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My Evolving Take on the Debate on a College Football Playoff Part II: The Effect of a Playoff on the Games and Schedules

September 8, 2009 – 5:02 pm

We’re using Ed Gunther’s analysis of the debate on a college football playoff as a framework to present my own analysis and opinions. In Part I I explained some of the history behind how we got where we are, and used mathematical analysis to show not only that a playoff wouldn’t make college football’s regular season less meaningful than any other sport, but that it’s quite possibly too meaningful now, because it gives us too small a sample size to properly compare teams in different conferences.

In his introduction, Gunther illustrates this with a discussion of two different notions of who’s “better”, and they’re fairly familiar: better as determined by individual games (what Gunther calls “on-that-day” better), and better as determined by your body of work over the course of the season – determined in pro sports with balanced schedules by won-loss records, but even then there is a small element of subjectiveness when comparing teams that differ by one or two games, because if that one game had gone differently who knows what might have happened. Who’s better “on that day” is obvious, but there is a tendency to conflate it with who’s better over the course of the season. Gunther imagines the following debate between an Oklahoma and Texas fan at some point after the end of the 2008 season, which I have edited for clarity, and highlighted the Oklahoma fan in red and the Texas fan in orange:

Oklahoma is better than Texas.
No way – Texas beat them 45-35!
So what? Going by that, then you have to say that Texas Tech is better than Texas, since the Red Raiders beat the Longhorns.
Texas obviously had a better season than Texas Tech. The Longhorns didn’t get blown out 65-21 by Oklahoma – their one loss was by 6 points on the last play of the game.

The Texas fan argues that, since Texas was better than Oklahoma on the day the two teams took the field, that means Texas was better than Oklahoma over the course of the whole season as well. The Oklahoma fan brings up a strawman, saying by that logic, Texas Tech is better than Texas, which of course, would further imply that Oklahoma was better than Texas Tech and therefore Texas. The Texas fan dismisses that result on the grounds that it was a close contest, effectively saying the respective bodies of work of Texas and Texas Tech trump the result of that one game. Yet those bodies of work are themselves defined by two games: Texas beat Oklahoma but Oklahoma beat Texas Tech. None of the other games any of the three teams played matters one iota. And the worst part? You don’t need to be a Texas homer to say this – just about everyone outside the state of Oklahoma worked through the argument this way after the Big 12 Title Game matchup was set.

That, more than anything else, is a symptom of college football’s small sample size: we can’t even perceive of what it means to be better over the course of the season. All we know is that two teams won ten, eleven, or even twelve games. We can’t compare two teams over the course of all twelve games; we can only compare them in terms of comparable individual games. That, in a nutshell, is why when it comes to BCS conferences, teams end up being ranked by their record. Other sports – even college basketball, where records alone aren’t everything – have a large enough sample size that we can make those comparisons without resorting to individual games. (If there were fewer cupcake games and more inter-conference games between powerhouses we might be able to make better comparisons, but that only happens when you have enough leeway to care about more than record, and that only happens with a playoff.)

This helps explain why one of the big rallying cries of a playoff to proponents is “settle it on the field!” A playoff is entirely predicated on the notion that you can compare teams’ entire seasons by looking at a few individual games. Gunther’s opponents don’t believe in that notion; they prefer to look at the big picture of the season as a whole. Their counterargument is “Any team can beat any other team on any given day.” After all, just because Appalachian State beat Michigan or Stanford beat USC doesn’t mean either of those two teams were actually better than the teams they beat, at least in the context of the entire season. No one in their right mind would say that. But it’s easy to throw out games when the teams involved are widely separated in the standings; what happens when two teams are very close in the standings, like a game apart or tied? It seems reasonable to look at the two teams’ games against one another to break the tie as to which team’s better, right? That’s what professional leagues (and, to some extent, other college sports) do.

Here’s the dirty little secret about comparing two teams’ seasons by looking at their games against each other: If the Steelers and Chargers each go 14-2 this season, and the Steelers beat the Chargers, then if you take that one, fallible, game away, the Steelers would be 13-2 and the Chargers would be 14-1.

Let’s look at two examples. Looking at games and records alone, you can’t resolve the problem between Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas Tech. If you look at the games, Texas is better than Oklahoma, but Oklahoma is better than Texas Tech, but Texas Tech is better than Texas. You have to throw out one of the games. If you look at records, all three teams were 11-1 before the Big 12 Championship Game. Take away their games against each other and all three are 10-0. Even people within a given side of the debate wouldn’t be able to agree on what to use after that – margin of victory? (Effectively keeping the focus on the games.) Strength of schedule? (Effectively forcing you to look at the body of work.) Something else? Some combination of the bunch? Proponents say the right solution in this situation is a playoff to include all three teams so at least two can get eliminated. But opponents of a playoff say this shows games can fail you, putting you on a logical loop, and forcing you to throw out a game and admit games aren’t always the be-all end-all even among comparable teams, so a playoff won’t tell you as much as you might think. (Moreover, if you’re interested in this loop because you want to figure out which team had the best season, your next stop should be more seasonal factors like strength of schedule, so why did you take a detour into individual games again?)

