Horns want an 8 team (pig skin) playoff.
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this makes about as much sense as his other 2173 messages....
I want 8. That's my sweetspot, I think it becomes somewhat diluted beyond 8, but I understand the arguments for more. I think the whole committee aspect is a joke. There are plenty of ways to make it better, but it probably falls under the if it aint broke don't fix it, and from a $ standpoint it aint broke.
That would be my choice. If you're 7th, you really don't have a gripe. Not near as much as if you're 5 anyway. Plus it gives #s 1 and 2 an advantage which seems fair.
You go 8 teams. 5 conf champs. 3 at large. If a mid major is ranked in the top 15 AND wins their conf, they get a 6, 7 or 8 bid--- UNLESS they murdered their power 5 preseason opponents and one ends up ranked in the top 5. (Memphis almost).
Then you fill your remaining spots with the also rans or if ND is ranked in the top 10, automatic bid. In the right hands, with the right PR machine, this playoff would net more than any NCAA basketball tourney.
Then you fill your remaining spots with the also rans or if ND is ranked in the top 10, automatic bid. In the right hands, with the right PR machine, this playoff would net more than any NCAA basketball tourney.
I don't like the idea of a bye. Too big of an advantage for 1 and 2 over 3,4,5. I agree that likely 6 and 7 don't deserve a gripe, but unless there are 2 undefeated teams the difference between 2 and 5 is nothing but whimsical opinions of the committee.
There was a point, before realignment, that I really liked the idea of 12, giving every conference champ a shot, seeding via strength of schedule, having the higher-seeded teams host for the first two rounds, giving the top 4 byes, and giving the highest ranked non-champion team the 12th seed (and therefore the hardest road to the championship, because honestly I don't feel like a team that doesn't win their conference should even be considered to play for the national championship game in a world of uneven scheduling situations). Realignment (and the actual playoff system) have changed my views a bit.
I'd be pretty happy with either a 6 or 8 team playoff at this point. 4 is at least 1 too few, seeing as how there's not a requirement for the power conferences to actually play each other in any even way and it's entirely possible that, in any given year, one of the power conferences could be just tough and beat itself up, leaving all the teams with less impressive records.
If it were 6 teams, I'd say just stick with conference champions, one from each of the power-5 conferences and one spot for the best group-of-5 conf champ.
If it were 8, I'd say that's the approach to go for people who actually believe in "wildcard" teams, giving the power-5 champs a spot each, reserving 1 spot for a group-of-5 champ, and then filling the other 3 spots with the next 3 highest teams. I'd be tempted to say "only one wildcard per conference" but could be ok leaving that up for debate.
Yes, I'm very aware that at least 2 of these methods (and arguably all 3) hold Notre Dame to a disadvantage for not being in a conference since 1 method doesn't really give them a route (unless you can say they can beat out the group-of-5 champ), and the other two mean they'd have to get in as a wildcard.
I'd be pretty happy with either a 6 or 8 team playoff at this point. 4 is at least 1 too few, seeing as how there's not a requirement for the power conferences to actually play each other in any even way and it's entirely possible that, in any given year, one of the power conferences could be just tough and beat itself up, leaving all the teams with less impressive records.
If it were 6 teams, I'd say just stick with conference champions, one from each of the power-5 conferences and one spot for the best group-of-5 conf champ.
If it were 8, I'd say that's the approach to go for people who actually believe in "wildcard" teams, giving the power-5 champs a spot each, reserving 1 spot for a group-of-5 champ, and then filling the other 3 spots with the next 3 highest teams. I'd be tempted to say "only one wildcard per conference" but could be ok leaving that up for debate.
Yes, I'm very aware that at least 2 of these methods (and arguably all 3) hold Notre Dame to a disadvantage for not being in a conference since 1 method doesn't really give them a route (unless you can say they can beat out the group-of-5 champ), and the other two mean they'd have to get in as a wildcard.
Agreed. A bye is way too big of an advantage to predicate on the hair-splitting that goes on in picking between nos. 2 and 3.
I also don't like the idea of automatically granting conference champions a spot in the playoffs. I want the best four (or best eight, if it has to be that way), and I'm fine with committee seeding if that means keeping out some three-loss conference champion.
I've always thought that choosing who gets to be in the playoffs by ranking is a bit ridiculous. College football is the only sport that does it like this, and it's really no better than a popularity contest at times.
Other sports seem to be able to make a playoff system work. You win and you're in.
I like the idea of the little guy getting the chance to win it all. I want the playoff system to be conference champs. Every conference has two divisions. You win your division and you play for the conference title. If you win your conference you get to be in the playoffs. No at large teams; no byes. You can still keep your other bowl games.
