Random thoughts on the CFP playoff rankings … For those that don’t follow college football all that closely, the CFP playoff committee released their updated playoff rankings last night as they’ll do every Tuesday between now and the end of the college season. Oregon remains the #1 team, followed by Ohio State, Texas, and Penn State with upstart Indiana rounding out the top 5. For the record, that means the Big Ten holds four of the top 5 positions, while the rest of the top 12 field is completed by BYU, Tennessee, Notre Dame, Miami, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. Note though that Georgia would actually be bumped from the playoff in favor of Boise State which would get an automatic bid as the highest rated non-Power 5 conference team. And that had us thinking back to an earlier ESPN article which asked whether the SEC was getting snubbed in the rankings. Here’s the problem with the whole business. The rankings are based largely on team’s raw W-L records, but the elephant in the room is that in reality teams play wildly different schedules. Take Georgia, for example; the Bulldogs have already played 3 teams in the CFP’s current top 12. In fact, they played all the 3 ON THE ROAD: at Alabama, at Texas and at Mississippi last weekend. And so it goes in the SEC where teams are playing tough games every week, often against other contenders and somebody has to lose. No wonder the SEC wanted a guaranteed number of its teams in the playoff as a pretty good case can be made that a 3-loss season in the SEC is probably the equivalent of a 2-loss record in the Big Ten and a 1-loss mark elsewhere. Indeed, in contrast, 6th ranked BYU hasn’t played any other current playoff team and has only played against 2 games even against top 25 teams; they’ve also only played one game within the conference against a team with a plus-.500 record in Big XII play. BYU, if they hold on in the conference, should certainly be included in the playoff, but does anyone really think they would beat Alabama or Georgia if they had to play them as part of their regular schedule. What’s the answer? Probably to have 4-5 ten or so team top-tier leagues across the country with some kind of promotion mechanism for the top second-tier teams, but we just aren’t likely to see any such development as long as long as there is no overriding body running college football where currently the individual conferences operate pretty much as independent entities with almost total control of the money flowing to the sport.
