Adaptive College Football Playoff System
Someone smarter than me help me think through how this could work.
Truth #1 - Money and tradition should take a back seat to getting the system itself right. Duh.
Truth #2 - There should be as few playoff games played each year as absolutely necessary. This keeps the most amount of importance on regular season games as possible, which is what College Football is all about.
Scenario #1 - One SEC team and one B1G team finish undefeated. Every other P team has one loss. What should happen? One game, winner take all. Why should they have to play more than that?
Scenario #2 - 3 one loss teams. What should happen? 4 team playoff with the highest ranked 2 loss. Who cares about the other 2 loss teams? They didn't earn the right to complain on the field. We are only worried about the "tier 1" teams, and what is fair to them. Well, it is fair that they should all have to play the same amount of games, and the highest ranked gets the two loss.
Scenario #3 - 1 undefeated from the B1G, two one-loss teams from the SEC. What should happen? The committee is asked the question "is B1G team the best team in the country?" If 6/10 answer "yes", then there is a one game playoff between B1G and whoever won the SECCG. If less than 6/10 answer "yes", there is a 4 team playoff.
Scenario #4 - 2008 - season ends with:
OU (12 - 1)
Florida (12 - 1)
Texas (11 - 1)
Alabama (11 - 1)
USC (11 - 1)
Utah (12 - 0)
Texas Tech (11 - 1)
Penn State (11 - 1)
How's that for an 8 team playoff for ya?
Scenario #5 - 2004 - season ends with:
USC (12 - 0)
Oklahoma (12 - 0)
Auburn (12 - 0)
California (10 - 1)
Utah (11 - 0)
Texas (10 - 1)
Louisville (10 - 1)
Georgia (9 - 2)
What should happen? The first question asked is "are USC, OU, and Auburn in the top tier by themselves?" If the answer is 7/10 yes, the next question is "is USC the undisputed top team?" If the answer is 8/10 yes, then in 3 weeks OU plays Auburn, and two weeks later the winner plays USC. If the answer is less than 8/10 yes, then there is a 4 team playoff.
Scenario #6 - 2003 - season ends with:
Oklahoma (12 - 0)
USC (10 - 1)
LSU (11 - 1)
What should happen? Sorry, but despite hindsight, due to wins, the question "Are USC and LSU in the same tier as Oklahoma?" has to be met with a 8/10 vote for a 4 team playoff. Otherwise, OU only has to play as many games as necessary, which is one. So they play the highest ranked one-loss.
Scenario #7 - You are given the keys to college football. They call you the MasterKingShit of College Football. Your people have anointed you. You can do anything you want to the system of college football, and money and tradition do not stand in your way. You can move the start of the season back a week. You can implement a system like European soccer where teams rotate in and out of conferences based on performance. You can knock ND off their high horse and make them join the B1G. You obviously start with 4 or 5 power conferences that have a CCG. Where do you go from there?
Preliminary thoughts:
- the playoff can never be greater than 8
- the playoff committee will select people based on football knowledge
- Conference Championship games have to mean something, but their value can't be absolute
- playoffs with 3 rounds will have the first game played on campus
- playoffs with 1 - 2 game have a 3 or 4 week break, playoffs with 3 - 7 games have 2 weeks in between all games
Excuse the sloppyness, I'm quite inebriated.
*Magnifcuss Discusstis*
GO!
It WILL happen
I would love to see an 8 team playoff.
8 conferences. 10 teams each. No conference championship games.
Play all 9 teams in your conference. 3 non-conference games.
Must be top 12 in the nation to keep your conference's automatic bid to the 8-team playoff. Otherwise it becomes an at-large spot.
Quarterfinals at home site of high seed (#1 - #4)
Losers of the quarters go into the pool for bowls like all non-playoff teams. Must have WINNING record to make a bowl.
Semis and finals done just like they're done now.
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Bring up the 35-40 best FCS teams to create a D-1AA with the MAC/Sun Belt/etc. teams that are no longer D1A. Those teams belong together anyway (EMU is closer to Towson than any power 5 team). *I think people would actually watch the D-1AA games if they played on Wednesday's like MACtion does now.*
I made this a week or so ago...
I included the service academies because I've been told it would be extrememly difficult not to include them in any type of overhaul. But you can remove them and find 3 better schools that didn't make it for sure.
Having them makes the NE weak, but it doesn't matter if you have to be top 12 to get your automatic bid to the playoff. Being a 2-loss team in that NE conference is basically the old Big East and you'd get left out...which is fine. Be top 12, that's the upper half of the top 25 if you want an automatic bid for being a conference champ.
Right click it and open it in a new tab.
Imagine this year (2016-17)...