So in 2000, which team was better, Florida State or Miami (FL)? Florida State went to the national championship game, outraging many people who felt it was ignoring Miami’s victory over the Seminoles. How reasonable is that, really? Take away Miami’s win over Florida State, and Florida State was 11-0 while Miami was 9-1. Had that game just been cancelled, no one would have complained that Miami was more deserving in a spot in the national championship game than Florida State. Are you just creating an artificial “tie” between two teams, effectively bumping Miami up two levels for no reason? Does a single, fallible game completely trash Florida State’s season? If Florida State was better outside that one game, and Miami was better “on that day”, shouldn’t Florida State still get the seasonal prize? Did they really settle their differences “on the field” or was it only because of that game that there was anything to settle? If that were a playoff game, would we say Miami was better over the course of the regular season because they beat a team that, until then, we thought was better during the regular season?

Yes. Again, it’s impossible to say that a team in one conference is necessarily better than a team in another conference just because they have one fewer loss. For all we know, Florida State might have gone through a weaker schedule, dodging bullets Miami had to deal with. Miami’s only loss was against Washington, who – like Miami – went 10-1 (and had a bit of a beef of their own with the national championship game selection – was it only a decade ago they were still good?). Washington was clearly a good team; maybe they too got lucky on that day in that one game. Had the ball bounced a different way, Miami could have been 10-0 outside the Florida State game and then there is a tie for us to break again. Heck, maybe Washington was better than Miami who was better than Florida State. And not all situations are like this, where there is a game we can turn to to break the tie, which is why a playoff is such a good idea, to create those games.

Gunther’s opponents would argue that an individual game isn’t a good candidate to break the tie, because it’s so fallible, and thus a playoff wouldn’t work; best to stick with a system that forces us to use tools that work over the course of the season. But the point is that a playoff can create at least the illusion of clarity; it plucks out a single team that, in college football, can at least claim to be the best of the bunch even with a fairly large playoff. In both the 2008 and 2000 cases, the current system was left with amorphous blobs of three teams and could conceivably have picked any one of the three to go to a game that would crown one team as national champion anyway (conceivably none of the three – this debate was all to see who would face eventual national champion Florida or Oklahoma respectively, and the latter was undefeated!).

The example of Miami and Florida State shows that college football can’t rank every single team based on their record. Despite the complaints about how unfair it is that non-BCS teams have no shot at the national championship, no person in their right mind that’s not a Mountain West or WAC homer would put up with Utah-Boise State as the 2009 National Championship game. Members of BCS conferences would complain that they’re being punished for being in good conferences and the tendency to schedule cupcakes would get even worse. Ranking every team based on record, without regard to schedule, benefits the non-BCS conferences but it rarely actually selects the best teams that managed to escape good conferences. The system is biased against the non-BCS teams for a reason, people. A playoff is the only approach fair to both the BCS and non-BCS conferences.

Gunther waxes poetic about how professional leagues can use win-loss records and nothing else to determine playoff composition and seeding, because their leagues are small enough and the number of games are large enough for a balanced schedule, while college sports need to use other factors like strength of schedule and create a more convoluted (and inherently subjective) ranking. Fans of, say, last year’s Patriots can complain that their 11-5 team didn’t get into the playoff while the 8-8 Chargers did, but at least they know that’s the way the rules are set up. In college basketball, however, Patriots fans – while they might accept that the Chargers are deserving of an auto bid – would complain that the committee passed them over for some other team when they shouldn’t have.

And they’d be right, and wrong. People could debate until the cows came home over whether the Patriots were more deserving of an at-large (or, perhaps, just inherently better regardless of what they deserve) than, say, the Ravens, or over where the Chargers should have been seeded compared to other teams, and would never come to a truly definitive answer. Because of this, the NFL quite possibly could get away with a BCS-like system, selecting just the champions of each conference, ignoring the divisional imbalances, and rarely upsetting more than one team in a given year if even that (in fact, the National League got by without any playoff for years until the AL added ambiguity, and European soccer leagues still do) – but college basketball could never consider a playoff even sixteen teams deep, or even one that just didn’t give auto bids to every single conference. And college football isn’t much different.

Yet Gunther follows this line of reasoning to the exact opposite conclusion – that because determining the best team is more inherently subjective in college than in professional sports, it warrants a subjective method of determining the champion, namely, the BCS. All his reasoning has told us is that the regular season in the NFL is more inherently objective and the regular season in college basketball is more inherently subjective, which tells me that for the sake of balance, the NFL can afford to be more subjective in how it chooses its champion (and maybe, to re-emphasize the regular season, they should), while college basketball has to add an objective element to its postseason, or else it gets, well, the BCS (with three times the headache!). Gunther seems to think college sports need to “mak[e] their inherent subjectivity work for the sport”, and while in college basketball that just means leaving the seeding to a committee, in college football, apparently, opponents of a playoff think a subjective season needs to be followed by a subjective championship. Is it any wonder we go through headaches every year? And is it any wonder why March Madness is considered one of the greatest tournaments in the country and is heavily watched as far back as the Round of 64?

Let’s dig into Gunther’s reasoning:

[A]nti-playoff fans want their champion to be the best over the whole season, and in order to gauge that the season usually has to be equal throughout. The college football season as it is now, with all teams playing roughly the same number of games of equal value, gives them that. But switching from a subjective regular season with all teams participating to an objective playoff with a handful of teams participating breaks the continuity of the seasons as a whole and throws it out of balance.

