We’ve had a few months to digest the first-ever postseason tournament in college football and the system that brought it to us. We still have a few more months before we can really worry about what’s happening next season. So let’s use this time to look at a few components of the selection process and see what we liked and what we didn’t.
Offseason CFP Thoughts: Transparency
First of all, the weekly rankings and the show to present them were awful. Let’s be clear on that. The committee did not show consistency from week to week in how they ranked the teams and fans just weren’t ready for the fluctuations that came on a weekly basis. If you saw my thoughts during the season, I thought that TCU would fall to #6 in the last week (based on Ohio State, Baylor, and Florida State all facing much higher-quality opponents in the final week). But college football fans aren’t used to seeing teams putting up 50-point victories and dropping. More importantly, though, TCU players and staff couldn’t have seen that coming. And while things like this happen in sports, it’s just not fair to set up a subjective system that will intentionally lead teams to such disappointments.
The other part of the weekly rankings that should absolutely change next season was the post-release Jeff Long interview. Quite frankly, he was not good at it. He backtracked from week-to-week and when things were boiled down, his essential common refrain was “this team looks better.” Long also had the poor faux pas in the third-to-last rankings where he mentioned that the committee looks at game-time rankings (and not only that, but he was citing polls that the committee protocols explicitly state may not be used).
Long’s interviews rapidly became an object of ridicule on Twitter and other college football corners of the internet, with the #GameControl hashtag still a relatively popular joke among sports fans. ESPN often did an excellent job asking Long the obvious questions, but there were many times where Rece Davis could have pressed an issue that didn’t seem to make sense. On the one hand, professionalism dictates that Long shouldn’t be called out too explicitly on things that don’t make sense. On the other hand, fans deserve someone who can clearly explain what the thought process of the committee was.
(If you want to think of a crazy idea, why isn’t the committee member who spent her adult career as a politician the one who has to try to explain a potentially foreign thought process to millions of fans?)
This brings us to a much larger issue, of course, and the reason behind the weekly show and the interviews with Long in the first place (well, aside from the ratings they bring in). The powers-that-be behind the College Football Playoff want there to be some level of transparency in this system. They want fans to know what’s going on. More importantly, though, they need fans to accept what’s going on. It’s tough to claim “One True Champion” if the champion is disputed. So they need fans and other media to be on board with the decisions that are made. That means, to some extent, cluing those outside the room into what is going on inside of it.
The other side of the coin, though, is that there are a lot of crazy college football fans out there. The committee has to be more-or-less protected from the fans who might take things too far. That’s the reason behind secret ballots and a closed room. Threats have been issued by fans far less devoted and by fanbases far smaller than what major college football brings to the table.
There can be greater transparency, though, without giving away access to the committee. The committee supposedly has factors that it is supposed to take into account. One of the chief factors in Strength of Schedule. Not once during the season did we hear Jeff Long use any type of SOS statistic to back up a committee decision. The closest things we heard were game-time rankings and nebulous references to quality opponents. If the committee wants to pretend that SOS matters, they need to actually use SOS. Eyeballing the names on the schedule and their record doesn’t give you an SOS number that you can use or that fans can relate to. It just gives another subjective criterion on top of the subjective nature of college football rankings.
It doesn’t just have to be with SOS, though. The committee can give us actual numbers of how much they value certain stats, or quality wins, or close games, or whatever else they want to value. It doesn’t matter so much what they choose to emphasize, so long as it makes sense. At the end of the day, if you want people to be able to understand and accept what’s going on, things need to be more objective and less subjective.
Main Photo: ATHENS, GA – SEPTEMBER 27: The College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy is seen on the field prior to the game between the Georgia Bulldogs and the Tennessee Volunteers at Sanford Stadium on September 27, 2014 in Athens, Georgia. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