That seems fair to me.
Other sports seem to be able to make a playoff system work. You win and you're in.
I like the idea of the little guy getting the chance to win it all. I want the playoff system to be conference champs. Every conference has two divisions. You win your division and you play for the conference title. If you win your conference you get to be in the playoffs. No at large teams; no byes. You can still keep your other bowl games.
That seems fair to me.
I don't really think other sports make it work any better than division I college football. The only metric that really causes change is $$, and no other college sport is making it work as well as football by that metric.
I'm partial to a 6 team playoff if you take the 5 major conference winners and one at large team. Then you rank em 1-6 with the top two getting a biweek .
They do a playoff in lower level divisions, but I wouldn't say they make it work, as much as no one really cares about possible imperfections. Unfortunately every imperfection at this level is spotlighted and magnified on a weekly basis.
I like it in college basketball and baseball. But I also love the fact that you have to have had a nearly perfect season to be the national champion in college football, and the fact that other sports do it differently doesn't mean to me that they necessarily do it any better.
Eh, I mean, we saw how having a committee choose the best four teams based on their opinions (and to some extent, w/l records) worked out. We had two blowout games. Woo. Can you honestly say that having Stanford in the mix would have made the match-ups worse? I actually think having Stanford and Houston round out a 6-team playoff might have given us a chance to see BETTER games, not worse ones.
I mean, clearly Iowa would have been a disaster if they were included in almost any match up, if you went to 8, but again, I'm all for upping the importance of strength of schedule and lowering the importance of a committee's personal biases for ANY playoff, even a 4-team one. As long as you skip over Iowa, there are plenty of teams in the top of the rankings this year who might have made for good games as wildcard teams.
As far as 3-loss conference champions, it happens so rarely recently (if you look at records prior to bowl games) that you're statistically way more likely to get a bad match-up from teams with good records than you are to have to worry about there actually being a 3 or more loss team. And as I said above, there's always the chance that some year one conference just is that much tougher than everyone else. It basically sets up a situation where no conference can complain. No "but the SEC was just so tough from top to bottom!" No "the parity in the Pac 12 this year took them out of the running, despite the fact that they were as good as anyone". Whoever the best team is, they get their shot, and if they don't win...? Then that's their fault or their conference-mates for not beating them and claiming the championship for themselves.
Anyway, the more that a conference championship is a factor in getting into the playoff, the more things matter week-to-week during the season. I feel like your conference slate should be your playoff elimination. If you aren't the best in your conference, why should you be considered for the best in the nation? So, while I'd be ok with wildcards in an 8 team playoff, I feel like there's more substance to it if you give the focus and advantages to whoever actually wins their conference.
For starters, you're working from a pretty limited sample here. I don't think we've seen anything that allows us to conclude that the committee's choices will inevitably lead to a greater proportion of bad games than with any other system. Take a look at all of the BCS bowls, BCS NCG games, and major bowls since the start of the CFP: roughly 50% of all of those games have been blowouts and flops. Bad games happen a lot in college football. This postseason saw an unusually high proportion of them across all of the bowls.
For another thing, and perhaps more to the point, you and I simply value things differently. Even assuming that the CFP will produce a marginally greater proportion of bad matchups -- which I don't concede -- I value maintaining the requirement that the CFB national champion have had a nearly perfect season more than I care about that hypothetical cost. I'm not in favor of an eight-team playoff for that same reason -- the fewer two-loss teams that have a chance to play for the national championship, the better, as far as I'm concerned. I can understand why people would want an eight-team playoff, but I value competing concerns differently than those folks. I also have an extremely strong aversion to introducing a structural advantage/disadvantage as formidable as a bye when there's no consistently satisfactory way of differentiating between no. 2 and no. 3 seeds.
It happens entirely too often for my taste (key words), if we're going to be letting those conference champions play for a national championship. In the past decade, the ACC and Big Ten have sent one three-loss champion, two four-loss champions, and one five-loss team champion to major bowls. (The former Big East also sent a three-loss and a four-loss champion to major bowls during that time.)
That's rarely a complaint that any significant number of people care about. Yeah, some conferences and divisions are particularly tough in some years, but I can't remember any widespread laments that some 9-3 team deserved a shot at a national championship because their conference was so tough. People factor in conference difficulty among P5 schools to the tune of one win/loss, but nobody is going to get much sympathy for their complaints past that margin.
I don't really agree, since under an arrangement where all conference champions got automatic admission to the CFP, we would have seen six teams with three or more losses in the playoff since 2005. What you say would be more the case if champions were determined by complete round-robin play (no longer possible with conferences of >10 teams) rather than predominantly by championship games.
