College Football 2016 - Cracks in the Golden Dome

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

I can see Kalbears side of things, butt why have a conference champkinship then? What purpose does it even serve? Why have conferences? Just schedule whoever the he'll you want and put 13 guys in a room and the can decide who the best 4 are. Wait, that's what we do. We just have conf championships which apparently mean nothing.

Again, conference championships don't mean nothing. They just aren't the only thing that matters, and if other things are more important they will be factored in. For example, in 2014 they mattered a great deal - Oregon and Ohio State both got into the playoffs because of their conference championship, over the TCU/Baylor garbage. 2015 it didn't matter as much, and again - that's a good thing, because the champion that was left out was Stanford, and they had no argument over any of the other teams that made it in.

We have conferences because of tradition and money. I would gladly get rid of them in favor of relegation and balanced regional divisions, but I can't do that. So we have them. We have conference championships because of money, too. What we don't have is any semblance of balanced conferences or divisions in those conferences (2 14-team conferences, 2 12- team ones and a 10-team one...the fuck?), so making them equally 'fair' makes zero sense. 

Also, as to that Big-10 is the best conference thing? Heh.

 

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

I think Ohio St would beat Penn St 8 out of 10 times, but they didn't. And Iowa's kicker made that field goal and beat Iowa, so all that is just more subjective bullshit. You play the games for a reason. And if winning you're conference championship awards you nothing, than why have it? See, how the make it to the Conference championship is objective, there are rules in place for tie-breakers and such. We don't have to be subjective and say, "Well it was just a field goal that kept them out of it anyway.". The field goal happened, Sorry for UM and OSU, their setting at home on Saturday. If the NCAA can't come up with something of the same sorts, then it's just a money making scheme for the Power 5 to rub one another's back. 

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

Yea, and I've seen different strength of schedules that have Bama at 2 and by a different one at 36. All that is subjective. Just like I think the B1G is the best conf is subjective. We need to take the opinions of people out of the equation is what I'm saying Kalbear. Results be damned. You win and you're in (conf champ), and next 3 highest ranked teams as the other 3 to get a spot in the 8. And, the Bama's and OSU's would still get in. 

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Switchback the Second said:

Am I fine with Va Tech (in this hypothetical scenario) winning 3 games in the playoff to win the whole thing and be crowned "champion" while Bama is left out because they didn't win their conference and there are 3 other non-conference winners who were determined to have better seasons than them?  Um, yes?  What about that scenario seems wrong to you?  Because there is a group of people who think Bama is better than the conference winners in addition to being better than the other 3 non-conference winners who were chosen ahead of them?  I don't follow this logic at all....

Yes, because you're not asking why they lost their championship in the first place. And that might  - or might not - matter. Put it another way: Alabama could have lost 3 of their games and still be the SEC West champion this year, and then could beat Florida and win it all. And for you, those three losses don't matter in the slightest, because they would have won their title.

Which implies heavily that you don't care at all about conference strength, schedule strength, or anything of the sort. If a conference sucks, well, good luck to you then! You're fine with a Big-East kind of conference which was basically Miami and then a bunch of scrubs. 

I am not. I do not want to incentivize Ohio State, Michigan, USC, Alabama, Florida State and Oklahoma to basically get as many shitty teams in their conference as they can so that they automatically get a bid in the playoffs every year. And that's exactly what they'd do. They'd go and form an 8-team conference with shitty other teams that have to play at the big school so that each school can maximize their revenue, and they'd have their own TV station, and they'd just get in every single year. Why would you do anything different?

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I, too understand Kalbear's pov, but I agree with you on this statement. If you can't win your conference, what business do you have trying to win the national title?

And I would say that the answer is sometimes it depends. Iowa beating Michigan should not preclude Ohio State from being in title consideration. Not having a conference championship should not preclude Oklahoma from making it in. Losing to the eventual best team in the country (LSU in 2011) should not preclude Alabama from making it in if they have otherwise shown their skills. Similarly, lucking into being in a shitty conference/division and winning one special game while losing every game you played against good teams should not mean you get to move on - we want to discourage people padding their schedule, and we want to encourage good games - especially good games out of conference. 

