2017 College Football Thread

[The Buscher]

Imagine how many times in the past 15 years the committee would've said "fuck the NFC, we need a Pats vs. Colts/Broncos Super Bowl" if the NFL had a playoff committee.

I think there are merits to both structures but the product of the playoffs would've suffered if a team like Wisconsin or Ohio State got in this year.  The last thing we need is to cheapen a playoff system that will usually guarantee you two or three great games.

Unfortunately, it's probably inevitable that they'll bump it up to eight teams with the Power 5 conference winners all getting in and three at-large bids.  And what we'll get is an opening week of the playoffs that contains a whole bunch of shitty games to get us to the same conclusion we'd already reach in the current system.

[GhostMachine]

I'd like to see them make one change: If you don't win your conference's championship, you're out of the playoffs.

 

[Meacon Keaton]

There ya go, Maxx. You have GhostMachine on your side.  

[livid]

A lot of this would be solved by making the field larger than 4 teams. 

[Meacon Keaton]

If they go to six teams then #7 and #8 will be unhappy. If they go to eight teams, #9 and #10 will be unhappy. No matter how many times they change things up, people and teams aren't going to be happy. When we got LSU/Alabama rematch a few years back in the BCS era, people would've murdered for a four team playoff. There's never going to be a system that pleases everyone. The way it's set up now is a fine balance between getting the best teams and still making the regular season feel like it means something. 

[GhostMachine]

I think it's perfectly fine with the number of teams they have now. I just think it is absolutely ludicrous that you can play for the national championship without winning your conference's championship. Losing your conference's championship game should knock you out of the running. You can't be the best team in the country when you're not even the best team in your own conference.

P.S. FUCK ALABAMA!

 

[Meacon Keaton]

But they just beat the best team in their conference.

[Your Mom]

Forgive my noobishness here but how is this any different from a wildcard team winning the Superbowl or World Series?

[The Buscher]

24 minutes ago, The Chiksrara Special said:

Forgive my noobishness here but how is this any different from a wildcard team winning the Superbowl or World Series?

The main difference is that in college football winning a division doesn't assure you a spot in the postseason at all whereas is does in other sports.

Essentially it'd be like if the Cubs won the NL Central at 82-80 but they didn't go to the playoffs because 12 other teams in baseball won 83+ games.  So the Cubs' division title ended up not really meaning anything because it was a weak division deemed unworthy of an automatic playoff spot.

But even then it's not an exact comparison because college has bowl games.

[DMN in the House]

2 hours ago, Meacon said:

If they go to six teams then #7 and #8 will be unhappy. If they go to eight teams, #9 and #10 will be unhappy. No matter how many times they change things up, people and teams aren't going to be happy. When we got LSU/Alabama rematch a few years back in the BCS era, people would've murdered for a four team playoff. There's never going to be a system that pleases everyone. The way it's set up now is a fine balance between getting the best teams and still making the regular season feel like it means something. 

8 teams, P5 champs, top G5, two at large. Maybe throw in something to account for two good G5s and reserve a spot for a second if they're in the top 12 or whatever.

I'm not going to go look, but I doubt many deserving teams fall through those holes. Maybe in a year with a good ND and a second great G5, then some deserving P5 teams could get left out, but it should work most of the time.

[Maxx]

2 hours ago, Meacon said:

If they go to six teams then #7 and #8 will be unhappy. If they go to eight teams, #9 and #10 will be unhappy. No matter how many times they change things up, people and teams aren't going to be happy. When we got LSU/Alabama rematch a few years back in the BCS era, people would've murdered for a four team playoff. There's never going to be a system that pleases everyone. The way it's set up now is a fine balance between getting the best teams and still making the regular season feel like it means something. 

6 is fine, 8 would be perfect.  Yes there will always be bitching, but if you go 8, you've got your 5 best teams in for sure, and then they can work on a better way to weigh out the final 3 spots.  You've changed the debate, you're no longer worrying if the best 5 teams in the country are getting in.   If this were a 6 or an 8 team playoff, I wouldn't have complained at all about Alabama being in it.

And playing an extra week does fucking matter, because once again, all of the other teams in the top 3 had to put their record on the line for one more week.  They all had to worry about the risk of another loss taking them out of the playoffs, because they played well enough to get to their conference title game.  Meanwhile, Alabama gets rewarded for fucking up their shot at the SEC title by not having to play another game.  Their record got locked in, with no fear of another loss, while everyone else kept playing.  They pretty much turned the conference championship games into a punishment for the rest of the teams in the Top 4.  You all have to prove yourself one more time, but Alabama gets a bye.   How you can sit there and look at what they did and think its fair at all, is beyond me.

I'm not saying you have to win the conference title to get in, but you damn well better qualify for the game.  The idea that one team gets to sit out because they couldn't win their side of the conference, while all the rest of the teams have to put their record on the line again, is absolutely ridiculous.

[Meacon Keaton]

So, for the third time, who would you have put in at #4 instead of Alabama? What team is better than Alabama that deserved to be in that slot? 

This whole conference championship thing is so fucking bogus when you stop for a second and realize that the Big-10 is not the same as the SEC. The Big-12 is not the same as the Pac-12. Alabama losing to Auburn, ONE DAMN GAME, meant they didn't get in their conference title game. Ohio State got to go to their conference championship, despite getting DESTROYED, because their division within their conference was weak.

If this were the NFL , you'd be asking to put the Lions in the playoffs over the Vikings, because the Lions went 6-0 in the division. 