But I can just as easily say, "Why should an 8-5 Wisconsin team get even a half-second of consideration for a CFP berth?" or "Why should a 9-3 WVU team that lost at home by 26 points to 13-0 LSU (and 26 points to 5-7 Syracuse and at home to 7-6 Louisville) get in while 11-1 Alabama, whose only loss came at home to that same LSU team by three points in OT, gets left at home?" Every system has its potential sub-optimal outcomes.
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Well, sure, that's a limited sample, but you're kind of getting to my point with yours. There are going to be chances for there to be bad games regardless of what method is used, so acting like throwing in another team is going to increase the odds of a bad game seems a bit moot. If there's a big match up, most of us are going to watch it. If there's a blowout, most of us are going to get tired of us so long as our team isn't playing in the game. But while bad match-ups are always bound to happen, this year certainly doesn't help to support that a biased "eye test" by a committee actually achieves a better outcome. We're on year 2, so that's certainly a small sample size, but I'll be interested to see if the committee admits that they need to tweak the way they do things.
I'm certainly not arguing that it will always result in worse match-ups, but I am going to say that, so far, there's no evidence that they've made BETTER ones. At best it seems, so far, that they've done about equally as well. The main improvement, to me so far, is that there are 4 teams with a shot instead of simply 2. In THAT way they cut down on the odds that they didn't put the best team in the championship game. They doubled the chance that they got it right. But that said, look, imagine if, somehow, Iowa had gotten up for their conference championship game. They would have had to beat, more or less, ONE really impressive team to get into the playoff. And I mean, based on your "losses are the ultimate elimination" theory... it wouldn't matter that their schedule was pretty weak. While Stanford, who also won their conference, would have been left out. Now, this is one of those rare hypotheticals that we actually got to see play out in real life. I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that Stanford, who came into the bowl game with 2 losses already, was the FAR FAR superior team than Iowa who had 1 (and in my hypothetical, 0) loss. I also don't think that there's any question in people's minds that Stanford's regular season schedule was MUCH more difficult than Iowa's. If you put ANY team into their shoes... Oklahoma... Clemson... Alabama... they'd probably have sailed through Iowa's schedule and had a rough time with Stanford's, whether their eventual record would have been better than 11-2 or not.
On the other hand, I'd tend to agree that byes, in such a small format, would be bad. If you DID expand it to something like 12 to invite all the conference champions and 1 or 2 wildcards in, then a first round bye for 4 teams would almost work a bit like a lot of the early season basketball tournaments that have regional games against smaller-name opponents to start. The one change would be that, if somehow San Diego State or Houston upset someone, they'd actually get into the "real" rounds. With 6 teams, the first round bye would be a huge advantage across a potentially minuscule difference in the team's resume. I'd agree that would be a bit problematic. I still think you'd see as many "upsets" according to the seeing, but yeah, it's still a bit more unfair than I'd prefer.
I also feel like focusing entirely on W/L record strongly encourages teams to schedule like Baylor does. Why schedule Notre Dame AND Cal in the same season, even a season where you're going to be GREAT, when an extra loss is part of what the committee is going to focus on (rather than whether you won your conference and what your strength of schedule was). I LOVE Texas' current scheduling method of 1 marquee game, 1 other power-5 game, and one lite game... but if we're following your logic, this scheduling method would be pretty dumb. It would be far smarter to schedule NO ONE out of conference like Baylor has been... or if you are worried that "they're on to us", then go the SEC route and play as few conference games as you can get away with, at least 1 FCS game, and 2 other cupcakes. 3 automatic wins (unless you mess up against Toledo or something) makes a lot more sense if all you care about is going 12 or 13 - 0, or 11 - 1. No, I'd rather encourage good out-of-conference football. Give me a strong strength of schedule component to reward those teams that schedule and win in tough OOC games by giving them a better chance of getting in and affecting how they're seeded, and let a team in if they win their conference rather than punish a team for playing a harder schedule and occasionally losing one of those "optional" games.
Yeah, I was trying to get an exact count per conference overall but ran into complications when I realized that A) a lot of the 3 or 4 loss teams actually acquired that 3rd or 4th loss in a bowl game, B) a lot of 3 or 4 loss conference champions from back in the day are actually co-champions (many times with other teams with 2 or fewer losses) so it comes down to a question of which one got the bowl bid, and C) some years there are, overall, fewer teams with flawless or near-flawless records than others, so sometimes 3 losses is good enough to be one of the top 8 bowl slots since there weren't any other BCS conference teams with fewer losses (even if you want to ignore things like my Iowa example and say that they deserve a higher spot despite having a horrible schedule).
