3 things the College Football Playoff committee got right, and 3 things we learned : Source: SBNation – All Posts:– First, the three things the committee that gave us Alabama-Ohio State and Oregon-Florida State improved about this season. 1. More worthy teams are in contention for the national championship. The principal selling point of the Playoff was greater access to the title. And lo and behold, we now have a much more compelling championship situation than if it were just Alabama and Florida State. Oregon deserves a shot at the national title this year. That seems pretty well obvious. Less obvious is whether Ohio State does, or Baylor does, or TCU does, or Oklahoma does (well okay, Oklahoma does not) but overall this is a more compelling field of competitors than the two it would have been otherwise. That is a step up. Oregon would not have made title game in BCS system but is a 7.5 point favorite over a team that did….discuss — Chris Dufresne (@DufresneLATimes) December 7, 2014 2. Everyone in had a valid case. More than four teams had viable cases, especially considering the situation as it was understood last week, with TCU, Florida State, Ohio State, and Baylor (in order) all clamoring for two spots. TCU was the No. 3 team and followed it up by erasing Iowa State, 55-3. Florida State finished off its perfect season with a 37-35 victory over No. 11 Georgia Tech, Ohio State obliterated No. 13 Wisconsin by 59 points, and Baylor stole one of TCU’s last few trump cards by handling No. 9 KSU, 38-27. That made Baylor and TCU Big 12 co-champs, and in the absence of a conference championship game, that would have to do. So the committee was in an impossible position: pick two teams from that group, and only two, to be the lower seeds against mighty Alabama and Oregon. The committee picked its two, which is fine; FSU being the only undefeated power team and left out would have been abominable, and Ohio State has been playing as well as anybody in America in the last two weeks, top two seeds included. Nobody with a lousy case for inclusion was under serious consideration, and everything is more or less in order. 3. Fan interest in the Playoff has been white-hot every step of the way. Say what you will about the methods of the committee, but by releasing its (often curious) rankings on Tuesday nights, the sport that has spent decades being shoved off the front page by the NFL in less than 24 hours every week all of a sudden had a secure place atop the sports media landscape on a weekday evening. Did Twitter melt down into a cacophony of insults and complaints? Certainly, but we all adjust to new information in our own ways. Three things we learned 1. “Champions” beats “co-champions.” In one of the most embarrassing and disappointing instances of doublespeak in recent college football memory, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby hedged on a recent opportunity to aver Baylor’s supremacy as the One True Champion (you know, the Big 12’s ever-present mantra as the only major conference with a round robin schedule instead of divisions and a final championship game). Instead, Bowlsby said the conference would declare TCU and Baylor “co-champions” in the event of a tie at 8-1 atop the conference—despite the whole point of a round robin—and, here are your co-champions, sitting outside the Playoff. Bowlsby’s logic is understandable, as TCU’s resume was incrementally better than Baylor’s for most of the season and the rankings usually reflected that. But by spreading the bonus of a declared championship across two teams on top of denying them an opportunity for a crucial 12th win against another strong opponent, Bowlsby and the Big 12 hurt the hopes either team might have had to put together a Playoff resume on par with any of the other champions. Baylor should be very, very angry. (It is.) 2. Recency matters. For all the talk of the entire season being important—and nobody’s waltzing into the discussion at 8-4, obviously—Ohio State sure got in with a bad loss to Virginia Tech, didn’t it? But the Buckeyes’ bad loss happened to be in Week 2, while Baylor’s crippling defeat came in the middle of October. Also, the Buckeyes’ 59-0 demolition of Wisconsin was a thing of beauty. Think it still carries the same weight if it comes in Week 6? That’s not to say the concept carries no merit. The talk of teams “peaking at the right time” permeates nearly every sport, and bringing an 11-game win streak into the postseason sure looks good from a committee’s standpoint. But the message is clear: get your loss out of the way early. 3. Non-conference schedule difficulty isn’t that big of a deal. The four Playoff teams played a total of six non-conference games against power foes, and Florida State had three of them. FSU was a distant No. 3 in the rankings. The toughest non-conference foe Alabama faced was West Virginia, and Oregon’s early win over Michigan State, while impressive, didn’t command much of the Playoff resume discussion as the season wore on. Give Ohio State some credit for a commanding win over 9-3 Cincinnati, but the AAC is a glorified 2008 Conference USA. No, the real metric at play seems to have been wins—just plain rackin’ up the Ws. Wins remain substantially more valuable than strength of schedule for virtually everybody. The committee’s weekly Top 25 rankings shuffled much more boldly than the traditional polls have, but they mostly adhered to the old “win-go-up, lose-go-down” adage, and as the season wore on they basically sorted teams within sub-groups by loss total. Ohio State can and should be happy about that, as its season-ending victory over Wisconsin (a team that beat nobody better than Minnesota all year) sure looked nice when the Badgers had a committee-certified “No. 13″ next to their name. Conference difficulty played a decent role in the sorting of those teams inside the groups of like losses, and it buoyed Alabama to an uncontroversial No. 1 seed despite a simple non-conference slate. That’s probably as it should be, though; non-conference games make up one-quarter or one-third of the regular season, depending on the conference, and they’re rarely all that difficult. It’s the wins, stupid. Continue Reading….. ift.tt/1wSPIUW
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:29:34 +0000
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