Obama is pressing for an eight-team playoff for college football, while other argue for a twelve-team playoff. I’m going to go the other way and propose a six-team playoff on the grounds that wild cards slots are an abomination. There are six BCS conferences, each of which has one champion. That champion has already beaten every other team in their conference in the regular season standings. Put one of those other teams in the playoffs anyway, and you give them the opportunity to overturn the entire regular season in a single game.Â
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Eric,
so what? Â leaving aside the fact that this is the case for every regular season game in the BCS as well, isn’t the whole point of wild-cards to help correct for the fact that the conferences aren’t all created equal? Â Or that two teams might really be that evenly matched?
The conferences may not be evenly matched, but that’s what the playoffs are for. If a weak team gets in because the rest of their conference was weak, then the better teams have a chance to beat them in the playoffs. But the second-best team in a conference already had their chance to beat the conference winner, and didn’t. They don’t deserve a do-over in the playoffs. For multiple teams in the same conference, the regular season is a better arbitor of which is the better team than the playoffs.
6 is a bad number because:
1) Not all teams are in a BCS conference and sometimes the national champion comes from outside, e.g., BYU 1984
2) Not all conferences crown their champion the same way. Since both the Big 10 and PAC 10 lack championship games, they have screwy tie-breakers (e.g., who’s been the longest since the Rose Bowl). Â
3) In particular, the Big 10 is problematic as they neither play a full round-robin nor have a championship game which means that the two best teams in the conference may not have played each other.
4) Even when there is a conference championship game, you get ties in determining who goes into the championship game – see the SEC East many years or the Big-12 south where there’s a tie for who gets to play in the championhip game, with again screwy tie breakers (BCS rankings or voting as was once done in the SEC).
Let’s say you have a circle of death in the Big 12 South (as will happen this year if Oklahoma beats Tx Tech as expected) of 1 loss teams to each other. The team that eventually represents the Big 12 South in the championship game is not unarguably better than the other two.
Wild cards help smooth out these issues.
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Here’s my proposal:
Take the top 20 football programs at the end of the year based on current standings.
Sit all the football team players who have played at least 25 downs during the regular season down and have them take a final exam based on general studies (reading, writing, arithmetic).
Award the team with the highest average score the national championship.
I could get behind that one.
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1. I’d be open to some sort of qualifying mechanism for non-BCS-conference teams. I’m not firmly attached to number six, merely hostile to wild card slots letting in teams that lost their conferences.
2-4. Sounds like the conferences need to clean up their regular season mechanisms. Obama should get right on this.
I’ll admit a certain ignorance about college football. I’m mainly a baseball fan, and my antipathy towards wild cards is a reaction to the relatively recent introduction of wild cards to MLBÂ and residual bitterness about the 2004 ALCS.
Ooh, I like CC’s idea. It needs a bit of work so it makes better television, but the principle seems sound.
<i>Ooh, I like CC’s idea. It needs a bit of work so it makes better television, but the principle seems sound.</i>
College Bowl Tournament?
jodyneel’s last blog post..Obama wins
Eric,
in what way is the regular season a better arbiter than a championship game? Â it sounds like sour grapes, to me. Â after all, most college teams in the same conference meet each other only once, if at all. Â you simply can’t draw parallels to baseball in that regard.
Sample size. Regular season standings compare performance over 12 games per team, while in a three-round playoff no team plays more than three games, and the average team plays less than two.
Eric,
but if each team plays each other team only once, then your n for any given matchup, which seems to be the critical point here, still equals 1. For example, consider two teams A and B, each with an 11-1 record, but team A had beaten team B, and team A’s loss had come from a team B had not faced. In a wild-card situation, perhaps both teams A and B would be in the playoffs. In your situation, the fact that A had beaten B would disqualify B from the playoffs based on a single observation.
It’s not based on a singled observation. It’s based on being very slightly better over a set of twelve observations. If they weren’t tied in the standings, the head-to-head record wouldn’t matter, so the full season’s records are the sample size.
It’s not at all very slightly better over the set of 12 observations, because after 12 observations their W/L ratio is identical. Â So then you delve into having to subjectively decide which wins or losses "count" more than others, since neither team had anything close to an identical schedule. Â You’re dealing with a totally non-normal distribution and having wild card slots seems to be a pretty decent way of, as jodyneel puts it, smoothing things out.
And all of that aside, let’s say that a wild-card team upsets their division champion. Â Well, so what? Â Isn’t the wild-card team deserving? Â If not, why not? Â If all you cared about was the sanctity of some regular-season record, of who "deserved" to win, then why bother having a championship at all? Â Add 3 games to the regular season and declare the winner by their W/L record.
The point of the championship games, in my mind, is to pick and overall champion between the champions of the various leagues, divisions, or conferences. Each conference champion is the best team of their confernce, as determined by the regular season record with ties broken by various mechanisms (conceptually, I prefer one-game playoffs to break regular season ties, but that’s not always practical in football, so they may use head-to-head record or another tiebreaker mechanism). You can’t use regular season record to compare teams from different conferences, as they played completely different opponents in the regular season, so you need championship games for that.
Eric,
So you’re uncomfortable comparing teams from different conferences because they played different opponents. Â But you’re comfortable comparing teams from the same conference despite the fact that they, too, face substantially different opponents?
Isn’t the point of having conferences that they all play each other? As I said upthread, I’m basing my opinions on baseball, where teams within a division (competing for a single playoff slot awarded to the division champion) play nearly identical schedules. If they don’t do that in college football, then the regular season is broken as a mechanism for determining conference champions.
a problem to which wild card slots present one solution ;)
I guess you could say that, although I’d characterize it as a hacky workaround rather than a solution. :)
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