Just a spot we'll have to agree to disagree on. W/L record is at least as bad a determiner of who is deserving as who won conferences. As I explained above, the goal, if you want in the playoff, would suddenly be to play the weakest schedule possible. Hell, to take it to the most logical conclusion, the goal would be to move to the weakest conference possible. This year it would have been ideal to be in the Big 10 West! I mean, how many teams with winning records did Iowa have to beat to go unbeaten in conference play? And even a few of those were only above .500 because they also play in the Big 10 West! At least if you won a conference (championship game, or otherwise) you accomplished something to make the cut. AND it also gives you a clear goal, not a "you have to pass the eye test" bs thing where SEC bias or "well, they didn't run the score up as much as this other team" can play a role. Conference championship? Hey, I can actually define what it takes to win that. Strength of schedule? Just a little vague since opponents' strength will change from year to year, but you can get a pretty good idea of how to schedule the right level of teams to get what you're wanting. I could draw a simple picture to tell you how to get into the playoff that way, as opposed to requiring a few gigs of data, an iPad, and a few hours in a meeting room with other people to come up with who's getting in and who isn't.
6 is flawed because of byes. 8 is flawed because it rewards more teams that didn't actually win anything (i.e., Iowa), but 4 is, to me, the most flawed because I'd think Stanford has a reasonable argument that they could have been better and played a tougher slate than one or two of the teams who got in ahead of them. They won a major conference with several ranked teams. What's not to like about how their season turned out?
Plus, we saw how this went back in the BCS era. LSU won the regular season game, won their conference championship game, ended the regular season unbeaten. Bama still got into the title game. NO ONE ELSE even got a chance, and LSU's regular season win... which should have been HUGE... didn't really matter. By your method, that would be encouraged rather than saying... hey, you know what? That game was won once already. What if another conference has a team that could beat them? What if Bama and LSU were the only two good teams in their conference that year?
Well, again, in recent years those aren't questions that are likely to come up, but even if they were... there's a pretty clear answer. The Big 10 might have been the best conference some season. Wisconsin got through 8-5 by beating the third and eighth best teams in the country but losing to the fourth, fifth, tenth, and then they had a flop one week when their QB was injured. They did what was required to say they were the best team in their conference! To me, that counts for something and counts for more than, well, the SEC had 3 teams that went 11-1 in the regular season, and then everyone else had 7 wins or less, with a huge amount of 6 win teams thanks to their built in 3 auto-wins. In that case? Yeah, I'd include a 8-5 Wisconsin who won their conference. I mean, clearly one of the other SEC teams would probably get a wildcard spot in the 8-team version... because, of course they would. But it's entirely possible that at least one of those SEC teams got 3 wins against FCS, cupcake, cupcake, Syracuse, Vanderbilt, South Carolina on a bad year, Arkansas, A&M when they were shuffling QBs, Mizzou, Mississippi State... the last 3 of which aren't horrible but aren't super impressive... and then got their one big win when Ole Miss was looking ahead or something. Meh.
Anyway, give me a clear goal for every team in the country to go after, not a moving goal post where halfway through the season you start hearing the buzz about why your wins weren't blow-out-y enough of your schedule didn't impress people. Win your conference, play one or two good OOC opponents (and win) and that's the what the committee wants to see! That's simple. That takes into account the error of some conferences being up and others being down. That takes into account uneven scheduling. And any real gripes would come down to how the conferences themselves schedule and crown their champion, not some mysterious committee biases.
I'd just like to see the politics and popular opinion taken out. I remember when TCU was getting snubbed year in and year out when they were in the Mountain West. I remember when Alamaa couldn't even win their own division, but ended up playing LSU for a national championship. There are many cases of seemingly deserving teams getting a cold shoulder, or seemingly undeserving teams getting a shot...
I'd rather see a level playing field across the board, where everyone gets a shot. I can't think of a fairer way than to make it start with winning your conference. Then as long as you keep winning there is no doubt.
Will there be one loss teams left out, while a potential 3 or 4 loss team is in? Yep... Shoulda won your conference. Is your team scheduling OOC sissies? Okay, but if your OOC schedule doesn't prepare you for you conference that's too bad. Maybe beating up on the sisters of the poor before conference play isn't so attractive now...
If you don't make the playoffs you can still go to a bowl and play a [hopefully] quality opponent.