People who back the notion of a “regular season playoff”, in other words, note that every team plays twelve games (and this is where a lot of people complain about the extra game conference championships add). For most BCS teams, four of those games are nonconference games (the Pac-10 has one fewer and the Big East has one more) – we’ll say two of them are against cupcakes and two are against tougher opponents, one arranged by ESPN and one interconference rival. The other eight are played against other teams in your own conference, and for the most part, despite some ebbs and flows and inequalities between the conferences, the comparison is fairly constant across BCS conferences. Everyone plays the same number of games, and those games have roughly the same amount of value, so BCS proponents (I know a lot of people who oppose playoffs hate the BCS as a pseudo-playoff, but a lot of them love them too, and I don’t agree with Gunther’s interpretation of their side, including the pro-”ranking” aspect, so I refer to them as pro-BCS for simplicity only) are fine with picking BCS teams based on record alone, and because of the bowls that doesn’t introduce any further incongruity. But it’s arguably unfair for the best teams to play two, three, even four more games after the end of the season, and play that many more games than everyone else. If you’re in a playoff, you’re being punished for being good and continuing to win. What’s more, the only game that matters once you’re in the playoff is the last game you played and the next game you play. The regular season, with its body-of-work aspect, is now irrelevant, and the result is a schism between the best team and the team that’s winning now. This is why you hear people moan about how little the regular season matters in other sports, no matter what that sport is.

This line of reasoning would work in European soccer, but it breaks my brain in American sports and certainly in college football, where not only are there differences between BCS conferences, the non-BCS conferences just don’t compete on a level playing field. They don’t play opponents that are as tough and they don’t have an equal shot (or any shot) at the national championship. If you want to define FBS as consisting solely of the members of the BCS conferences, you can make the argument that everyone plays the same regular season, but I hope you have time to console the non-BCS teams that just got told they’re not really part of FBS, they’re not playing for the same championship.

What’s more, the idea that the regular season ceases to matter in a playoff isn’t completely true either. True, if you lose you go home. But if you win, who do you play? Do you play the team widely considered the best team in the country on their home turf, or do you play a team that barely got into the playoffs at all on your own home turf? Under a playoff system, the regular season is not only important for determining which teams get into the playoff, but which seeds they have as well, which can affect how far they progress once in the tournament. And seeds are important: a 1 seed has never lost to a 16 in the NCAA basketball tournament, but a 9 seed beats an 8 seed more times than not. That’s why a team that has already locked up their spot in the playoff won’t necessarily start coasting – if there’s a high risk-reward for maximizing their seed. Whether or not there is varies from year to year and system to system, but if college football had a plus-one in 2008, and Florida and Alabama knew they were both moving on to the plus-one regardless of the result of the SEC Championship Game, and the difference was whether they were playing Oklahoma or Texas (or, if Oklahoma lost the Big 12 title game, USC) in the semifinals, I don’t think they’d be terribly motivated to fight for the chance to play the thought-to-be-marginally-worse team. In 2008, the plus-one fell into college football’s uncanny valley: the SEC Championship Game had more meaning under the BCS, but it would have had more meaning under a 16-team system as well. Same goes for Ohio State-Michigan in 2006.

It turns out that a postseason that makes the regular season less meaningful if your goal is to make the playoffs makes it more meaningful if your goal is to fight for seeding. In the NBA, the regular season isn’t very meaningful for picking the teams that go to the playoffs, since half the teams are picked. If your goal is just to make the playoffs, you can coast once you’re in. But by the same token, seeding is very valuable in the NBA, since the 1 seed faces a mediocre team in the first round. The 1 seed would be less valuable in a college football playoff that selected the best eight teams regardless of conference because you’d be facing another team almost as good in the first round. So you need a balance between a playoff large enough to make it valuable for the top teams but small enough to make it valuable for enough bubble teams that no team feels safe, whether it’s with their seeding or their spot in the playoff.

College football is a large enough universe that even with a rather large field, seeding wouldn’t be terribly valuable in and of itself because the differences between seeds would be fine gradations. Seeding value is enhanced by giving auto bids to the winners of mediocre conferences/divisions and placing them at the bottom of the ladder. The 16 seeds in the NCAA Tournament aren’t the 64th best teams in the country; they’re far worse. Teams fight for 1 seeds because they know they’ll not only get a free pass to the second round, they’ll have hardly broken a sweat when they take on a team that survived the grueling 8-9 game. Drop down to the 4 seed and you face a real upset possibility and no distinct advantage over the winner of the 5-12 game.

(Most pro sports do this wrong and give the auto bid teams the best seeds as well, regardless of record compared to the other teams. This is because pro sports are balanced enough that the 1 seed wouldn’t benefit that much more from playing a weak division winner than a less-weak non-division winner, and in fact usually wouldn’t be affected at all. But the NBA did eventually notice that when the 3rd best division winner has a worse record than the 3rd best non-division winner (or 6 seed), and the second-best record happens to belong in the same division as the best record, and home court is based on record and not seed, it produces a perverse incentive to lose and sink to the 6 seed, and allowed the best non-division winner to be seeded with the division winners.)

Tomorrow we put this all together as I unveil – and further defend – my preferred playoff format.

