There is no right way to fix the college football playoff as it is currently setup.
NCAA President Mark Emmert told ESPN’s Brett McMurphy yesterday that he would “prefer an 8-team CFB Playoff so all Power 5 conference champions are guaranteed a bid.”
But an 8-team playoff guaranteeing all conference champions get in doesn’t solve things either.
The move to 4 teams was supposed to fix the issues that the BCS brought by having only 2 teams, which was brought up to fix the problem of not having #1 play #2 every year thanks to bowl contracts.
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How were we supposed to figure out if Alabama or Oklahoma St was the better team in 2011? It was mainly just based on an eye test. Oklahoma St, had they beaten Iowa St at the end of the season, would have been playing LSU in the national championship game. Had there been a 4 team playoff that year, it would have been #1 LSU vs #4 Stanford and #2 Alabama vs #3 Oklahoma St.
In 2011, that would have only represented the SEC, Big 12 and Pac 12. In the ACC, #5 Virginia Tech lost 38-10 to #15 Clemson, who was 9-3 that season, with losses to Georgia Tech, NC State, and South Carolina. In the Big 10, #15 Wisconsin (10-2) beat #12 Michigan St (10-2) 42-39. In the final Top 10 of the BCS rankings, we had 3 SEC teams, 2 Pac 12 teams, 2 Big 12 teams, and Boise St. South Carolina finished #9 and Wisconsin is the first from another conference at #10. For an 8 team playoff, with 5 of the slots being granted to conference champions, 2011’s final BCS rankings would have been a disaster.
That doesn’t solve the issue of getting in more teams.
And in a year like that, do you really want 5 of your slots going to conference champions? You’d have #1 LSU, #3 Oklahoma St, #4 Stanford, #10 Wisconsin, and #15 Clemson.
People forget that the playoff and the bowl games are not put together by the NCAA. They’re not trying to put in the best teams – they’re trying to put in the best draws. They want fans in seats and eyes on television.
The playoff is a company – CFP Administration, LLC. It is a for-profit business, which is looking to capitalize on big brands, while trying to remain “credible” at the same time. If a team like Vanderbilt goes undefeated, they have no way to keep them out of the playoff while still remaining credible. The conferences and playoffs are supposed to give “everyone” a chance to win, but the biggest picture is finding a way to turn a profit. The playoffs have a deal with ESPN, who has a deal with advertisers. When the ratings don’t hit, ESPN has to refund advertisers (like last year, when they had to give $20M in free advertisements to their partners due to poor ratings on the playoff).
The President / Executive Director of the CFP Administration is none other than former BCS Executive Director Bill Hancock. He’s been around for all of the issues and he gets that there’s no exact science to this. You can’t take just conference champions because of what he saw in the 2011 and 2012 seasons.
In 2012, you would have had the same problems – 6 of the top 10 teams in the final 2012 BCS standings were from the SEC. Notre Dame was #1. Alabama and Florida were 2 and 3. Pac 12 champ Oregon was 4 and Stanford was #6. Kansas St was #5, representing the Big 12. The ACC finally showed up at #12 with Florida St, who moved up from 13 after a riveting 21-15 win over 6-6 Georgia Tech in the ACC championship game. The best ranked Big 10 team was #16 Nebraska, who lost the Big 10 title game to unranked 7-5 Wisconsin by a score of 70-31. The same Wisconsin team that had lost 3 of their final 4 games before the title game.
So in 2012, 5 of your 8 teams would have been #2 Alabama, #4 Oregon, #5 Kansas St, #12 Florida St, and unranked Wisconsin. Then you have Notre Dame, who was #1 and undefeated. So who do your other 2 seeds go to? Florida was #3 at 11-1, but their loss was to #7 Georgia, who lost to #2 Alabama in the SEC Championship game on the last play of the game, and to #10 South Carolina in the 2nd game of the season. It gets complicated trying to fill 3 slots, when several of them are filled by teams that should not even be in the conversation.
There are several teams that will always be looked at differently than other “conference” teams. Notre Dame, obviously, does not have a conference. Alabama is a brand. Ohio St is a brand. Michigan is a brand. USC is a brand. Texas is a brand. There’s not much more than those that will bring eyeballs in this day and age, and if any of those teams is within a shot of the playoff, you’d almost be guaranteed that they will make it in.
So long as there are profits to be made, there will never be any criteria that requires a conference champion to get into the playoffs. Whether it’s 4, 6, or 8 teams.
Next week, I’ll discuss what 16 team conferences would look like, and what the playoff would look like from there.
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