#8 Stanford/USC @ #1 Clemson
#7 LSU/Houston @ #2 Alabama
#6 FSU (at-large) @ #3 Michigan
#5 OSU (at-large) @ #4 Oklahoma
Play these games the 2nd week of Decemeber (NO conference championship games the week before - everyone is off). The day after these games, you have your bowl selection special for all of your non-playoff teams with records over .500 and the losers from this quarterfinal round. Still plenty of time to make travel arrangements - actually it's the same amount of time.
Then just do bowls like you do them now*....and the semifinals/finals like you do them now. Semis in the last week of Decemeber, Finals the 2nd week of January.
*except make the TV schedule on New Year's Day make sense so 4 games aren't playing at the same time including 3 including teams from one stincking conference! (Also, put your shit bowls first and your better bowls last...no GMAC bowl on Jan 3rd).
When does it stop, and when does the playoff come to mean more than the regular season? The NCAA has convinced itself 67 teams is currently the correct number for Basketball, how long before 32 is seen as optimal for football?
Just because 8 makes sense to a ton of people...especially when you currently have 5 power conferences. Doesn't mean infinite expansion is good or people want it.
Why even have a regular season? Let's just start the tournament in Septemeber and make it double elimination.
Stop it with that bullshit.
16 is ridiculous and few people actually realistically clamor for it. It would take forever to finish and the discrepency in games played for the championship game teams and non-playoff teams would be far too great. Most people agree that most years you're going to get 5-10 true playoff worth teams. I've never seen anyone pretending like #14-#16 are worthy of playing with the top teams.
You can not like 8 without acting like just because people like the idea of 8...it starts some never ending cycle of playoff expansion.
How long before 32 is seen as optimal? Never. No one who knows anything about college football would ever suggest a 32-team playoff and actually mean it. Like I said, very few people think 16 is even realistic. So you can cut all that "but when does it stop?!" mess now.
August 4th, 2016 at 10:29 PM ^
I think they need to take most of it out of the hands of people sitting on their asses and put it in the hands of the players and coaches. The best way to do this is to go to 6 or 8 teams, championons only. Every Power Five champion should be guaranteed a slot. Then the best of the other champions, including an "indie champion" if it works out that way,
You want to see a bunch of "marquee matchups" during pre-conference play? See what happepns when the playoff isn't a beauty contest anymore, but lets each conference champion play.
That way, the loser of Michigan/ND isn't facing an uphill battle all season. If they want every game to be important, then make teams win their division and their conference to get into the playoff.
There should be as few playoff games played each year as absolutely necessary. This keeps the most amount of importance on regular season games as possible, which is what College Football is all about.
The problem is that you have no basis for deciding what the fewest number of playoff games necessary is, and so adapting the system based on some arbitrary and likely incorrect mertric like "games won" when not all games or schedules are equal is to chase fool's gold.
You need to have the minimum number of playoff games necessary to ensure that there is a very high probability that the best team ion the country is in the playoff. So long as you have that, it is silly to try to limit the minimum to below that because some teams when undefeated and others did not; the whole point is that, given the schedule of the 11-2 team, the 12-0 team may have lost three or four games.
Four seems like it will work 90+% of the time. Six (with byes for the top-ranked two teams) would probably increase that to 95+%. Eight probably wouldn't be much better than six.
Adapting the rules season by season would cost a lot and gain nothing.
It's been about 5-6 teams who are realistically worthy for the first two years of the playoff.
That's why a lot of people like 8. Because they'd rather have 1-2 teams that probably aren't quite playoff worthy over leaving someone out who should be in and very well could win a national championship. Especially when you know those 1-2 teams are going to play your #1 and #2 seeds...it rewards those top teams for being fucking awesome.
In year 1...Baylor and TCU should've been in the playoff. So what if you add MSU and Ole Miss? That's not egregious. I'd rather MSU and Ole Miss in than Baylor and TCU out.
In year 2...Stanford and Iowa should've been in the playoff. So what if you add 2 of OSU, ND and UNC. Again, that's not egregious. OSU's only lost was a ugly game to a playoff team (MSU), UNC took #1 Clemson to the wire and got screwed on an onside kick to potentially tie. I'm not saying either wins a national championship..but it doesn't hurt anything by having them in the playoff.
It's not like we're talking about last year's Oregon team being in a 16-team playoff (or, sigh, Michigan). In 2014 that would've been a 3-loss Mizzou, Wisconsin or Arizona St. - no one wants those teams in a playoff except the fans of those teams in that particular year.
This is not a discussion of what will be, but what should be.
We should be discussing your drinking habits.