By Morgan Wick | Comments (0)

My Evolving Take on the Debate on a College Football Playoff Part I: The Effect of a Playoff on the Importance of the Regular Season

September 7, 2009 – 6:40 pm

As I said last Monday, I bring a different perspective on the world of sports because I like to think about my sports (I’m that rarest of rarities, a nerd with a sports interest), and there’s no sport that invites more thinking than college football. This is an update and expansion of The Case for a Playoff, probably one of the posts I’ve looked the most at on the old version of Da Blog.

No sport has a more contentious championship structure, in all the world, than American college football. We give control over the championship to a complicated structure called the “BCS” which combines the result of two subjective polls with a bunch of complicated computer ratings which no one knows how they work and wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. This system eventually spits out two teams who are supposed to be “the best” and play each other, and we call the winner the champion.

It’s a lot better than the old system, where we just took a poll to determine the champion. USC-Texas in 2005-06 would never have happened under that system; USC would have played in the Rose Bowl and Texas in the Cotton or Fiesta bowl. Unfortunately, years like that are the exception and not the rule. When there are exactly two undefeated teams, the BCS’ job is easy. When there isn’t, controversy is basically unavoidable. Everyone thinks we should have a real playoff, but no one can get it done.

Part of the problem is the hidden genius in the old system. There wasn’t a national championship. Oh sure, the polls announced a national championship at the end of the season, but who really cared what they had to say? College football was a regional sport that just so happened to be popular in all the regions. Each region crowned its own champion, and some of these regional champions faced other regional champions in bowl games at the end of the season for regional bragging rights. (College football is probably the only sport in the world that ends its season with exhibition games.) The “national championship”, such as it was, wasn’t much different than the Heisman – it was awarded by a panel to the team they felt was most deserving of it. College football isn’t about championships; it’s about history, tradition, and GO WOLVERINES BEAT THE BUCKEYES! Each team didn’t care what most of the other teams in their own conference did, let alone the other teams in the entire country.

The fixation on championships is mostly a result of the ESPN and Internet era, coupled with the rise of money in sports, in particular the proliferation of college football TV contracts in the aftermath of the NCAA’s monopoly power over college football on TV being busted. For a long time, the three most popular sports in America were baseball, horse racing, and boxing. Only baseball had a championship structure similar to that which proliferates in the major sports today – and it only started in 1903 despite prior attempts to compete with the National League and despite the NL itself starting in 1876. Even baseball only selected one-eighth of its teams to the postseason (one team from each eight-team league until 1961, and one from each ten-team league until divisions were finally introduced in 1969), meaning for the majority of teams the postseason was irrelevant (and until the addition of the LCS – and certainly before the 1920 formation of the unified Major League Baseball – the World Series was almost an exhibition). Even baseball today, which has sought to keep its postseason miniscule compared to the select-half-the-teams postseasons of the NBA and NHL (and to a lesser extent, the NFL), still selects eight out of 30 teams – a little over a quarter of all the teams in baseball. (Because of unbalanced league sizes the NL selects exactly a quarter.)

Horse racing and boxing were downright different. Horse racing had no championship whatsoever, or even any unified sanctioning bodies; going to the racetrack was mostly a pastime (and a chance to gamble). That’s why the Triple Crown is more important than it really should be, because they were, for a long time, the biggest races in the sport by default. (The horses that run the Triple Crown are really teenagers, and the races were originally a showcase for the hottest young talent in the sport. That horses are now being bred solely to run in three races in their teens and then retire to stud is just one of the many MANY things horribly wrong about horse racing today.) The closest any of the sports come to this system (or non-system) outside college football are NASCAR and golf – both of which have established pseudo-”playoff” systems in the hope of evoking their team-sport counterparts.

Boxing used and still uses the system of (as wrestler Ric Flair famously put it) “to be the man, you gotta beat the man”, and the corruption of this system with more “championships” than you can shake a stick at (and no one caring about any of them, only caring about individual fighters) is probably irrelevant to most of the other factors. MMA suggests the system can still work wonders when there is a single sanctioning body (even though there have been and continue to be several attempts to compete with the UFC), and the idea of college football using this system has been
floated
before, but the regional nature of the sport makes it difficult, especially since college football does not have a real central sanctioning body. (Not to mention it pretty much necessitates abandoning the idea of only holding the sport for three months; in fact, the need for some sort of “training camp” in team sports is probably the main reason the championship-belt idea has never gotten any play in a team sport.)

Certainly it didn’t have a real sanctioning body before the 90s. The NCAA only handled the TV (and eventually, not even that); college football was really controlled by the individual conferences (and even then by the top schools within each conference), the top independents (of which there were more, including Penn State and the better, more tradition-filled ACC and Big East teams, than today), and the bowls (which were really controlled by the conferences and top schools). When the NCAA handled the TV it showed one game each week; after losing its monopoly power TV contracts began being handled by the conferences. That, coupled with ESPN beginning to showcase games from all around the country, started to dissolve the regional nature of the sport. College football now had a national audience, and it was possible for someone to see games from Ohio State, Alabama, and USC in one weekend.

