In these days of limitless demand for content, with broadcast hours and YouTube channels overstuffed with “analysis” (read: arguing) of various levels of quality, overreaction has become the norm in both the NFL and college football.
Every latest loss is a “season-klller” and every win is the one to turn around a team’s season … at least until that big win is followed by one of those season-killing losses.
Remember when Deion Sanders’ Colorado squad whupped a losing Utah team playing without its star QB, 10th-year senior Cam Rising? The Buffs were in control of their fate to reach the Big 12 championship game, and there was even talk of “Coach Prime” taking his team from 1-11 to the College Football Playoff in two seasons.
Well, a week later, those hopes took a hit when Colorado lost to another conference rival with a losing record — Kansas. The out-of-contention Jayhawks shook up the Big 12 chase for the third week in a row, after beating contenders Iowa State and BYU. Colorado blew out Oklahoma State the next week, but it was not enough to get the Buffaloes into the B12 final, and Sanders had to settle for a still-impressive 9-3 regular season.
So it’d be easy to dismiss the criticism of the first-year 12-team College Football Playoff as overreaction, and certainly, the final analysis must take into account the remaining three games, but so far it’s been a disaster. I’m not talking about the lack of close games, as we had blowouts under the BCS, and even two closely matched teams can play a game decided by three touchdowns (see: Oregon’s 20-point loss to Ohio State less than three months after the Ducks’ one-point regular season win over the Buckeyes). But I have a few ideas — ranging from “obvious” to “outside the box” — for improving the playoffs.
The bigger problem is that expanding the field decreases the likelihood of the champion actually being the best team in the country. And perhaps the biggest problem is that that no longer seems to be the mission.
The goal of any postseason bracket — whether it’s four teams or 12 or something in between — should be to determine which team was the best in college football this season. When there was a four-team bracket, a worthy team with a legitimate argument was often left out, hence the call to expand the field. But with a 12-team bracket, the talk turned to which teams were left out that belonged among the 12 best in the country.
Who cares if Alabama (losses to fringe bowl teams Vanderbilt and Oklahoma) was left out in favor of 10 seed Indiana (biggest win was over Michigan) and 11 seed SMU (biggest win was over Louisville)? None of those teams has any argument that they were the best in the country.
I don’t think any team that has zero chance of being the best team in the country should be in the field of 12. I think that described the following this season:
>> Fourth-seeded Arizona State (Big 12 champ, but with conference losses to mediocre Cincinnati and Texas Tech)
>> Fifth-seeded Texas (two losses to Georgia mean they are clearly not the best team in the SEC even)
>> Sixth-seeded Penn State (losses to Ohio State and Oregon mean they are definitely not the best team in the Big Ten)
>> 12th-seeded Clemson (three losses before the conference title game is too many to overlook)
From those four, I’d leave Texas in because the injury to Georgia quarterback Carson Beck means the Longhorns could be the best remaining team in the SEC. That leaves seven teams (Oregon, Georgia, Boise State, Texas, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Tennessee) plus two Power 4 conference champions (Arizona State, Clemson) because I believe the schools would require all four of those be included. I’d knock that down to eight because no conference should have three teams in the field, so Tennessee would be out (losses to Georgia and mediocre Arkansas).
I think pretty much every year an eight-team bracket would be sufficient to avoid having to leave out a team that might be the best in the country. So ideally we’d have an eight-team playoff, but I don’t remember the last time the NCAA reduced a postseason field. No matter the size of the field, teams and fan bases will complain about being left out, but I think eight is the smallest field where no one who’s left out can legitimately claim they might be the best team in the nation.
The next two changes I’d make to improve the playoffs would apply whether the field stays at 12 or goes down to eight. I don’t think the top four seeds should automatically go to conference champions. Boise State and Arizona State moved up from ninth and 12th in the rankings because of this rule and it just makes no sense. If the field stays at 12, guarantee the Power 4 champions and the highest-ranked Group of 5 champion a top-eight seed and a home game and call it good enough.
I’d also grant the committee the power to move teams around a little to improve the bracket. Teams would still fall into two to three tiers of four teams, but the committee would have the freedom to sidestep rematches happening too early. There’s no excuse to have rematches before the semifinal round.
For example, making Ohio State an eight seed set up the Buckeyes’ rematch with Oregon (when the draw came out, I thought it was a bum deal for both teams). A goal should be to feature as many interconference matchups as possible because we learn more from them than we do from conference head-to-heads. I would’ve loved to have seen Notre Dame vs. Oregon and Ohio State vs. Boise State or Arizona State in the quarterfinals — even though I think the Buckeyes would have blown out either of those teams — because those games could give us some context to what we saw during the season.
The last idea I have is a little bit more out there. I think the NCAA should designate one week each season for interconference games, with matchups decided by a panel based on the previous season’s finish. Or maybe these matchups could be split over two weeks
Teams would have one fewer nonconference game of choice, but it would lock in some intriguing — and meaningful — games. One idea would be to break the conferences into tiers and have teams from equal or adjacent tiers face off. This season, the Big Ten and SEC were clearly the best conferences. The other two Power 4 conferences — ACC and Big 12 — could sit in another tier. The Mountain West could be grouped with the MAC and AAC with the Pac-2 thrown in.
I don’t think we learn as much about a conference’s strength from its conference games as we do from out of conference games. Boise State pushing Oregon to the limit at Autzen and UNLV losing at home to Syracuse told us more about how the Mountain West stacks up than those teams’ wins over San Jose State and San Diego State did.
Making changes to the CFP structure after one season could be viewed as reactionary, but it also is an opportunity to refine the system for determining a champion before bad ideas and practices become entrenched.
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Reach Sjarif Goldstein at sgoldstein@staradvertiser.com.
