If we had an 8-team playoff this year - yesterday’s games would have meant nothing. Maybe the best way to do 8 would be to eliminate the conference championship games and use the weekend for the first round. I’m sure the conferences would agree to that, right?
I don’t think there is a way to do a national championship thing for college football that won’t piss off someone.
There was a good article in this week’s Sports Illustrated about the college football playoff format. Basically it said that the 4-team playoff is the sweet spot. You keep the importance of the regular season, because there’s not so many spots that weak teams can slide in. And you don’t leave highly deserving teams sitting out because there’s not enough spots. Perfect? Of course not. But move in any direction and you lose on one of those two fronts.
Fortunately that’s simply their opinion and one I disagree with. With a 4 team playoff and 5 power conferences, you always leave a deserving conference champion out of the mix. Of course that depends on how you define “deserving”. But to me it seems like highly deserving teams get left out every season. Also I do not believe that an 8 team playoff would litter the playoffs with weak teams at all. Sure, there’s likely a drop off the further down the rankings you go but that argument can be used against having a 4 team playoff vs a single game championship as well. In general, the top 8 teams in the country are all good enough to deserve a shot. Once again that depends on how you define deserving. I think a playoff that includes all 5 power conference champions and the 3 best at large teams is far more “the sweet spot” than what we have now. In part because it possible today that 2 conference champions could get left out by a team that did not win their conference and played a very soft schedule. So I guess what SI is really saying is they should reward a team that plays a soft schedule over championship teams that survived a grind? Nope, I disagree.
Goddamn it Wisconsin.
And there it is.
Bullshit it’s bama. I understand it not being USC. We simply couldn’t put teams away the way we should have, but it should have been Ohio State then.
To add to that, how can they jump Alabama over Auburn given the recency of the loss.
Fuck you, Wisconsin.
Oh, I don’t think anyone is arguing that. What the article was saying was that in order to correct that, you’d have to take a step backward in keeping the regular season games as relevant as possible. Which I think is correct, if you go to 8 teams and/or give conf champs an automatic bid, then there’s less relevance prior to the post-season. Of course, you could argue that it doesn’t matter if the regular season continues to stay as relevant, but a lot of folks do care.
I don’t think Alabama should be in the playoff, but then I don’t think Ohio State deserves to be either. It is a shame that the committee has no interest in letting non-power conferences into the playoff because this was the perfect season for it and UCF the perfect team. They would probably lose big, but at least they would be more deserving than ‘Bama or OSU.
One thing to note about expanding the playoff: So far, there’s been exactly one competitive playoff semifinal: Ohio State beating Alabama 42-35 in 2014-2015 season. The other five have been blowouts or at least decisive wins. Expansion is probably not viable from a competitive standpoint, but it is probably inevitable given the additional money that could be made.
“It happens.” 2007 Missouri Tigers
USC’s problem wasn’t not putting teams away, it was the huge egg they laid in South Bend where they weren’t even competitive.
And Ohio State’s problem was the even bigger egg they laid in Iowa. I’m an Ohio State alum and as big a fan as there is, but I really can’t say they’re a better team than Bama this year.
It’s hard to say because Alabama failed their only big test, but while everyone points to the Iowa game, the bigger problem was getting torched by Oklahoma at home, IMHO.
Also, Ohio state got a huge gift last year and wasn’t competitive.
Except that Oklahoma is the current No. 2 team, so I don’t think that early-season loss hurt them that much. And there’s this: “More damaging was the 31-point loss to unranked Iowa,” committee chair Kirby Hocutt told ESPN on Sunday.
Anyway, the USC - Ohio State Cotton Bowl should be fun.
It’s weird that they decided to have the Rose Bowl in Texas this year and also renamed it the Cotton Bowl.
Re: The CFP, this year sent the message that P5 conferences shouldn’t schedule championship games and that G5 conferences should set up their own playoff structure. I agree with this tiny tweetstorm:
Win that game and they are comfortably #2, if not #1 overall.
Alabama doesn’t belong there. It’s politics of College Football and nothing more.
Actually, I think they ignored the politics and went with the team they though had the best chance of winning. Politics would have dictated taking a Big Ten team and a conference champion. So I give the committee credit for that.