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Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - Class_of_75 - 10-28-2014

The first college football playoff rankings were just released. 3 SEC teams in the top 4 - Miss St, Ole Miss, and Auburn. Florida St. was the 4th team. Oregon was 5th, Notre Dame 10th, Arizona 12th, Arizona St 14th, Utah 17th, and UCLA 22nd.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/mississippi-state-florida-state-top-234812999--ncaaf.html

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - martyup - 10-28-2014

It appears the committee is focusing more on quality wins than bad losses.  Thus, a one loss Oregon is rated ahead of a one loss Arizona, even though Arizona beat Oregon handily.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - OutsiderFan - 10-28-2014

Will be fascinating to see how far the loser of Auburn-Miss falls after this weekend.

Pretty safe to assume that if Oregon loses another game the Pac-12 is going to be aced out of the playoff.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - cardcoug - 10-28-2014

I think a one loss AZ or Utah would still get in. Utah, at least, still has plenty of tough games left to impress with (or, more likely, lose), and I assume the same is true of AZ (haven't looked at their schedule). I think a 1 loss PAC champ is a sure bet.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - CowboyIndian - 10-28-2014

Is there a less impressive two-loss team in the country than UCLA? Their inclusion - even at #22 -  is an indictment of this whole thing.

And...why don't they just go ahead and name four $EC teams and be done with it. We'll just have our little Alamo and Holiday Bowls and be happy they actually considered some of us in September.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - CTcard - 10-28-2014

(10-28-2014, 06:01 PM)martyup link Wrote:It appears the committee is focusing more on quality wins than losses.  Thus, a one loss Oregon is rated ahead of a one loss Arizona, even though Arizona beat Oregon handily.

[But doesn't that mean that they aren't taking Arizona's quality win seriously? ]


It appears to me that the committee is like the pollsters, primarily focused on the number of losses a team has - and only if tied on that measure do they start to consider issues of schedule.

They rank at the top the Power Five 0 loss teams.
Then they rank all of the Power Five 1 loss teams.
Then they rank all of the Power Five 2 loss teams.

There are two sort-of exceptions; 1 loss Duke is down among the 2 loss teams. Also with Duke is 1 loss, non-Power 5 East Carolina. Those are the only two examples of taking strength of schedule above losses - and they are pretty extreme examples of weak schedules.

It appears so far that the route to the championship game is the same as always: be in a Power Five conference, make the easiest schedule possible, win the games.



Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - CTcard - 10-28-2014

(10-28-2014, 07:57 PM)CowboyIndian link Wrote:Is there a less impressive two-loss team in the country than UCLA?

I initially had the same thought, then I started looking at the two loss teams.

Less impressive than UCLA would be: Clemson, Louisville, Georgia Tech, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, not to mention UCF, Northern Illinois, Boise, Georgia Southern, and South Alabama.

Apparently the committee disagrees with me about Clemson. Maybe.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - OutsiderFan - 10-28-2014

Ranking teams based on their losses is so incredibly misguided.  How many times do we see the teams that don't have the best records, winning championships in playoffs?  It happens routinely.  Tomorrow one such team will win the World Series.  The L.A. Kings finished 3rd in their division and won the Stanley Cup last year.  The year before, a Wild Card team won the Super Bowl.

Please for the love of Pete, can we just give each Big 5 conference champion a berth in the playoff, and then have a committee select three at-large teams?

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - stupac2 - 10-28-2014

(10-28-2014, 08:17 PM)OutsiderFan link Wrote:Ranking teams based on their losses is so incredibly misguided.  How many times do we see the teams that don't have the best records, winning championships in playoffs?  It happens routinely.  Tomorrow one such team will win the World Series.  The L.A. Kings finished 3rd in their division and won the Stanley Cup last year.  The year before, a Wild Card team won the Super Bowl.

Please for the love of Pete, can we just give each Big 5 conference champion a berth in the playoff, and then have a committee select three at-large teams?

The problem is "tradition", which says that the goal is naming the "best" team. Of course, no one actually grapples with what "best" means and how you determine it. Every other team sport uses a playoff with defined paths to berths for a reason: it's the only sane way to declare a champion. Trying to name the "best" team is completely futile even if you manage to define it in a coherent way, which you probably can't.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - Papa John - 10-28-2014

I have to admit I'm rooting for total chaos. Four SEC teams in the first playoff might do the trick.

But there's a method to my madness. I'm looking for a catalyst to get this playoff expanded to eight, with automatic bids for the champions of the Power 5 conferences, plus one bid reserved for the best non-Power 5 team, plus two more wildcards.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - stupac2 - 10-29-2014

(10-29-2014, 08:20 AM)garvin link Wrote:
Quote:Every other team sport uses a playoff with defined paths to berths for a reason: it's the only sane way to declare a champion.

Not sure what you mean by "every other team sport." Football is using a playoff, too; that's what this is all about. But somebody still has to decide who gets into the playoff, and those decisions are always subjective. Before the basketball tournament expanded to 64 teams, there was a firestorm of bitching every year about teams that had been excluded. Unless football expands its playoffs to 16 -- possibly more -- there will still be lots of complaints.

Garvin, I said (and you quoted) "Every other team sport uses a playoff with defined paths to berths". The current system does not have defined paths to berths. Until every P5 conference champion gets in the football playoff is still not where it needs to be.

Would there be complaints with an 8-team playoff? Probably, there are complaints about pretty much everything in life. But I don't think they'd be legitimate as long as every team knows what they need to do to get in.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - jacketree - 10-29-2014

Even better, reorganize the top 80 teams into (8) 10-team conferences with round robin champions and go from there. All that's left is how to seed the playoffs and how to select the top 80. Details.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - stupac2 - 10-29-2014

(10-29-2014, 08:44 AM)jacketree link Wrote:Even better, reorganize the top 80 teams into (8) 10-team conferences with round robin champions and go from there. All that's left is how to seed the playoffs and how to select the top 80. Details.

That's how I'd ideally do it too (though I'm enthralled with the idea of 16-team conferences with pods and would go with that instead, but that's quibbling). The problem, of course, is there isn't a popsicle's chance in hell of that happening. Too bad, really, because it's a much more elegant solution.

Re: Inaugural Football Playoff Rankings - 82 Card - 10-29-2014

The difference between football and other college sports is that the other sports don't have jousts so brutal that only one game per week is possible. The other sports have many more matches in a season. If you want to have playoffs like in other sports, football would have to become a different game so that there could be muliple matches in a weekend. How many people would come out to watch a a football festival of 15 or 30 minute matches? Would it be more or less than the number that watch arena football?

As it is, I really don't see the point of football playoffs. I wish they would just make it 4 SEC teams so they can have their media circus and leave the rest of the country out of it.  I really don't GOS whose the bestest in the whole wide world.