In my humble opinion, having someone like UH in the mix would have been a good addition to the NC mix. The problem is that Houston got no respect, because they aren't a power conference team. They had 1 loss and were ranked #18 (even if they were undefeated, do you think they would have been voted into the top 10?) FSU had 2 losses and was the #9 team. The Cougars had little trouble handling the 'Noles. Who's to say they couldn't have gone all the way.
I'd like to see the occasional Cinderella story play out on the field. The current playoff system doesn't allow for that.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the 8 team playoff wouldn't be the closest thing to a good compromise for people from my and txleapd views, and BringBackRoyal's views. 8 teams. The conference champions of the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC, and the highest ranked gang-of-5 conference (this year it would likely have been Houston), plus the highest remaining wildcard teams. I still think that upping the SOS factor would help with making those two teams more legitimate though.
No, it wouldn't be perfect by either of our standards. You'd end up with wildcard teams that didn't win their conference, which I think is kind of lame and takes away from the regular season, and you'd end up potentially a team with a 2 or 3 losses who won their conference... so again, not perfect by either standard... but it avoids the potentially major advantage of a first round bye, it prevents Stanford and Houston (this year) or Baylor/TCU (last year) from having any gripe about how it turned out, and perhaps most of all, it gives everyone a clear guild line for what it takes to make the playoff. I think that a big part of what bugged me the past couple years is that it's pretty vague what you'd tell the teams that missed out to do to fix things so they don't miss it next time. Go unbeaten? Well, even most of the teams that got in didn't do that. Play a tougher OOC schedule? Play a championship game? Don't play a championship game? Play in a better conference? Run up the score more? Play more "smash mouth" football? It's all vague and opinion-based. Give me something standard: Win your conference, and play at least a good team or two and OOC play. Simple answer.
I think the SOS factor would have changed the seeding a bit, but this doesn't look terrible
2014:
8. Boise State vs 1. Alabama
vs.
5. Baylor vs. 4. Ohio State
7. Mississippi Sate vs. 2. Oregon
vs.
6. TCU vs 3. Florida State
2015:
8. Houston vs 1. Clemson
vs.
5. Iowa (Unless SOS would bump them below ND) vs 4. Oklahoma
7. Ohio State (or Notre Dame if you limit it to two per conference) vs. 2. Alabama
vs.
6. Stanford vs. 3. Michigan State
Aside from the one obvious SOS issue in one case, I don't really see any obvious duds in the list (and most would certainly draw an audience). You'd get rid of any of the possible arguments people had about the results. I suppose you could always have a "play-in" game for the group-of-5 team if those teams agreed to it, or not if they thought that would be too strenuous to have an extra game. And, honestly, I think Stanford vs Alabama as a potential 2nd round game looks a lot better than the way this season's final 4 played out...
No, it wouldn't be perfect by either of our standards. You'd end up with wildcard teams that didn't win their conference, which I think is kind of lame and takes away from the regular season, and you'd end up potentially a team with a 2 or 3 losses who won their conference... so again, not perfect by either standard... but it avoids the potentially major advantage of a first round bye, it prevents Stanford and Houston (this year) or Baylor/TCU (last year) from having any gripe about how it turned out, and perhaps most of all, it gives everyone a clear guild line for what it takes to make the playoff. I think that a big part of what bugged me the past couple years is that it's pretty vague what you'd tell the teams that missed out to do to fix things so they don't miss it next time. Go unbeaten? Well, even most of the teams that got in didn't do that. Play a tougher OOC schedule? Play a championship game? Don't play a championship game? Play in a better conference? Run up the score more? Play more "smash mouth" football? It's all vague and opinion-based. Give me something standard: Win your conference, and play at least a good team or two and OOC play. Simple answer.
I think the SOS factor would have changed the seeding a bit, but this doesn't look terrible
2014:
8. Boise State vs 1. Alabama
vs.
5. Baylor vs. 4. Ohio State
7. Mississippi Sate vs. 2. Oregon
vs.
6. TCU vs 3. Florida State
2015:
8. Houston vs 1. Clemson
vs.
5. Iowa (Unless SOS would bump them below ND) vs 4. Oklahoma
7. Ohio State (or Notre Dame if you limit it to two per conference) vs. 2. Alabama
vs.
6. Stanford vs. 3. Michigan State
Aside from the one obvious SOS issue in one case, I don't really see any obvious duds in the list (and most would certainly draw an audience). You'd get rid of any of the possible arguments people had about the results. I suppose you could always have a "play-in" game for the group-of-5 team if those teams agreed to it, or not if they thought that would be too strenuous to have an extra game. And, honestly, I think Stanford vs Alabama as a potential 2nd round game looks a lot better than the way this season's final 4 played out...