This started to focus more attention on college football’s nonexistent national championship, and the conferences and bowls, seeing how popular a “national championship game” between the best two teams in the country could be, decided to get together and create one, agreeing to send the top two teams to the same bowl. The Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance both suffered from not including the Big Ten, Pac-10, or Rose Bowl, and the split poll-determined titles of the past remained common. Finally, after a series of concessions to those groups, the Bowl Championship Series, involving four bowls and six conferences plus Notre Dame, was instituted in time for the 1998 college football season. But far from ending the era of split titles and instituting a true college football national championship, the BCS created controversy almost every year, with farcical results and teams outside the previously-nonexistent “Big Six” having no shot at a national championship. The BCS and its faults have had an odd effect, however: it’s touched off a national debate about what sort of system to replace it with, if any (the minority that supports the BCS is very vocal), and that has resulted in an examination, carried out by a surprisingly large number of people, of the very premise and meaning of a playoff in all of sports.

The problem – and, if not the main reason, a big part of the reason we don’t have a playoff already – is the tension between our desire for a playoff and college football clarity, and the history and various traditions of college football that made it so popular in its own right for decades but which were borne out of not having a playoff and thus can’t easily accommodate one. For all its faults, the BCS was designed mostly so as not to overly disrupt these traditions, namely, the fact that you play 11 (later 12) games during the regular season, and if you have a winning season you get to have a vacation in a bowl after school lets out for Christmas, a showcase for college football attended by people visiting the city for the holidays, and a chance to close out your season on a fantastic note by winning your own “championship”, and if you’re really, really good, you just might play in one of the marquee bowls on New Year’s Day. The only thing the BCS changed about this calculus directly was playing after New Year’s. To extend the BCS into a playoff would cause some sort of problem, and it’s an open question whether it’s worth it. It would devalue the regular season by providing spots for 4, 8, or 16 teams rather than two, thus robbing college football of what makes it special; it would force teams to play during finals week, or otherwise hinder academics; it would be the end of the bowls; it would make college football a two-semester sport (never mind that today’s January 8th BCS Championship Game is already being played after school starts). The debate over the merits of a playoff is a debate over striking the right balance between clarity and maintaining these traditions.

What’s my opinion of this debate? It’s too late to preserve the traditions. They were borne of a sport that barely even cared about the games, let alone who was “national champion”, instead preferring to care about the pageantry surrounding it, with the exception of the major rivalry games. The gatekeepers of college football opened Pandora’s Box when they decided they were going to start caring about who was national champion by creating the BCS. You want to preserve the traditions, go back to the old system, but if you want a national champion, you’ve already sacrificed the traditions. You’ve attracted a new clientele to college football, but they won’t miss the traditions if it means they get a playoff. Want proof? Just look at the farce the bowls have become, with more bowls than one-quarter the teams in the Bowl Subdivision, meaning it’s a minor miracle there have been enough 6-6 teams to fill all the spots – and all but five of them are completely meaningless, and even four of those five no longer have even a shot of influencing who gets at least one of the national championships. College football is now a sport that has a “national championship” (of sorts) and it needs to stop acting like it isn’t, and it needs to stop being a hybrid of a sport that cares and a sport that doesn’t, and ends up doing a bad job of either.

Earlier this year I discovered the college football blog of Ed Gunther, and his incredibly well thought-out and comprehensive analysis of the debate surrounding a playoff. As Gunther sees it, the debate surrounding a playoff is rooted in different conceptions of what a champion is. Proponents of a playoff want a champion to be objective, with no ambiguity, settled “on the field”, regardless of whether that team was really the best team there was that season (as opposed to just getting lucky at the right time); opponents want a champion to at least have a claim to being the best in the sport, even if that means picking it subjectively with multiple possible answers, plucked out of a hat by a poll. Opponents of a playoff, in other words, would say the 2007 New England Patriots should have been crowned champions because the Giants weren’t actually any better, they just got lucky at the right time; the Patriots could literally beat them two out of three times. In my opinion, although Gunther accurately captures the root beliefs of the pro-playoff side, he’s off the mark with the anti-playoff side, and this is more of an individual side argument than the actual core of the debate, namely the “upsets mean you won’t really get any real clarity as to who the best team is” argument. As I just mentioned, opponents of a playoff are more concerned about holding on to the image of college football they have from their youth, and in the case of university presidents, whether their student-athletes are doing well in class. The debate surrounding a playoff is more about differences in priorities than differences in philosophies.

(But if Gunther wants me to approach the debate as a difference in philosophies, then let me say to playoff opponents: What’s your response to the fact that a team outside a BCS conference has virtually no shot of claiming to be the “best”? Isn’t it possible that there could be a season with only one team with a legit claim to be the “best” but that loses in an upset in the BCS championship game – in other words, isn’t even a two-team playoff bad enough? Before you call that far-fetched, let me point you to 2006 Ohio State and Florida. Actually, I’m not sure if even Gunther really believes in this dichotomy as more than a device to help focus the debate. You can judge for yourself by reading his expanded explanation.)

I’m going to follow along with Gunther’s analysis of the issues, responding to both the various arguments against the playoff as well as Gunther’s analysis of both sides. This process should serve to demonstrate my personal playoff biases and what I feel is the best form of playoff for FBS, why other systems (including the current one) don’t work, and why mine does, taking a fairly comprehensive tour of the arguments along the way. It’s probably not the Holy Grail and the great panacea that solves every question, and it certainly has no shortage of its own issues, but over the course of this debate I hope to show why it manages to keep many of the things that make college football great, against the grain of what you might think. By his own admission, Gunther’s analysis skips around a bit because the debate kinda goes around in circles in some ways, with many different potential paths through the various arguments, and I’m going to follow Gunther’s path as a framework for presenting my own thoughts.