[S John]

3 minutes ago, Switchback the Second said:

Am I fine with Va Tech (in this hypothetical scenario) winning 3 games in the playoff to win the whole thing and be crowned "champion" while Bama is left out because they didn't win their conference and there are 3 other non-conference winners who were determined to have better seasons than them?  Um, yes?  What about that scenario seems wrong to you?  Because there is a group of people who think Bama is better than the conference winners in addition to being better than the other 3 non-conference winners who were chosen ahead of them?  I don't follow this logic at all....

 

 

Bama would totally get in as an at-large in that scenario anyway so Kal's point rings a bit hollow to me there.  I agree with you, 5 auto-bids for conference winners and 3 at-large.  It is a pretty simple solution and would work perfectly.  Upsets are always possible, but there will not be an upset in all 5 conference championship games, and if there were, it'll just have to be tough titties for 2 of the 5 teams that were in the mix prior to the final week but failed to win their conference.  That is far less controversial than a closed-door committee with a shifting set of standards that changes every year.  Even if acting in good faith its a system bursting with potential for bias and corruption.  I very much disagree with the notion of moving goal posts being a positive feature, rather than a bug in the system.  

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

Yea, and I've seen different strength of schedules that have Bama at 2 and by a different one at 36. All that is subjective. Just like I think the B1G is the best conf is subjective. We need to take the opinions of people out of the equation is what I'm saying Kalbear. Results be damned. You win and you're in (conf champ), and next 3 highest ranked teams as the other 3 to get a spot in the 8. And, the Bama's and OSU's would still get in. 

Why do we need to take opinions out of it? Again, what has happened so far in the playoff system that indicates that we have had a bad outcome?

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

3 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Why do we need to take opinions out of it? Again, what has happened so far in the playoff system that indicates that we have had a bad outcome?

The Pac-12 and BIGXII only being represented once so far and if Colorado wins probably still only once. There are a bunch of flaws.

[Kalbear]

Just now, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

The Pac-12 and BIGXII only being represented once so far and if Colorado wins probably still only once. There are a bunch of flaws.

Why is that a flaw? 

Last year - do you think Stanford would have been better instead of Alabama or Clemson?

In 2014, was TCU or Baylor (and I'm fairly certain one of those really shit the bed later) any better than Oregon, Ohio State or Alabama? (arguably they were better than FSU, but then you'll have to tell me how an unbeaten FSU team should be excluded).

You say there are a bunch more flaws. What are they? And if the purpose of the playoff is to determine the championship, why do you care about participation trophies?

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

But you saying those teams are better is purely subjective. Before OSU played PSU, who in the Nation said that PSU would win that game? None. They did though. So, to say it isn't unfair that TCU or Baylor or Stanford for left out, becuse other teams were better in opinion only is totally unfair. TCU was a beast that year, I think they could have won it all, but guess what? 13 goons in suits giving their opinion thought they wasn't. You're giving me the argument that opinions matter, when they shouldn't. It should be decided on the field. Outcomes be damned. It might have been Alabama getting a participation trophy if TCU got in. We'll never know though. Because.....opinions.

[Switchback the Second]

Here's my thinking on conference championships being the most important.  

Bama is more comparable to Florida, LSU, Auburn, etc than they are to say Stanford, USC and Oregon.  The teams in a conference (any conference) share things in common like going after similar recruits, style of play, pressure/demands from fanbases/admin, traditions, etc.  Any number of things make Bama more comparable to Florida year-in year-out than any school from a different conference.  And this is true of any of the power 5 conferences.  

There has admittedly been some jockeying around in the conferences the last few years, but that's an outlier, and the teams that don't fit in with their conference now on the things I mentioned above are at most 2 out of 14 per conference.

So you have these mostly regional conferences, competing with each other for recruits, playing similar styles, dealing with similar pressures, etc.  Those things differ (for the most part) from conference to conference.  Comparing these teams across conferences will absolutely require subjective determinations on things like type of win, quality of loss, who's playing better when, etc.  If you're going to do that, I think it's a much more fair system that first objectively rewards the 5 conference winners, and then subjectively chooses 3 more.  You can't easily compare teams across conferences, but there are established ways to determine a conference champion.

As for scheduling, and teams trying to form new conferences or bring in scrubs to existing conferences, I think that's an extreme scenario.  Florida for instance isn't interested in leaving the SEC, and the idea of forming a conference with the likes of USF, UCF, FIU, whoever isn't going to change that.  The main conferences will survive mostly in tact.  OSU and Michigan aren't leaving the Big-10 for example.  I also think if conference championship gets you in no matter what, you may have schools more interested in scheduling tougher OOC games since it doesn't affect their conference record at all.

