It's that time of year when the sports talk monkeys begin speculating about which for-profit Minor League Football franchises loosely affiliated with major universities will earn bids to the playoffs, with the promise of extra revenue and alumni support.
The conversation always sounds the same: "If (Team X) wins out, can they make the tournament?"
Let me just save them all a lot of time, trouble and hot air right here. The answer is yes.
Because, if these professional sports observers had actually observed "college" football anytime in the last 30 years, they would have noticed that teams don't win out. Upsets happen. Teams ebb and flow week-by-week.
Cases in point already this year:
- Three touchdown favorite Clemson, the defending national champs, fell to ... Syracuse?!
- Seventeen-point favorite Washington lost at middling Arizona State.
- Oklahoma minus four touchdowns, at home, after a bye, came up short against Iowa State.
- Undefeated Washington State was a two-touchdown favorite over California when they got shellacked by 34 points.
- Mediocre South Carolina handled otherwise undefeated NC State in North Carolina.
- LSU lost to Troy. Troy! Their last big win against Sparta required a trick play. And that was, like 2,500 years ago, so that's a pretty old team. Probably a lot of redshirts and graduate students.
- And so on. And on. And on.
Anyone actually paying attention has noticed that it all shakes out in the end. There are very few big-time undefeated and one-loss teams left in December.
So if you're alma mater's football franchise has one loss on its record and can survive the remaining gauntlet, yes, they're going to qualify for the playoff. The problem is, they probably won't.
There, that's settled. Now the sports talk monkeys can spend their time learning something about baseball.
Okay, so maybe relaxing wasn't the right strategy.
It didn't all work out in the end.
It turned out there were six teams for four spots and they all had compelling cases. The music stopped without chairs for two teams of prodigious accomplishments.
So college football is still subject to the whims and vagaries of opinion. So sue me.
Even if last year's formula were in play, we'd have the same brouhaha. Undefeated Florida State, irrespective of their in-game woes against tepid competition, would have claimed one spot. Oregon would have had a strong case against Alabama for the other. Someone would have been screaming bloody murder, football-wise.
This year it's TCU and Baylor. But here's the lesson they have, painfully, learned: If you want to compete for a championship, don't schedule out-of-conference games again Northwestern State, SMU and Buffalo. These teams aren't just marshmallows, they're marshmallows that play below Baylor's level.
TCU at least played and defeated a Big "Ten" team (I almost wrote "school," tee-hee), Minnesota. But TCU fell to Baylor, which dropped them behind the Bears.
And who can blame the committee for choosing Ohio State, whose lone loss, early in the season, reflected the team's transition from Heisman candidate quarterback to second stringer, ugly though the defeat was. A shellacking of Wisconsin in the title game, with the third stringer no less, sealed their fate.
So you've got your playoff. And your endless debate. It's the best of both worlds.
Warm regards to all the crybabies bleating about the unfairness of the new college football playoff system that selects the top four teams for a three-game tournament to determine the 1A champion.
In the words of noted philosopher Aaron Rogers, R-E-L-A-X. It will all sort itself out, just as it always has.
No matter how many slots you have in a tournament, if the last team is chosen, rather than automatically qualifying, there will be anger and recrimination among the hoi polloi. (See: NCAA basketball tournament, where 68 teams qualify, leaving the fans of the 69th best outfit to wail and rend garments over the injustice.) Selecting the fourth-best team, from among a gaggle of similar squads that play completely different schedules in different regions of the country is an exercise in something akin to randomness.
And so we find ourselves reading tea leaves and parsing results as if the BCS was the Kremlin. We attempt to distinguish among teams with identical records, the same number of "good" wins and "bad" losses, blowouts, lucky calls and so on. It leaves the situation ripe for argument, which is at least half the fun.
So this discussion is not one for self-righteousness in the first place. If your team is TCU or Baylor or Ohio State and you're not in the top four right now, you can't credibly argue that you've been robbed. The differences among these teams is so small you couldn't event fit the NCAA's credibility between them.
All that said, R-E-L-A-X. Unimpressive Florida State, which has squeaked by a series of hapless opponents, has an ACC title game to deal with against the bum-rushing Rambling Wreck. Baylor has a tussle with a tough Kansas State team in the Big 12 championship and Ohio State will have to prove itself versus the Wisconsin Melvins to capture the Big 16 crown. If any of these lose, they will certainly not make the championship tournament. If any win, they will leapfrog TCU.
And while we're at it, let's give the selection committee some credit. They have employed their weekly rankings to send messages about what they value, and they have chosen wisely. To wit:
- They are choosing the programs that have had the best season, not the teams that are the best at that moment.