This is a terrible idea. It will only make things more chaotic. You will get endless arguments, and they will actually be arguments that not only were teams worthy of the playoff but that the committee artificially capped the playoff at too low of a number.
It's unworkable. It's nonsensical. I respect your effort in putting this together, but it doesn't solve a single problem and it does not make the sport any better.
Just to use one example, there are times that one-loss teams are actually better than undefeated teams. The BCS tried to handle this and it was always controversial; the fact that two teams from, say, the Big 12 and the Pac 12 made it through a season without a loss simply doesn't tell us if they are better than a 1-loss Alabama team that played a uber-talented LSU team on the road.
This is not a good idea.
Just looked closer at your breakdown of the 2003 season. Wow. It gets it wrong, which automatically disqualifies this idea again. BTW, Oklahoma wasn't undefeated, they had a baaaaaaad loss in the Big 12 Title game.
Yes, I just realized this too. 2003 should have been a 4 team playoff. I disagree with you because I believe wins on the field should be the single most important factor in deciding who plays who. In the scenario of a one-loss SEC team vs two undefeated teams from other conferences, this is why you need the human element. If there were 10 guys like Brian Billick voting, given the reality of the inequality of that conference compared to others, they would probably overwhelmingly decide that the one-loss SEC champ deserves a shot, and that's the way it should be. But wins on the field still have to have the most meaning.
They already do.
But the playoff as currently constructed was totally validated in its second-ever game, when "not-sure-if-they-belong" Ohio State eviscerated Alabama's celebrated defense. They were clear-cut the last team in, but they were the best. In your system they just would have had Alabama and Florida State play, a miscarriage of justice.
The only conclusion one can come to in light of what has occurred in the last two years is that teams that don't get a chance to play are complete unknowns. We have missed out on truly learning who was the best.
I was a long-time playoff opponent, since I believe as you do that the regular season is by far the best part of the game and that every game should matter. But what occurred is that teams STILL lost those idle games and STILL got unfair breaks to play in title games while other deserving teams were left out.
Perhaps the saddest lament I have about the era of the 00s (besides Michigan declining) is that we never got to see a great Pete Carroll USC team play a great SEC team in a title game. And there were quality candidates. USC was great in 2003 and didn't play LSU; great in 2004 and missed Auburn; great in 2007 and didn't get their fair chance to play LSU again; and great in 2008 and didn't get to play Florida. And other years, like 2006, they would have been a serious title threat.
The SEC was the rising conference; USC was a great team. And we never got to learn how they compared. Not once.
I'm a non-playoff guy and I hope we never see an 8-team structure, but the landscape of football as such requires what we have now.
Why wouldn't you want an 8 team playoff in 2008? There were 8 teams that should have been in based on W/L. Also, I don't really care if a 2 loss team would have wound up winning the playoff, if there were 2 undefeated teams and no one-loss teams, they didn't earn the right to be in the playoff in the first place.
But neither did the undefeated team earn the right to be in the playoff. It played no one in the non-conference, played in a weak division, and saw the other division's star qb break his leg the week before the conference championship.
Your arbitrary decision that team record trumps team quality makes your idea a non-starter. The system has to allow the best team to appear in the playoff, or it is bogus.
And that is why you have the greatest football minds of all time on the committee, so they can use common sense to overrule scenarios that break the system. It all comes down to establishing tiers of teams, and tier one has to be some mixture of wins and common sense. In your scenario, obviously these things are taken into consideration and these great football people who are completely nuetral will make the obvious vote.
Well that's why you ask the question "is Alabama in the same tier as Iowa / Clemson"? And if you had the right people on the comittee, they would have overwhelmingly voted "yes", and you expand from there. Understand there is no perfect system for any given year, even this system, but it at least makes an attempt to get the closest to what it should be on any given year.
August 4th, 2016 at 10:22 PM ^
Oooopss
(actually it looks cooler now)
So tempted to make my second vote a mirror image of my first...
Yes, and that is why you have a committe that votes, so common sense prevails over any rigid system.
So it's not adaptive based on situation, it's subjective based on situation. This is an absolutely terrible idea and you should be ashamed you put your name on it.
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And as to "fewest games possible," that is a sysnym for:
Angriest TV networks;
Fewest fans interested;
Least public attention;
Stupidest idea.
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So in a year with 5 one loss teams, you want a 4 team playoff, and in a year with one undefeated and one one-loss, you want a 4 team playoff, and in a year with 8 one loss, you want a four team playoff, etc.?
That's a much better idea! Let's go with that. Thanks for suggesting it.
So you legitimately think that if 2008 pops up again, there should be a 4 team playoff? Why wouldn't you want to include the other 4 teams that played their way into it on the field?