[Kalbear]

3 minutes ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

But you saying those teams are better is purely subjective. Before OSU played PSU, who in the Nation said that PSU would win that game? None. They did though. So, to say it isn't unfair that TCU or Baylor or Stanford for left out, becuse other teams were better in opinion only is totally unfair. TCU was a beast that year, I think they could have won it all, but guess what? 13 goons in suits giving their opinion thought they wasn't. You're giving me the argument that opinions matter, when they shouldn't. It should be decided on the field. Outcomes be damned. It might have been Alabama getting a participation trophy if TCU got in. We'll never know though. Because.....opinions.

First, note that because TCU lost to Baylor they were not, actually, the Big-12 champions. So you're advocating putting in a non-champion who didn't even play a conference championship game because they were beastly. I am pointing this out not because you are necessarily wrong, but because it is entirely inconsistent with your argument of fairness or determining it on the field. 

And with that out of the way, let's be really, really, clear about it:

I am not saying anything about something being unfair. I do not care one fucking iota about fairness in the argument here. That's your argument. And it's a reasonable one - if you want to maximize fairness, having a purely subjective system with entirely changing criteria is about as unfair as it gets. 

I say that openly. The playoff system is crazily unfair. Absurdly unfair. 100% unfair. And I don't care that much, because the unfairness of the entire college football system vastly out-dwarfs the unfairness of picking playoff teams. Because of that - because college football is incredibly unfair in general - my interest is in making the best playoff games I reasonably can do, regardless of being fair or not. And to me, the best possible way to pick every year is to have a team of experts whose job it is to pick those teams. I expect they will have biases, will use rationalizations to justify their feelings, etc - but that is still a better system than any supposedly objective, static system that cannot adjust to new information rapidly. 

[Switchback the Second]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I say that openly. The playoff system is crazily unfair. Absurdly unfair. 100% unfair. And I don't care that much, because the unfairness of the entire college football system vastly out-dwarfs the unfairness of picking playoff teams. Because of that - because college football is incredibly unfair in general - my interest is in making the best playoff games I reasonably can do, regardless of being fair or not. And to me, the best possible way to pick every year is to have a team of experts whose job it is to pick those teams. I expect they will have biases, will use rationalizations to justify their feelings, etc - but that is still a better system than any supposedly objective, static system that cannot adjust to new information rapidly. 

Okay, yeah... we're having different arguments then.  No use in continuing on really. 

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, Switchback the Second said:

There has admittedly been some jockeying around in the conferences the last few years, but that's an outlier, and the teams that don't fit in with their conference now on the things I mentioned above are at most 2 out of 14 per conference.

this is completely inaccurate. Conference changes in the big-5 have happened at a rate of about 2 per year since the 90s. And that's not counting things like the Big-East basically ceasing to exist as an entity. And more importantly, this is not going to stop moving forward. Already each conference is looking to expand in various ways. Furthermore there is nothing stopping them from doing so. 

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So you have these mostly regional conferences, competing with each other for recruits, playing similar styles, dealing with similar pressures, etc.  Those things differ (for the most part) from conference to conference.  Comparing these teams across conferences will absolutely require subjective determinations on things like type of win, quality of loss, who's playing better when, etc.  If you're going to do that, I think it's a much more fair system that first objectively rewards the 5 conference winners, and then subjectively chooses 3 more.  You can't easily compare teams across conferences, but there are established ways to determine a conference champion.

Sure, and I don't care about fairness at all. The entire college football system is the most unfair, gerrymandered, exploitative sporting system in the entire world. 

And as I pointed out above, TCU lost to Baylor and was not the conference champion, yet was pretty clearly the best team in 2014.

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As for scheduling, and teams trying to form new conferences or bring in scrubs to existing conferences, I think that's an extreme scenario.  Florida for instance isn't interested in leaving the SEC, and the idea of forming a conference with the likes of USF, UCF, FIU, whoever isn't going to change that.  The main conferences will survive mostly in tact.  OSU and Michigan aren't leaving the Big-10 for example.  I also think if conference championship gets you in no matter what, you may have schools more interested in scheduling tougher OOC games since it doesn't affect their conference record at all.