We're just going to go around in circles here, because I do not believe, and nothing can make me believe, that winning a championship in one conference is equal to winning a conference championship in another. In college football, that's just not how it is. Any fool watching can see that the best four teams were put in the playoffs this year. Will the committee get it wrong in the future? I'd say the odds are likely they'll fuck up somewhere, but it wasn't this year. You can say, "Zippy doo, no conference championship for you" at Alabama all you want, but they lost once, on the road, to a hated rival that was ranked in the Top-5 at the time. Ohio State played a playoff team (Oklahoma) and lost. They played a 7-5 Iowa team and got humiliated. Alabama, as much as we hate them, would have never gotten beaten as badly as the Buckeyes did that day. Ohio State had just as many loses in conference as Alabama (and Auburn!) did, but it just lucked out for the Buckeyes that they managed to win the tie-breaker team against the with the same in-conference record (Penn State). 

All of this could have been avoided if Wisconsin had won the Big-10 championship. Then the committee would've had to have put them in as an undefeated team. But they failed. And they were replaced by the next best team, who just so happened to beat two of the other four best teams in consecutive weeks.  Say they don't belong all you want. They won, so I'd say that shows that they did. 

[Maxx]

What you aren't getting is why I'm saying they don't belong.  I'll fully acknowledge they were the best team in the country and should have been playing for a national title.  However, sometime shit like that just doesn't work out.  Obviously we have a difference of opinion here, but what they did for Alabama pretty much shit all over conference titles and wins and they idea that they actually have any kind of real system to figuring out their rankings.  Yes, a win in a conference title game, over a ranked, previously undefeated team, should absolutely have been enough to get Ohio State in over Alabama, who put nothing up in the final week of the season.  If your system allows a team to benefit from not playing at all over a team that wins another game, you have a flawed system.  However you want to weigh it, an extra win in the conference title game should count far more than sitting out.  Hell, not playing during the title game week should ding you worse than a loss, because you at least with a loss you were out there competing and risking your record.

And this is exactly why it should be expanded to 6 or 8, because this entire argument would be rendered moot and both sides would be appeased.  You get your conference champions in, rewarding the teams that played an extra game to win their conference, and you get Alabama in as at at large.  And you definitely stop the dumb shit that occurred in 2014 from happening again.  It's far better to be debating over who goes in at #8 than it is to debate over who goes in at #4.

[gunnar hendershow]

I think they idea of all the Power 5 champions being the best is a bit misleading. With the way divisions shake out you could have an 8-4 team face a 12-0 team, win the conference, and suddenly be guaranteed a spot in the playoff? Imagine if a 4-loss team from the ACC Coastal beat an undefeated Clemson in the ACC title game. Suddenly that team, say they are Georgia Tech, suddenly wind up in the playoffs against Alabama or Oklahoma or Ohio State. They would more than likely get steamrolled. And you can't argue they got it done in the regular season when hypothetically they have 2 out-of-conference losses to teams that didn't make bowl games plus a loss to Georgia. It's the biggest flaw with guaranteeing conference champs a spot in, since conferences aren't round robin you can wind up with fluke champions.

So even if/when you expand to 6 or 8 there still exists the problem of just letting in conference champs when there's the chance a real crappy team winds up pulling an upset in a conference title game.

[Meacon Keaton]

Damn it damshow, you could've saved me a lot of words. Everything you've said was exactly right. Guaranteeing a Power-5 champion does not fix the issues that people seem to have with the set up. 

[gunnar hendershow]

50 minutes ago, Meacon said:

Damn it damshow, you could've saved me a lot of words. Everything you've said was exactly right. Guaranteeing a Power-5 champion does not fix the issues that people seem to have with the set up. 

If only they capped all conferences at 8-10 teams and made them all do pure round robins to determine a champion. Like the good ol' days.

[The Buscher]

I'm all for making every division have their own G1 Climax.

[DMN in the House]

2 hours ago, damshow said:

I think they idea of all the Power 5 champions being the best is a bit misleading. With the way divisions shake out you could have an 8-4 team face a 12-0 team, win the conference, and suddenly be guaranteed a spot in the playoff? Imagine if a 4-loss team from the ACC Coastal beat an undefeated Clemson in the ACC title game. Suddenly that team, say they are Georgia Tech, suddenly wind up in the playoffs against Alabama or Oklahoma or Ohio State. They would more than likely get steamrolled. And you can't argue they got it done in the regular season when hypothetically they have 2 out-of-conference losses to teams that didn't make bowl games plus a loss to Georgia. It's the biggest flaw with guaranteeing conference champs a spot in, since conferences aren't round robin you can wind up with fluke champions.

So even if/when you expand to 6 or 8 there still exists the problem of just letting in conference champs when there's the chance a real crappy team winds up pulling an upset in a conference title game.

Unless you had a one loss ND and another non-conference champion considered better, that team still makes an eight team playoff, solving both issues.

[Lineker]

Bryce Love's dad says son will return to Stanford for senior year

[Meacon Keaton]

Ugh

I mean, we did a fairly good job of keeping him contained this year, but selling out the defense to stop him allowed the pimply-faced goober to pass all over us. Still. Stanford kid staying to get his degree isn't all that shocking.

In Notre Dame news, defensive tackle Jerry Tillery, lineback Te'von Coney, and safety/linebacker/rover Drue Tranquill are all coming back for their senior seasons.