The final College Football Playoff rankings were announced last Sunday. To the surprise of few, Alabama, Clemson, Notre Dame and Oklahoma will be the four teams competing for shiny new rings — most assuredly paid for by the out of state tuition of some poor biology major — and a national championship trophy that will forever collect dust in a private suite where only the top athletic director ass-kissers in America will see it.
All four teams are deserving. But exactly how did the committee arrive at these four schools, leaving an 11-2 Georgia team that should’ve beat the “unbeatable” Crimson Tide, a 12-1 conference champion Ohio State and a pointlessly undefeated UCF team out in the frigid air?
Sidebar: Who’s kidding who? UCF will never matter in the eyes of the committee.
Joel Klatt eloquently summarized the decision on Fox Sports One:
True, the committee ranked Notre Dame and Oklahoma, and penalized Georgia and Ohio State relative to their lowest moment(s) of the season. But is that truly the most suitable way to judge the best of the best? Rather than placing an added emphasis on a team’s highest point of the season, where they’re theoretically playing peak football, they’re being judged on the lack of quality in their defeats.
Does this make any sense at all? What other industry judges talent this way?
Did Simon Cowell send people to Hollywood based on which of their performances sucked the least? Did you get that promotion at work because your new idea for efficiency got shot down less quickly than your co-worker’s? Do we hand out KOs in the Tale of the Tape predicated on how good the worst song is relative to the next album’s best bad song?
Of course not. That would be idiotic. We define greatness by the ceiling of a performer, not by the dependability of their floor. Sure, consistency is important, and a 29-point loss to an average Purdue team shouldn’t go unpunished, nor should having two losses when being compared to several one and zero-loss teams. But to measure greatness by which teams had the best bad day seems counter-intuitive.
Consequently, ranking teams in this manner demonstrates a de-emphasis on the value placed on a team’s best performance. For example, we don’t view Ohio State as the team that put 62 points (and actually let up off the gas at the end) on the nation’s top-ranked defense (an arch rival no less) that the committee had previously indicated as being worthy of the playoff…because they lost by 29 at Purdue. The Purdue loss defined Ohio State’s season; it became their identity. The fact that Oklahoma had a “better loss” and were able to avenge that L in their conference championship is why they’re still playing for a championship.
Although, the phrase “any given Saturday” exists for a reason. Anybody can have a bad day at the office, or can momentarily lose focus against an inferior opponent. The Pittsburgh Steelers do it in the NFL all the time, but that doesn’t stop prognosticators from picking them to make the Super Bowl each year. Alabama’s best win was a 29-0 defecation on the then #3 LSU Tigers in Death Valley. It was a damn impressive win, however LSU lost two other contests and finished the regular season outside the top 10. It could easily be argued it wasn’t a more impressive win than the Buckeyes’ beatdown of Michigan, a team whose only other loss came by one score on the road to the committee’s current #3 team.
Naturally, Bama gets a benefit of the doubt they’ve earned through multiple years of dominance, and isn’t that kind of the point? The Tide earned that benefit in the minds of the committee because of the championship ceiling they’ve proven they’re capable of reaching (real talk, it’s the only reason they made the playoff in 2017). Not because of a handful of not-so-bad losses they’ve endured over the years. We envision the National Championship Game taking place between two teams playing at their zenith, for when they are at their zenith, they are in fact the two best teams. Yet the team with the most impressive victory on the season (who also happens to be a one-loss power five conference champion) is left out of the mix.
While this may sound strictly like lobbying for Ohio State, this is more a referendum on the committee and their criteria for selecting the four best teams. A string of underwhelming wins and generally inconsistent performances contributed to the omission of the Buckeyes. But if they won all of those games, should that override their ability to rise to the occasions against the stiffest competition? The committee says yes, in spite of the fact that only the stiffest competition makes the playoffs. The Bulldogs had a similar case as Ohio State until the SEC Championship game. Georgia’s “reward” for making it to that game was essentially a one-sided play-in game against Alabama for a chance to make the playoff, while a team like Notre Dame benefits from not having to play a conference championship game.
It remains an imperfect system to be sure. But at it’s core, the College Football Playoff professes to be a system designed to find “the four best teams”, using metrics such as conference championships, strength of schedule, head-to-head results, and comparison of results against common opponents. That sounds great in radio and TV interviews, but when their criteria appears to hinge more which teams had the worst loss rather than which teams had the best win, it’s likely we’re not judging “the best” properly.