Florida has already talked about leaving the SEC, especially with the SEC East being how it is. OSU and Michigan would leave in an instant if it meant more money and as long as they kept their rivalry game, and that is if anything easier with separate conferences. Now, you are right that OOC schedules might get better if conferences were weaker - but it also means that you'll get incredibly shitty conferences as a result because that results in the best overall outcome for the rich teams. 

And make no mistake - that's what drives the boats here. The haves of the college football world are the ones that drive everything else. In a perfect system only the haves would play each other - an elite megaconference of 32-40 teams that play everyone else regularly, leaving out the other 80+ bad teams and the other 80+ FCS teams. That would be fair. But that's not what we have. 

[Switchback the Second]

Okay, you drew me back in...  "Florida has already talked about leaving the SEC"????

As an alum, and fan of more than 30 years, this is news to me.  You have a link saying Florida has looked at getting out of the SEC?

[sperry]

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

As long as the conferences are entirely separate entities with no balance of power, no standard system of play, no restrictions on who they bring in to conference, no restrictions on how many conference games they play, no restriction on who they play outside of conference, no restriction on divisions and no restriction on even determining who the conference champion is, there should be no auto-bid into any playoff system.

Having an objective system works when the above are ALSO objective. It doesn't work when those things can be manipulated. Having a subjective system is absolutely unfair, but it also produces the best overall results year over year because things can change from year to year and rules don't keep pace with people's perceptions.

So yes, it is somewhat unfair that if Penn State wins out they wouldn't be in the playoff and Ohio State would be - but it's also undeniably the right call, because Penn State played an easier schedule and lucked out in beating Ohio State in a really weird game. It is unfair that Penn State wouldn't make it in over Michigan, either, but again - Michigan played a harder schedule, dominated said schedule, and looked otherwise significantly better. For a person who doesn't care personally about Penn State, Michigan, or Ohio State the right result is to bring in the teams that have the best shot of winning everything, regardless of fairness. 

 

Again, 8 teams is not just conference champions. You have the 5 conference champions, plus 3 at large to account for upsets in championship games and/or one conference just being stronger than the others.  In the entirety of the BCS era plus the 3 playoff years, there have been only 2 or 3 times that an undeserving power 5 team won a conference championship. There have been times when bad teams like Florida have made the championship game, but they've never actually won.  And assuming they win once every decade or so, that's not exactly a deal-breaker for the system. However, that system does make sure that each conference gets one representative, and an entire conference isn't snubbed on the basis of apples to oranges comparisons.

[Ded As Ned]

Florida talking of leaving the SEC is news to me as well... and I generally follow the SEC first and foremost.  Have they been so dominant they are looking for more competitive pastures?  I think not.  Where would they go?  For a football school, (and not trying to start another debate here on SEC football dominance) but where would they go?  Right now they have the easiest path to the SEC championship game... why would you leave?  

Besides that, I'm totally uninterested in the playoffs this year, because THE CATS ARE BOWLING BABY!

 

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

@Kalbear, after I wrote about TCU and thought about it, I remembered Baylor was de facto champ, can't get nothing by ya, can i?

I see your side, I honestly do. I just hate a world where Conf. Champ mean nothing, basically. And this year thats the case. Colorado won't get in if they win neither. I'd just like to see it go to 8. The 5 Power 5 champs and then they can eye test the Fuck out of the next 3. Then Bama, LSU and OSU can get in every year. ;)

As for your example of when Bama lost and still got to play LSU again for the NC, that might have been the 2 best teams, but it was the worst fucking game I've ever watched. Huge let down. 

[Kalbear]

48 minutes ago, Switchback the Second said:

Okay, you drew me back in...  "Florida has already talked about leaving the SEC"????

As an alum, and fan of more than 30 years, this is news to me.  You have a link saying Florida has looked at getting out of the SEC?

I'll see if I can find something; it was something I think I heard on sports radio, talking about how Florida suffers because they have to occasionally play Bama. I think the context was if the SEC expands to 16 or more teams, why should the division have to play either really shitty teams or really great teams in the other division. The other SEC teams really hate the Florida veto power of bringing in other Florida schools. 

And they currently do have the easiest time getting to the championship but they have almost zero chance of winning it. 

