankings, so it seems foolish to say they aren’t prepared for the choices they are making.  And, what’s best is that more teams now have access, and even more want to be in.  It’s a sign of health that champions are determined this way, and we should keep it the way it is until events force reform.