I am not the first to say it, and I definitely won’t be the last, but it is probably a mistake for the CFP selection committee to put out rankings every week.
The reasons why they are doing it are obvious. First of all, college football fans love rankings. Or more precisely, they love to hate rankings. Top 25 lists drive coverage and conversation. The CFP and ESPN are long-term partners, and ESPN’s goal is to get you to watch ESPN as much as possible. Mid-week is usually the weakest part of the week in terms of college football fans’ interest. So putting out the most important Top 25 ranking every Tuesday night for the last seven weeks of the year is huge to ESPN. And the CFP is very interested in keeping ESPN happy to remain viable.
The other important reason is that the CFP doesn’t want to surprise fans, and certainly not in its first year. It wants fans to more or less know what to expect so that there’s not a huge uproar at the end of the season. If the CFP committee is high on a team that the other polls are not, now at least fans will have a few weeks to get used to it rather than having it sprung on them at the end of the year.
The Selection Committee Will Need to Be Careful
The main issue with these rankings, though, is that if they are done properly they will lead to much more fan anger than they ever hoped to avoid. The major problem with the polls has always been inertia. Teams aren’t re-judged each week. No one looks at a resumé. Last week’s ranking pretty much extends to the current week unless a team in the polls loses (sometimes more and sometimes less depending on the qualifty of the loss) and everyone else more or less stays the same unless they pull off a huge upset, in which case they can jump a few spots. That is the type of poll that fans are used to and that is the type of ranking that fans expect. The voices congratulating pollsters for re-thinking preseason and early-season assumptions are a heck of a lot quieter than those yelling, “HOW DID MY TEAM MOVE DOWN A SPOT WHEN THEY WON?!”
This was a major problem with the BCS as well, especially in its earlier forms. The BCS did a decent job of looking at an entire resumé and the computer rankings really made the point clear that every game affects every single team to some degree. Sometimes, especially when strength of schedule and quality wins were part of the BCS formula, a team on a bye could slide a few spots in any direction depending on how every other team did. Fans hated it, but it is a natural consequence of taking the whole season into account each week rather than just assuming assuming last week’s status quo as a starting point.
A good case about this point was Texas A&M’s ranking two weeks ago. The Aggies were still ranked by many people with the following explanation. They were a top team earlier (as high as sixth) and even though they lost two straight games in blowouts, they lost to top teams (to Mississippi State and Ole Miss) so it’s not fair to drop them too far. That’s logical, until we think about how A&M got to number six in the first place. They beat then ninth-ranked South Carolina to open the season to jump into the Top Ten. Then they slid up as they blew out cupcakes and teams in front of them lost. So, until getting eviscerated by Alabama, Texas A&M was ranked with a resume comprised of a win over a 3-3 team (that had just lost to Kentucky), three cupcake wins, and two blowout losses to top teams. That might keep a team in the Top 20 of the polls we are used to. But in CFP resumé terms, that’s basically worthless.
The selection committee will seriously need to look at resumés each and every week to avoid falling into the classic pitfalls that the other weekly polls continuously fall into. They can’t afford to just slide teams down for losses and up for huge wins, even if that’s what fans expect. And that is why starting to publish these rankings too early can really hurt the committee. Unless they re-think their assumptions each week, their rankings won’t really be judging playoff resumés. Then, when their final ranking comes around and they really need to pick the Top Four teams, they could be forced to make drastic changes to get the right teams in the playoff.
Now the committee isn’t just ranking teams in a standard 1-25 ballot like every major poll does. Their complicated system of multiple ballots is meant to avoid precisely the issues mentioned above. Each team will be directly compared to at least five other teams at least once (and often twice) before being given their ranking. This forces the committee to discuss and debate each resume multiple times in order to get the right teams in the right order.
As fans, though, we need to expect volatility in these rankings. More than that, we need to welcome it. Each Virginia Tech (and Cincinnati and Navy) game will affect Ohio State. Each Kansas State game affects Auburn. The committee needs to take all of this into account, and so do we. Yelling about why a team dropped when they won now changes from being an annoying fan to doing a disservice to the entire college football community. Being on this committee is quite possibly the most stressful job in all of sports. And if they are too scared to be able to do their job properly, we all lose.
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