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Again, 8 teams is not just conference champions. You have the 5 conference champions, plus 3 at large to account for upsets in championship games and/or one conference just being stronger than the others.  In the entirety of the BCS era plus the 3 playoff years, there have been only 2 or 3 times that an undeserving power 5 team won a conference championship. There have been times when bad teams like Florida have made the championship game, but they've never actually won.  And assuming they win once every decade or so, that's not exactly a deal-breaker for the system. However, that system does make sure that each conference gets one representative, and an entire conference isn't snubbed on the basis of apples to oranges comparisons.

So you're saying in 12 years 3 times teams have won their conference undeservedly. That, to me, is 3 times too much. 

I'm also not remotely convinced that having all 5 conferences represented is at all important or even desirable. Why stop at those 5? What happens if the SEC West and East split? What happens if the Big-10 split? Or the Pac-12 becomes the Pac-16? What happens if we get 4 'big' conferences, or 6? Again, all of these things can be done right away, without any argument, by the respective conferences - the NCAA has no power there, and the playoff system has no power there. 

I'm fine with there being 8 teams, potentially. I am simply completely against any autobids of any kind until you get to at least 16 and preferably 32 teams. In a system of 8 teams and no autobids, the conference champions will get in virtually every time because they're the conference champions, likely have the best record and likely have had the best competition. And if they didn't for some reason, they won't get in. If you don't have a conference represented, perhaps that's because that conference sucks balls. This was the case for a long while with the Big East, as an example, and it was a good thing they were basically eliminated, because Connecticut playing in a major bowl game sucked ass. Meanwhile, you'll be rewarding the teams that played the best over the best schedule. You'll be rewarding teams for hard losses to good teams as well as wins over meh teams, because that results in the best overall quality of regular and postseason football. 

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As for your example of when Bama lost and still got to play LSU again for the NC, that might have been the 2 best teams, but it was the worst fucking game I've ever watched. Huge let down. 

And yet Bama - who you wouldn't include, typically - won. Whereas it was almost certain that any other team that year would have lost to LSU. Oregon already had, Stanford lost to Oregon convincingly, West Virginia lost to LSU, etc. That year was another example where just crowning LSU after the regular season would have likely been fine. 

[Switchback the Second]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I'll see if I can find something; it was something I think I heard on sports radio, talking about how Florida suffers because they have to occasionally play Bama. I think the context was if the SEC expands to 16 or more teams, why should the division have to play either really shitty teams or really great teams in the other division. The other SEC teams really hate the Florida veto power of bringing in other Florida schools. 

And they currently do have the easiest time getting to the championship but they have almost zero chance of winning it.

I'll be interested in whatever you find, because yeah.... that's all bullshit.  We're a founding member of the SEC.  We're not now, nor have we ever, been interested in getting out of the conference.  And yeah, some other schools may have wanted FSU at some point, but again UF is a founding member of the conference, and until just this October has had the most powerful AD in the country running things, FSU isn't coming into the conference to replace Florida. 

And people forget history I guess, but 'occasionally playing Bama' isn't something that will get a school like Florida to run off and hide.  Since the SEC Championship game started we've been in more games than any other school (including Bama) and have a 4-4 split with them when we play them in the Champ. game.  Yes, Bama has been amazing the last several years, but that doesn't wipe away the history, including the fact that we owned them in the 90s. 

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

8 minutes ago, Switchback the Second said:

I'll be interested in whatever you find, because yeah.... that's all bullshit.  We're a founding member of the SEC.  We're not now, nor have we ever, been interested in getting out of the conference.  And yeah, some other schools may have wanted FSU at some point, but again UF is a founding member of the conference, and until just this October has had the most powerful AD in the country running things, FSU isn't coming into the conference to replace Florida. 

And people forget history I guess, but 'occasionally playing Bama' isn't something that will get a school like Florida to run off and hide.  Since the SEC Championship game started we've been in more games than any other school (including Bama) and have a 4-4 split with them when we play them in the Champ. game.  Yes, Bama has been amazing the last several years, but that doesn't wipe away the history, including the fact that we owned them in the 90s. 

I hope somebody starts owning them again. Sick of seeing them as this unbeatable dynasty. When they play Tennessee F'N Chattanooga two weeks ago. That's stacking your schedule! That's why is like it expanded to 8 teams. Style of play is so different amongst conferences that it would make any one teams path to a NC that much harder.