ESPN swayed the CFB Playoff Committee & why a 6-team playoff is better than 8 or 4.

Ok, let’s start off with this:  Let’s say a team was 11-2, and were conference champions from the
media-stated most difficult division in this year’s best conference in college football.  They had won 9 straight games (8 straight by 14 or more, and the 9th was the title game over a top 6 team), had gone 9-1 in that conference, and in their 2 losses (one to a top 5 team, one to a top 25 team), both in September, they had injuries all over the field, and were starting walk-ons at linebacker.

But once they got healthy, they were on fire and beating teams up.

Let’s say another team goes 11-1, with a loss to that conference champion head to head, and they had a really good non-conference win over a top 10 team in the 3rd game of the season.  But they didn’t get a chance to play for the conference championship, so they played one less game.

If I flipped the names of the team, and said the conference champion was Ohio St, and the team that didn’t make their championship game was Penn St, would the committee have put in Ohio St over Penn St?  If the roles were reversed, it wouldn’t matter, because Ohio St was getting in no matter what.

It’s almost like I didn’t watch Penn St beat Ohio St back on Oct 22nd.  And that leads to questions…


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So let’s start off with what I brought up last week:

1. The College Football Playoff ratings were awful last year

…and they had to ensure their advertisers they would be up this year.  

In 2014, ESPN and the College Football universe believed they had grabbed hold of a cash cow – they found a way to get Ohio St into the playoffs as the 4th seed, so they were guaranteed good ratings in at least one playoff game and the championship, with either Alabama or Ohio St playing in the championship game after facing off in the 1st round.  The Oregon / Florida St battle between the 2013 and 2014 Heisman winners on New Years Day drew in 28.2M viewers, much more than expected, and the brand battle between Nick Saban’s Alabama and Urban Meyer’s Ohio St team that night did 28.3M.  The Championship game between Ohio St and Oregon did over 33.4M viewers.

However, last year moved to New Year’s Eve, and had considerably less name value, with Alabama facing Michigan St, and Clemson facing Oklahoma.  Yes, Oklahoma is a blue blood, but Clemson is not known as a ratings monster.  Michigan St plays a boring brand of football, and is known mostly as Michigan’s little brother.  Truth is, the ratings were going to take a dip, regardless, in the 2nd year, but having the Clemson / Oklahoma game on at 3pm on New Year’s Eve, while people are still at work, did not help with reaching an audience, and the late Cotton Bowl game lasting until almost midnight (yes, New Years) on the East Coast did not help audiences either, especially considering it was a 38-0 Alabama blowout.  The Clemson/ Oklahoma Orange Bowl did 15.76M viewers (down 12.4M), and the Alabama/Mich St Cotton Bowl did 18.56M (down 9.7M). The national championship game between Alabama and Clemson, two Southeastern teams (and one being a non-traditional power) brought in only 25.7M viewers (down 7.7M).

The ratings were so bad last year that ESPN had to give away $20M in free advertising to make good with their partners.

So this year, they had to hit a homerun, and they had to change up the times so people would stay tuned in.  In order to do that, they couldn’t take chances on teams from the same region, and they couldn’t take chances on teams that were considered upstarts.  So they went with a known commodity and a West Coast team.

Washington is in because of politics – there was no way they were going to leave out a 12-1 Pac 12 Champ, unless it was somebody like Washington St or Arizona St.  They needed a Washington, Stanford, Oregon, USC, UCLA… nobody else would fit the mold of having a traditional brand.

Ohio St is in because their brand (and coach) is just more well known than Penn St.  We can argue over 11-2 Penn St having a 3 pt loss to Pitt and 11-1 Ohio St beating Oklahoma in Norman as being the deciding factor, but the fact is that a Big 10 Championship should have evened that out.  Ohio St got in because of their name.  According to the Sagarin ratings, Ohio St played the 7th toughest schedule in the country, and Penn St played the 16th.  Ohio St was 3-1 against the top 30, and Penn St was 4-2 against the Top 30.

2. Why do we even have conference championship games?
For Penn St, it was important to get that 13th data point.  Same for Washington.  Clemson would have been in regardless.  So would Alabama.

But we all know that the conference championship games exist specifically for the money that it brings to the conference.  Roy Kramer started this back in 1992.  Other conferences followed suit after that.  Since it’s inception, the SEC Championship would have had 2 teams from the same division 8 times if you just went by conference record.  It would have been more if you had gone by the 2 highest ranked teams.  This year, the 2 highest ranked teams in the Big 10 were Ohio St and Michigan, even after Michigan lost twice at the end of the season.

Bob Bowlsby, commissioner of the Big 12, came out after the rankings yesterday with some criticism.  He was able to do this because they didn’t have a team in the race this year – his undefeated conference champion lost 2 non-conference games to 2 non-conference champs.  Hell, his conference’s best non-conference win was Oklahoma St’s win at home over Pittsburgh, so they really didn’t have a dog in the hunt.

His criticism was, first, on the conference championship games and that 13th data point.  In 2014, when TCU and Baylor were left out of the playoffs after Ohio St won their conference championship game over 10-2 Wisconsin 59-0.  Ohio St had only 2 wins over top 25 teams (Wisconsin and Michigan St), and they had a terrible non-conference resume that included a loss to 6-6 Virginia Tech, along with wins over Navy, Kent St, and Cincinnati, and were on their 3rd string QB.  TCU’s non conference included a win over 8-4 Minnesota (who Ohio St also beat), and their only loss was in conference at #6 Baylor, 61-58.  Baylor lost at West Virginia, but went 11-1 overall, along with that win over TCU.  