We already have a playoff – the regular season!
The regular season, which is part of what makes college football special, will become meaningless. Big upsets will mean less if the losers are going to get into a playoff anyway.
Late in the season, if a team has no or 1 loss, and has already locked up their conference or at least a spot in the playoff, they will rest starters and begin to coast, like in the NFL.
A playoff won’t give us the best team at the end of the season, only the hottest or the one best able to avoid – or pull off – upsets.

These arguments are tightly related, especially in Gunther’s analysis. They all have to do with the role of the regular season, the role of a playoff, and their relationship to each other, as well as the definitions of a champion held by the two sides in Gunther’s view. For this post and the next two, I’m going to jump around addressing different parts of each argument and different parts of Gunther’s “fair competition” sections.

College football is like a playoff because if you lose one game, you might be out, but if you win every game, you should win the championship; it’s not like a playoff because you can lose one game and still be in the running, and go undefeated and still not be in the running. (And not just in non-BCS conferences either. Remember Auburn 2004?) In fact, in 2007, you could lose two games and still be in the running, while there was an undefeated Hawaii team out there that couldn’t muscle its way into the title game. (I’m convinced that if the 2007 Mountain West Conference had played out like the 2008 MWC did, Utah would have been in the title game. You can exclude 2007 Hawaii for having an atrocious schedule, and you can exclude 2008 Utah on the grounds that despite having a conference and schedule on par with a BCS conference and team, it wasn’t quite good enough top-to-bottom to justify leapfrogging a one-loss BCS conference team, but you cannot say a team with a near-BCS quality schedule that goes undefeated should be kept out of the championship game in favor of a two-loss team whose schedule might not be that much better.) If it sounds a little confusing, it’s because both sides are true in different years and to different teams. One loss might eliminate you from championship contention, just like in a playoff, or it might not.

Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: every regular season in all of sports has meaning. It is idiotic to claim that a playoff would render the regular season completely meaningless. Regular season games in other sports influence who gets into the playoffs and how the playoffs are seeded. That’s even the case in college basketball’s famously undervalued regular season. Under a playoff, college football would be no different, which is part of the problem: playoff opponents don’t want to see college football lose its special quality. But they don’t really believe the regular season would be rendered completely meaningless, just that it would have less meaning than now, when it has “the most meaningful regular season in all of sports”, a regular season so meaningful “the whole regular season is a playoff”. A playoff would automatically devalue that, and the regular season wouldn’t “be a playoff” anymore.

So people who want college football to adopt a playoff want the regular season to have a different meaning than it does now: rather than serving as a “regular season playoff” to select two teams to play for the championship, the regular season is meaningful for selecting however many teams the playoff will have, 4, 8, or 16, and the meaning of the playoff is to determine the champion. When you only need to get into the top 4, 8, or 16, instead of the top two, it takes less effort to move on to the next stage of the season, you don’t need to win as many games, losses are less costly, and it’s easier to brush off regular season games. College football’s regular season would not be as meaningful.

So the harder it is to get into the postseason, the more meaningful the regular season becomes. When there are more teams competing for fewer spots, the regular season becomes more meaningful. So to establish a rough index of how meaningful the regular season is, we can take the proportion of each league that gets selected to the postseason – the ratio of number of teams in the league to number of teams in the postseason. The larger the number, the more meaningful the regular season is. Then to establish an index of the meaning of each game, we take the number we get, and divide it by the number of games each team plays. Do a little algebra, and the Regular Season Meaning Index is T / (P x G), where T is the number of teams in the league, P is the number of teams in the postseason, and G is the number of games each team plays. (Note that this index is not adjusted for auto bids and seeding – it is purely the meaning of the regular season for getting into the postseason all else being equal.) Here are the numbers for various leagues:

 

Teams in
Postseason

Total
teams

% of teams
in Postseason

# of Games
Per Team

Meaning of
Each Game

College Football

2

120

1.67%

12

5

CFB (All BCS Bowls)

10

120

8.33%

12

1

College Basketball

65

347

18.73%

31

.1722

NFL

12

32

37.5%

16

.1667

CFB (All Bowls)

68

120

56.67%

12

.1471

Baseball

8

30

26.67%

162

.0231

NBA/NHL

16

30

53.33%

82

.0228

There it is, plain for all to see: college football by far has the most meaningful regular season in sports. But there are some odd things about this chart. What is college basketball doing with the most meaningful regular season, per game, than any sport except college football? I thought opponents of a playoff wanted to avoid a situation like college basketball where the regular season doesn’t matter and only March Madness is even worth paying attention to? If college basketball’s regular season is so meaningful, why do I always hear about how meaningless it is? (Even if we included all three minor tournaments – the NIT, CBI, and CIT – college basketball’s meaning index would be .0868, more than baseball, the NBA, and the NHL, and it would be selecting a smaller percentage of its teams to the postseason than the NFL at 37.18%. Note that the number of games per team is a guesstimate and the total number of teams may be out of date.) Well, part of it is that college basketball selects the largest raw number of teams to the postseason, so the perception is that teams at the top get locked in quicker. There’s also the fact that most of college basketball’s at-larges go to BCS conference schools; for those schools, the meaning of each game is significantly less than .1722, for the other schools, it’s significantly more. (We’ll see how much less for BCS schools later.) But in my opinion, another factor in college basketball not getting credit for its meaningful regular season is the fact there isn’t a straightforward standings you can check. Though “bracketology” has become a well-practiced science in recent years it’s still guesswork, and people often have trouble grasping what’s at stake in each game. The selection committee’s picks can seem like voodoo, and so people think the regular season has little to do with it.

