With the 2015 college football season kicking off today, it’s time for us to look at one final important point as we wean ourselves off of preseason hype and look at games that are actually occurring on the field. I’ve said this many times before, but it certainly bears repeating:
Teams, not conferences, play games.
Now, what does this mean? And, more importantly, why does it matter?
Everyone can look at that sentence and realize that of course it’s true. No one actually thinks that the opening game of South Carolina vs North Carolina will be the SEC and ACC lining up against each other. The standing of a conference in the eyes of the college football world is made up of a season’s (or multiple seasons’) worth of nonconference games. So while it’s nice to brag about or denigrate a conference based on individual games, fans realize that no single game determines the value of a conference.
I am saying much stronger than that, however. Not only does a single game not determine the value of a conference, but the value of a conference is not at all inherently relevant to the value of the teams in it. Why does it matter that teams, not conference, play games? It matters because of the second, far more important sentence that this piece will elaborate on:
The committee will judge teams, not conferences.
Now, this is a big deal. We have certainly seen cases in college football where great teams were surrounded by bad conferences. It happens. And the discussions of “but if they were in another conference they would have lost X games” will always happen. The fact is, though–and this has been emphasized from before day one–that the goal of the selection committee is to determine the best four teams, not the teams that can best represent the four best conferences.
This important factor gets lost in all of the offseason narratives about the fact that the Big XII got left out last year. Because of that, the offseason playoff narrative is far too focused on which conference gets left out this year instead of which teams. The committee is not here to rank conferences. The best conference in the country could always just not have one of the best four teams. It happens. And it’s not just about teams in good conferences beating each other up.
Having a stronger overall conference is no guarantee for having the best team in the country. It never has been and it never will be. The Big XII, for example, could have half of its ten teams ranked and have an average overall ranking of teams be in the top 25 of college football. It’s happened before. Again, though, having depth is no guarantee to power at the top.
The powerful teams at the top are what this playoff is all about. No one was ever interested in determining the best conference. That’s always been something for the armchair quarterbacks at home to talk about. That’s been something that might carry a level of bragging rights, but never had on-the-field relevance.
It still doesn’t matter on the field, much as we sometimes forget it. Every time we see a question of “which conference gets left out”, we have to remember that the frame of reference is totally off. The frame of reference for ranking teams and picking National Championship Game participants (in the BCS era) or playoff participants now has always been the standing of the team, not which conference it plays in.
Now, this is not to say that conference affiliation is completely irrelevant. It might not matter inherently, but at the end of the day what conference a team is in often has a strong impact on that team’s strength of schedule. SOS also doesn’t inherently tell us how good a team is, but playing good teams is often the best way to tell just how good a team is. Moreover, the CFP guidelines state that strength of schedule (though they don’t say how to calculate it) is one of the factors that the committee must take into account when judging which teams make the CFP.
Here is where we must stress that conference affiliation doesn’t necessarily determine SOS. For example, this year the SEC and Pac 12 will most likely be the top two conferences. The SEC West will probably be the best division in college football. Teams in the SEC West will probably have some of the toughest schedules in the country. The SEC, overall, will probably have the toughest average SOS of all of their teams. And yet many Pac 12 teams will have stronger strengths of schedule than most SEC East teams. Being in the SEC will mean solid strengths of schedule for most SEC East teams too, but the East is significantly weaker and some of those teams will just have lower strengths of schedule. So while looking at a conference as a whole can help judge SOS, it’s important to remember that the thing that truly affects SOS most is which teams a team actually faces on its schedule, not the conference mates it won’t meet. (And even if these assumptions don’t bear out over the course of the season, the principle being explained here remains true, even if the technical details would be better served by choosing difference divisions.)
Again, this is a cautionary point about what we have to keep in mind as we watch college football all season long. While it’s fun to get caught up in all of the conference judging and chest-beating, at the end the playoff participants will depend on what the individual team in question does over the course of the season, not what their conference mates did.
Because again, at the end of the day, teams play football games. Conferences don’t.