So, basically, the conference championship game really helped Ohio St, and not having it hurt TCU and Baylor.

Bowlsby’s second criticism had to do with the strength of schedule…

3. Does strength of schedule really matter?
The Big 12 was told that the strength of schedule really mattered, especially in non-conference.

Instead of determining between Ohio St and Penn St, let’s take a look at Penn St and Washington.  Here are the resumes, according to the Sagarin ratings:

Washington
12-1 overall, Pac-12 Champ
SOS: 41st
4-1 vs Top 30
1-1 vs Top 10
nonconference: #94 Idaho, #140 Rutgers, #188 Portland St

Penn St
11-2 overall, Big 10 Champ
SOS: 16th
4-2 vs Top 30
2-1 vs Top 10
nonconference: #21 Temple, #30 Pitt, #152 Kent St

So, had Penn St scheduled Idaho instead of Pitt, when the team had major injuries, they’d be in the college football playoffs?

Penn St won 9 straight games after getting healthy, including wins over the #2 and #7 teams in the Sagarin ratings.  The highest ranked team Washington beat was #10 Colorado (who was 0-3 against Top 10 teams). 

4. Why are we not doing a 6 team playoff?
Let me start off by saying that I’m not a proponent of an 8 team playoff.  Yes, 8 is a nice round number, but I like the regular season how it is, and, in most years, the 4 teams are done correctly.  The first 2 years of the playoff, it was pretty obvious who was supposed to get in, aside from the 2 Big 12 teams getting left out for Ohio St in 2014, but the idea was that it would set a precedent for everything else down the line.  Standards were set regarding strength of schedule, conference championship games, etc.

We’re in year 3 and the precedent has been broken.

Rather than an 8 team playoff, why not toy with expanding to 6?  2 teams get bye games, and the other 4 fight it out.  In 3 years of doing this, the #7 ranked team has never had a real gripe about not getting in.  This year, the 6th team (Michigan) does not really have a gripe. Here are the #7 teams the past 3 years:

2014: #7 Mississippi St (10-2)
2015: #7 Ohio St (11-1)
2016: #7 Oklahoma (10-2)

Which of those teams really can argue that they belong in?  None… with 4 teams, the 5th team can definitely have an argument, especially if ESPN is looking for viewers.  You can still get in the name brand teams, while having more of a shot for the deserving teams to be involved.

You wouldn’t have to change the bowl system at all from how it currently is – you just give the #3 and #4 ranked teams a game on their own campus and then move into playoff sites like they are currently constructed.  And you don’t change anything – there are no automatic bids – so that way you don’t have a team like Virginia Tech or Florida sneaking into the playoff when their body of work doesn’t constitute them being on of the best teams in the country.  There have been a myriad of championship game upsets over the years, and that 13th data point can give teams an opportunity for higher seeding, etc.  Right now, it’s either you’re in or not, if you’re the #3 team, you could be playing for either a bye week, or a loss could mean you have to play at somebody else’s stadium… or not at all, depending on the other teams.  It gives more meaning to the games.

Here’s what this would have looked like in 2014: 



  Florida St did not look like a playoff team in 2014, even though they were undefeated.  They could have been rewarded with a home game and a chance to prove it against TCU.  If they lost (the way they did against Oregon), then they don’t belong in the final 4, and they wouldn’t be there.  Same with Baylor and Ohio St.

Here’s what the 2015 bracket would have looked like:


In 2015, Ohio St still would not have made the bracket.  I don’t know that it would have been seeded this way if the committee knew it was a 6 team playoff – Ohio St had a better resume than Iowa, but Iowa made the conference championship game.  The Buckeyes only loss last year was to #3 Michigan St on a last second field goal in the middle of a rain storm.


Here’s what this year’s bracket would have looked like:

The only difference I could see here is maaaaybe Oklahoma gets in at #6 over Michigan, so as to have all 5 conferences represented, and Oklahoma went undefeated in their conference, and 1-2 in the non-conference while their all-star WR Westbrook was out.  They played a more difficult non-conference schedule than almost any other team in the country, so this would help establish what they told the conferences when the playoff first started — strength of schedule matters, and so do conference championships.

I think this would solve a lot of the issues, and would also give ESPN something else that’s majorly important to broadcast.  Think about how many people would watch all 5 of these games.  This year, it would make sense to play the games on Sat, Dec 17th (when you’ve already got not-great bowl games anyway), and then still have the bowls setup the way they currently are.

Penn St should have been in this playoff, but if they had beaten Michigan or Pittsburgh, it would have had an inarguable resume and we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.


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Gary Segars

Gary began his first website in 1998 as a sophomore in high school, writing reviews of cds and live shows in the Memphis area. He became editor of his college newspaper, then moved towards a career in music.He started the infamous MemphisTider.com blog during the 2006 football season, and was lucky enough to get into blogging just before the coaching search that landed Nick Saban at Alabama. The month and a half long coaching search netted his site, which was known for tracking airplanes, over 1 million hits in less than 90 days. The website introduced Gary to tons of new friends, including Nico and Todd, who had just started the site RollBamaRoll.com.After diving into more than just Alabama news, Gary started up his first installment of WinningCuresEverything.com in 2012. After keeping the site quiet for a while, it was started back up in April 2016. Gary then joined forces with high school friend Chris Giannini and began a podcast during the 2016 football season that runs at least 2 times a week, focusing on college football, NFL football, and sports wagering, and diving into other sports and pop-culture topics.E-mail: gary@winningcureseverything.com Twitter: @GaryWCE

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