There are some other interesting things about this chart. For one, the meaningfulness of each game in baseball is pathetic, but at least in its case it’s justifiable because of how pitching affects things – but the NBA and NHL chased the money in expanding their postseasons to include more than half their respective leagues’ teams and each game is only about as meaningful, maybe a little less, than baseball. The NFL, on the other hand, kept their postseason at a streamlined 12 teams, and with their 16-game regular season, that results in a regular season almost as meaningful as college basketball, and more meaningful than college football if the goal is to get into any bowl. I suspect the relatively large meaning the NFL imbues each game with is a key factor in the NFL being the most popular and powerful sports league. There’s drama and impact in each game you don’t get with the other three traditional major professional sports, not even in baseball which selects fewer teams and a smaller percentage of them.

But back to college football. As we said, college football has by far a more meaningful regular season than any other sport – but I bet you didn’t know how meaningful. Even college basketball and the NFL give each game a meaningfulness index number less than .2 (that’s point two). College football’s meaningfulness index number is 5 (that’s the integer 5). College football’s regular season is so much more meaningful than the others it’s hard to grasp just how meaningful it is. There are so few teams competing for the championship at the end of the season, and so few games, that it produces a meaningfulness index number over 1 (well over), which should beg the question: is college football’s regular season too meaningful? (The BCS bowls, taken as a whole as the goal, give the regular season a more reasonable level of meaningfulness at exactly 1.)

Here’s how imposing a playoff on college football would affect the meaning of each game:

Teams in
Playoff

% of teams
in Playoff

Meaning of
Each Game

4

3.33%

2.5

8

6.67%

1.25

16

13.33%

.625

An 8-team playoff would still have a meaningfulness index number over 1, and a 16-team playoff would have an index number still over three times bigger than any other sport, and would select a smaller percentage of teams than any other sport. The regular season would be significantly more meaningful than other sports even for the spotlight BCS teams with an easier path. This chart assumes every at-large is awarded to a BCS team:

 

Expected BCS Teams
in Postseason

Total BCS
teams

% of BCS in
Postseason

# of Games
Per Team

Meaning of Each
Game for BCS Teams

CFB (16-Team Playoff)

11

65

16.92%

12

.4924

College Basketball

40

73

54.79%

31

.0588

With a 16-team playoff, the regular season is not that much less meaningful for BCS teams than it is for college football as a whole, and still way more meaningful than in any other sport. (And even for BCS teams in college basketball, the regular season is twice as meaningful as in baseball, the NBA, and the NFL, before factoring in that every year, at least a few at-larges go to mid-majors.)

See, college football’s meaningful regular season has a dirty little secret: a pitifully small sample size. In fact, the sample size in college football is so pitifully small, especially compared to the number of teams, that no playoff is really any good at selecting the teams. When multiple teams can go undefeated in the regular season on a regular basis, you know you have a small sample size and a horribly skewed schedule – too skewed, in fact, to even come close to coming up with a half-decent playoff system. The NFL uses a system where every team in the division plays each other home-and-away, plus a balance of teams in the rest of the conference, plus all the teams in one in-conference division and one other-conference division. Each team plays six games that do a reasonably good job on a round-robin basis of establishing a pecking order within the division, plus a robust “out-of-conference schedule”, within a theoretically competitively-balanced league, establishing comparisons between divisions and between teams in different divisions. As long as the NFL includes every division champion it has a robust playoff system that includes every team with a claim to being “the best”. College basketball teams play 30 games within what amounts to a league with over 300 teams – about the same ratio as college football. But there are enough non-conference games, and enough of them against quality opponents, to establish connections between teams in different conferences.

College football teams only play three (four, now) non-conference games, and they are often against cupcakes. Comparing teams in different conferences is, almost literally, pure guesswork. Consider the following hypothetical scenario: Two teams go 11-1. One team lost to the #1 team but their best win is against the #50 team. The other team lost to the #30 team but their best win is against the #10 team – but their respective second-best wins are both against teams in the 60s. I could easily argue that a team that takes two losses to top-ten teams is better than an undefeated team that didn’t beat a single team in the top 50, but college football doesn’t really work that way (unless the former team is in a BCS conference and the latter team isn’t); it has to rank teams by record by default because the sample size is so small. It’s nearly impossible to separate the teams and seed them. College basketball teams suffer more losses (thus creating more of a pecking order) and create more separation of records between teams.

In Part II, I’ll explore how the way we compare teams with similar (not even necessarily identical) records in college football exposes the truth of this point, and I’ll start to explore my preferred playoff and why I prefer it.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in College Football Lineal Title | Comments (0)

Let’s play "What is Tom Hansen talking about?"

