“How can you be the best team in the country if you’re not the best team in your own conference?”
That is a question on the lips of fans and pundits alike when it looks like a team that won’t win their conference ends up as a major postseason contender. And it only happens in college football. In every other American sport, we respect the wild cards. If a wild card can win their tournament, we don’t view them as an undeserving champion. People accept the system and no one gripes about wild cards entering the postseason in the first place (well, almost no one).
College football is a different animal though. The sport has far more teams and far fewer games than any other major American sport. As such, determining a champion is always difficult. There always needs to be a little subjectivity and some tough decisions made to get down to a manageable number just to get started.
However, the conference champion argument is a flawed one, and here’s why: conference champions do not determine who the best team in the conference was that season.
Let’s be clear on that; the SEC champion will not necessarily be the SEC’s best team. They will be the team that did best in SEC play within a set of parameters. That set of parameters is conference play and the conference championship game.
The SEC is a great example to prove that this year. Imagine, for a second, that a team miraculously manages to run the table in the SEC West. Texas A&M’s defense turns out to be better than expected and their offense just outscores everyone. They come into the SEC Championship Game undefeated and the unanimous top team in the country.
On the East side, though, we get pandemonium. No team manages to separate themselves from the pack and there are upsets everywhere. In part due to favorable cross-divisional scheduling, a 9-3 Missouri (with a loss to Texas A&M themselves) goes 6-2 in the conference and wins the division.
Now, if there were to be an upset in the conference championship, no one would claim that Missouri had a better season. Missouri would have played a worse schedule and have a home loss to Indiana, not to mention two additional defeats on the year. Upsets in these games illustrate perfectly that winning a conference doesn’t make you the best team in that particular league, it just makes you the best team in conference play.
Also, just worrying about conference play is short-sighted. This aspect of a given team’s season is important, for sure, but it’s not the entire story. There are four additional games (three if you play in the Pac 12 or Big XII) to be considered. The fact is, having the best record in the games you’ve played against conference foes doesn’t say anything about the rest of the season.
USC could win the Pac 12. But even if they run the table in-conference, would their resumé be better than, say, Oregon’s, if the Trojans lose to Notre Dame to end the year. You could have a conference champion that goes 1-2 out-of-conference, with a bad loss to Boston College in there. Oregon, on the other hand, could be 12-1 on the year, with a 3-0 nonconference record including a victory over Michigan State. It’s easy to only start by looking at conference champions, but doing so often misses the bigger picture of the entire season.
The exact same logic and short-sightedness applies to the over-importance many place on head-to-head matchups, which will be described in a later post.
Now, Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio recently gave a different argument in favor of only considering conference champions. He doesn’t want to see a position where it is in a team’s best interest to lose a game rather than win it. The committee is made up of humans, though, and that could be solved by immediately refusing to consider any teams that tank games. The situation where this could happen is incredibly rare anyway, though, and as I showed, you lose a lot more than you gain by only giving winners of conference championship games consideration.
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