Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a nice, concise post about what’s wrong with college football. He’s responding to a desperately stupid post that ends with this:
Let’s not ruin college football’s fabulous 13 week do-or-die regular season with a playoff!
This was posted back in October, so the author can perhaps be forgiven for failing to anticipate the way this very season would completely undermine the “do or die” claim. Specifically, consider the case of the Big 12’s South division. Two teams, Oklahoma and Texas, finished with identical records of one loss each.
Texas’s one loss was to Texas Tech on a wild game-ending play. Oklahoma’s one loss was to Texas, by ten. And yet, Oklahoma is playing in the “national championship” game, and Texas is not.
Why is that? Because Texas beat Oklahoma on October 11, but they lost to Texas Tech on November 1. And late losses matter more than early ones.
This is because the BCS system includes two polls in its calculations, and voters in those polls are more influenced by recent games. It shouldn’t be that way, but that’s always how it works out, in any poll-based sports ranking: whoever lost most recently gets dropped down, while people who won this week– or, for that matter, didn’t even play– move up. Texas lost later in the season than Oklahoma did, therefore they drop behind Oklahoma, despite having beaten them in their head-to-head meeting.
And that, right there, is why college football is a complete waste of time. The poll-based system they use to fill the slots in their “championship” game is full of little glitches like that. In addition to the order of operations bug, there’s a systematic bias in favor of “traditional powers,” that leads to the same handful of teams being highly ranked every year.
And the system even has a corrosive effect on the competition itself– voters are impressed by large margins of victory, which rewards coaches for running up the score on inferior competition. If you lose a game in September, your only shot at the “championship” is to beat everybody else you play by the largest margin possible. Even if that means playing your starters well into the second half in a game that’s well out of reach.
The college football “championship” system is a crock. The sooner they get rid of it, and put in a playoff, the better.
I know a lot of people here at Texas Tech expressing those same thoughts.
I agree completely on college football. Let’s have playoffs.
When you get a chance, I’d appreciate your comments on the NCAA hoops rating system, especially RPI and SOS. Is there any value at all in early season SOS ratings? Is there a better way to do those ratings?
I suspect a lot of folks at UT feel the same. As a Sooner I have to say I would have loved to see a late season game between Texas and OU. I seriously think OK would have stomped their asses. They just got that much better as the season went on. So even though my team benefitted from the bizarre system currently in place, I’d like to see a playoff too so there’d be no muttering in the background.
MKK
If you do an eight-team playoff, you’re gonna have the exact same problem, except that the unfairness and stupidity will revolve around whether the 9-12-ranked teams were more deserving than the 5-8-ranked teams.
They should cut the number of schools at the BCS level. Make like 6 conferences (12 each). Play everyone in your conference maybe two other games (13 games total). Conference winners plus two make the Bowl level (Rose can have the Pac-10 Champ v. Big-10 Champ). You have 4 Bowl games played on Jan 1st. The winners then go into a 4-team playoff. Keeps the tradition of the bowls but lets a champion to be decided on the field of play.
If you do an eight-team playoff, you’re gonna have the exact same problem, except that the unfairness and stupidity will revolve around whether the 9-12-ranked teams were more deserving than the 5-8-ranked teams.
Right, but there’s less passion at that point because there’s less claim to be the best. Similarly, in NCAA basketball there’s always a lot of fascination about the bubble. While I’m sure it hurts feelings for a little while I don’t think people nurse grudges over years the way that, say, Auburn does w.r.t. BCS.
Polls are definitely biased toward traditional powers, and that’s a fine argument. But why shouldn’t a loss later in the season matter more? How is that necessarily a glitch? And why is head to head competition sacred? That promotes lots of weird things. The most obvious problem is a nontransitive cycle like OU-Texas-Texas Tech this year. You’re not going to get an ordinal ranking of those teams that plays nice with head to head results. Should we give up on rankings altogether? If so, how do you pick the best teams for your playoff?
I’m (slightly) amused by perennial bickering of the playoff and anti-playoff crowds.
I honestly don’t see what’s behind the fanatical desire to crown a “champion” by whatever means. Why the rabid adherence to the Highlander-esk “In the end there can be only one” mentality? I’m all for the return of the old system, where the bowl games were fun invitationals, and we didn’t give in to the “One Best Team” farce. Why can’t you just watch and enjoy the games without turning it into a horse race? What purpose is served by crowning a champion, except empty bragging rights? – And they are empty, given that your success in tournaments or rankings is highly dependent on what happens in games you don’t even play in. A low-ranked team catches a lucky break against a stiff opponent of yours, and suddenly you’re sailing through to the championship. Even though if the refs would have made that one ambiguous call the other way, you would have had more difficulty.
Also, regarding having late-in-season games counting more than earlier games, isn’t that what a playoff does, turning the late-season games into sudden death all-or nothings?
What really amuses me, though, is imagining what a playoff tournament for the Nobel Prizes would be like.
I have to note an improvement in this debate. A few seasons ago, you often heard people say we “need” a playoff. This season I’ve hardly heard it. People say they want, even desperately want, a playoff, or that it would be clearly better than the BCS, but not that we “need” one.
To everyone who is using the language with greater precision, thank you.
Right, but there’s less passion at that point because there’s less claim to be the best.
Tell that to the 9-12-ranked teams and their fans!!
And the comparison to the NCAA hoops bubble is absurd, since there you’re talking about distinctions between teams that completely suck utter shit. All teams that are anywhere even close to halfway decent make it into the NCAA hoops tourney. The only arguments are “we suck total utter shit, but they suck total utter shit a little bit worse than we do, and they got in!”
Gee, is RM at #7 as old as I am? The last time the bowls did not count was circa 1965, when one of the polls started voting after the bowl games. Back then, the “poll champion” was crowned at the end of the regular season and Notre Dame did not go to a bowl game because a 10 game season was considered enough for student athletes.
Commenter #2 makes the fundamental mistake of thinking there is no playoff in football. There is even a playoff in Division I, which was won by Richmond last night. Apropos the discussion, the championship game matched the 5th and 7th seeds in the tournament. No poll would have given that matchup, but they won it on the field. The winners get an actual NCAA trophy, something the “FBS” teams will never have.
Even Division III, where there aren’t even athletic scholarships, find a way to have a football tournament despite actually having to be students. If they can do it, the big schools can do it.