It is clear in the rules for the new College Football playoffs that a conference can have more than one team placed in the four-team tournament. Technically, all four teams could come from the same conference. So what situations, exactly, could lead to more than one team from a single conference being selected?
To begin with, we have to keep in mind that each team will be compared to each other team. So if the second-best team in a conference has a stellar resume, it won’t matter too much if three other conference champions have relatively similar resumes (Last year would be an amazing example of this, where Alabama most likely would have been left out in favor of Michigan State and Stanford, even though the Crimson Tide were considered one of the two most talented teams in the country until their bowl game). And while “conference championships” is only a minor criteria, it is still a lot easier on the committee to pick four conference champions than to take two teams from one conference. Thus, the best way for any conference to get a second team in is if only three of the five power conferences have worthy champions.
That said, what will it take out of a conference to still get that second team in? The easiest way for a team that didn’t win the conference championship to have a claim on a spot in the tournament is if they have a non-conference victory over another power conference champion. So, we are going to look at early non-conference games like Oregon vs Michigan State, Florida State vs Oklahoma State, and Wisconsin vs LSU, just to name a few. Basically, games like these between two conference contenders set up a whole season of possibilities.
For example, let’s say that Oregon beats Michigan State and then loses to Stanford. Stanford then finishes the year at 13-0 while Oregon is 11-1, with their sole loss to undefeated Stanford. Meanwhile, they also have a win over Big Ten champion Michigan State. I don’t know if or how the committee would distinguish between Michigan State and Oregon, but this would seem to be the easiest type of situation where a second-place team in a conference has a stronger claim than another conference champion.
The most important thing, though it goes without saying, is for a conference to have two teams with a very strong claim. Often it may even help if the runner-up’s claim is slightly stronger than the champion’s. The champion will get the benefit of the doubt because they won their conference, and the runner-up will have the benefit of a great resume.
The second team having an unimpeachable resume is the important part here. Teams that don’t win their conferences won’t get the benefit of the doubt. The outcry from fans will be very strong, unless the team that doesn’t win its conference is obviously a top two team. Alabama vs LSU from 2012 and Ohio State vs Michigan from 2006 immediately come to mind as the two cases where it is clear that teams that weren’t conference champions would easily have made the tournament. Sometimes resumes are just so strong that they speak for themselves.
Even with that, though, there won’t be controversy. The BCS prided itself that “every game mattered.” In the entire BCS era, there was only one occasion where a team could lose a game and still know that they were guaranteed a spot in the National Championship Game anyway (that would be LSU before the 2012 SEC Championship Game against Georgia). In the CFP era, though, we could see cases where two undefeated teams meet in the last week of the season or in a conference championship game and know that they are both in. Everything always depends on the entirety of the national landscape, of course, but we could see more cases with games that are actually meaningless, as far as postseason potential is concerned.
It must be stressed, though, that the national landscape is what first and foremost affects everything. No team (unless they’re undefeated) is on an island. Every team is connected to every other team and every team is affected by what every other team does—some games just affect some teams more than others. So you can never just look at a resume and say, “Oh, they deserve to be in.” It’s always about every other team. With only four teams that get in, you can’t have vague terms like “tournament resume” that you will see thrown around in college basketball. The same resume could be #1 in some years but #5 in others. That’s just how it works at the top. That’s the most important thing to remember. In the end, it doesn’t matter which is the best conference or who played the toughest games. It will come down to the top four resumes—as determined by the selection committee, of course.
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