- Head-to-head match-ups will be tie-breakers, not fatal wounds for the losers.
- They will not over-react to last week's result.
- How teams win matters when that's nearly all the best teams do.
Relax, enjoy the games, and have some faith in the system. It hasn't failed us yet.
"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need." --The Rolling Stones
College football fans have forever bemoaned the lack of a playoff to determine a national champion. That they've had such a structure for a decade has either escaped their notice or rattled them into cognitive dissonance. A single-game showdown between the best two teams is a playoff.
Still, college football fandom demands a four-team or eight team tournament. This year, no thanks to the NCAA, a playoff structure has emerged that's three rounds deep with two games left in the season. The whining continues unabated as this inconvenient truth has yet to settle in. Let's take the ride together, shall we?
Notre Dame has a semi-final scrum this weekend against the team claiming to be Southern Cal. If Our Lady wins, they go to the championship. Lose and they're out. That's a playoff game.
Alabama and Georgia both have quarter-final walkovers this weekend against state rivals Auburn and Georgia Tech respectively. The former is a hoodoo and the latter is a fake, so the Crimson Tide and Dawgs should advance with little resistance. Lose, against all odds -- and in this case I'm looking only at you, Georgia, since an Auburn upset could be considered nothing less than an optical illusion -- and the league championship the following week would simply be a consolation game. Assuming the cosmos remains intact, Alabama and Georgia will square off in two weeks with the SEC crown and a slot in the national title game in the balance.
Oregon, now ranked fourth, visits Corvalis for the inaptly named Civil War (in Oregon?) this weekend. A Notre Dame defeat opens the door for their contest to serve as a semi-final as well, unless Stanford slips against UCLA, allowing Oregon into the Pac-12 championship game. That would, ironically, bump this week's contest back to a quarter-final with the league title game as a possible semi-final.
Florida plays Florida State this weekend in a matchup that had lost much of its luster in recent years, but could serve as a national semi-final now. A couple of well-placed results could land the victor in the national title tilt. You may be thinking that it's unlikely that Notre Dame and Oregon would both lose, (or that one would succumb while Georgia and Alabama both split) but then you would already be forgetting the events of the weekend past.
In none of these scenarios does an eligible undefeated team get left out, a two-loss team hop over one-loss contenders or a one-loss team out-flank any serious one-loss contenders, except perhaps Notre Dame, which has its future in its own hands. (Kansas State might squawk about that, but such is the penalty for losing to a Baylor squad that entered their game 1-5 in league play.) Even the lowest ranked team named here, the one-loss Seminoles, would have vanquished #9 Clemson and #5 Florida among its victories.
Thus, up to six formidable teams are still vying for the championship. They will play up to seven determinative football games these next two weeks, and in no case will a loser nonetheless slip into the championship picture. That, my friends, is a playoff. The only thing left to complain about is that there's no reasonable cause for complaint.
Unless you're an Ohio State fan.
Finally, Still, college football is going to have a playoff starting in 2014.
The braying of the uninformed aside, college football has had a playoff for a decade. It's a one-game playoff between the top two teams, as determined by the worst method in the world except for all the other methods.
(The method most people want used is the one in which they personally get to choose the two teams.)
The discussion now on the table involves four teams rather than two, which maintains the sanctity of the championship series while preserving the urgency of the season. It may, however, sap yet more relevance from the bowl games, particularly those that don't get to host a championship series game. Imagine the spectacular pyre of apathy facing, say, the Sugar Bowl, as it hosts two teams not involved in the playoffs.
Another seductive element under consideration is the removal of automatic qualifiers to the BCS bowls, particularly inasmuch as the conferences have all the coherence and permanence of Dennis Rodman's hairdo. Consider:
- The Big East includes teams in Houston and Dallas.
- The Big Ten has 12 teams, but can't become the Big 12, because that's the name of another conference, which has 10 teams.
- The Atlantic Coast includes Pittsburgh, 366 miles from the coast.
- The Atlantic 10 includes a team from St. Louis, 950 miles from the Atlantic.
- Conference USA stretches from the NC coast to the Arizona border.
- New Jersey Tech plays in the Great West conference.
- The Southeast Conference will next year play in Columbia, Missouri, which is neither south nor east.
No wonder college athletes don't know anything: even the presidents of their schools are confused. Despite that, it appears we'll soon have an improved (and more lucrative, imagine that!) champion determinant in college football that won't undermine the weekly excitement of the regular season.
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