June 16, 2009 – 5:56 pm

From his interview with the LA Times:

It [a college football playoff] would be so negative for college football in my opinion that it just doesn’t make good sense. Including the fact it would be 16 teams, not the four that many people advocate, because politically you couldn’t stop at four, you couldn’t stop at eight, you couldn’t stop at 12. And even at 16 you’d have problems.

What political pressures and “problems” is he talking about?

If he thinks a playoff would have to pick the best 16 teams, yes, that would be a problem and devalue the regular season. But the political pressures I’m imagining would create an 11/5 playoff, which would mostly maintain the sanctity of the regular season and create an exciting postseason. And wouldn’t be terribly different, when you think about it, from an 8-team playoff with the best 8 teams.

Or is it just the logistical issues involved with scheduling 15 playoff games?

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog, College Football | Comments (0)

More football than you’d ever expect two days before the Super Bowl

January 29, 2009 – 11:04 pm

(Editor’s note: This post was  reconstructed from scratch because WordPress’ importer missed it the first time through. I don’t think any comments were left with this post but if there were I apologize.)

Stewart Mandel of Sports Illustrated uses the Arizona Cardinals to back the BCS, or at best a plus-one, in a column on SI.com. In his eyes, if the Cardinals could tank once they cinched their division and then rendered their mediocre regular season irrelevant in the playoffs, what’s to keep Florida from tanking before the SEC Title Game, or Virginia Tech from rendering irrelevant their mediocre regular season and cruising to the Golden Bowl in Cardinal-esque fashion?

You know I’m a staunch backer of an 11/5 system for college football. While Mandel makes a compelling argument, I think it falls flat for a number of reasons. Ignoring the tanking-Florida argument because I’ve covered it before, it’s worth remembering that V-Tech wouldn’t automatically get a home-field seed just for winning a mediocre conference, meaning the confluence of good fortune that assisted Arizona would need to be significantly greater. Even with a home field 8th seed, V-Tech would either need three games to go their way (not two as Arizona needed), or make their own luck twice (not once as Arizona needed). That’s before considering how much home field has been diluted in the NFL, which you can’t say about the famous college football crowds.

I have more in my comment to the Bleacher Report article that tipped me off to Mandel’s article.

Meanwhile, the college football rankings are finally up, as are updates to both lineal titles.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog, College Football Lineal Title, College Football Rankings, Internet adventures, My Comments on the News, NFL Lineal Title, Web site news | Comments (0)

After the Golden Bowl…

January 22, 2009 – 11:00 am

…Mark Sanchez, seeing how close he came to a national championship, elects to come back to USC for another season.

Think of how acrimonious his real-life decision to jump to the NFL was, how it caused a split with his coach and maybe even his father.

Now suppose that, rather than being the top of the heap, about as high as his career could go with the risk of injury being the main thing looming, the Rose Bowl put him in a real national championship game. And put Sanchez within one game of becoming the true champion of college football… and he lost (and had a mediocre performance that would hurt his standing with NFL scouts).

Don’t you think he would be a little more tempted to come back and get over that last hump? Even once Tim Tebow announces he’s coming back as well, it’s unlikely to change his decision; he wants to get a rematch in next year’s Golden Bowl where he thinks the Trojans can come out on top this time. After all, this year’s Golden Bowl was in Florida’s home state; next year’s will be a virtual home game at the Rose Bowl.

I’m going to simulate next year’s Golden Bowl Tournament based on the actual results of that season’s games, not based on some alternate universe where Sanchez still plays at USC. But this sort of thing is the sort of impact instituting a playoff would have on college football – real, substantive effects that change the course of college football history. And Whatifsports.com doesn’t even simulate injuries (because it’s intended to simulate one-game exhibitions).

Keep that in mind while you’re debating the merits of a playoff.

Yes, the college football rankings and lineal title are coming! Hold your horses!

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog, College Football | Comments (0)

2009 Golden Bowl: USC v. Florida

January 21, 2009 – 7:23 pm

I introduced the Golden Bowl after the semifinals as Golden Bowl II, but given my shifts in priorities and the new way we got here, not to mention I’m not waiting a year to present the results, I think Golden Bowl I might be more appropriate… prepare for a lot of scrolling…

Golden Bowl I: #9 USC v. #2 Florida
USC gets the ball off the opening kickoff and takes it to the 31. The instant the teams line up at the line of scrimmage, Florida gives them the gift of an encroachment penalty. Stafon Johnson gets nailed behind the line. Mark Sanchez tosses it forward to Patrick Turner who picks up 5, and C.J. Gable picks up 14 yards for the first down. Damian Williams can’t quite bring in the pass from Sanchez, but Gable picks up another first down to the 36. Johnson takes it to the 24 for another first down. Gable manages to move the pile for three yards, then Johnson breaks through for 15 to the 6. Joe McKnight’s first carry picks up two yards, one of which Gable loses. Sanchez takes the ball and can’t find anyone open, ending up tackled at the line, forcing a chip-shot field goal attempt. The kick is good and USC takes the early lead.

The ensuing kickoff is short, caught at the 10, and returned to the 30. Chris Rainey can only get a short gain on his first carry, but picks up a first down on his second. Percy Harvin picks up the ball from there and takes it 9 yards, and Jeffery Demps gets more than enough to pick up the next first down to the 48. But Rainey gets stuffed, Tim Tebow just barely overthrows his receiver, and Tebow himself gets stuffed, and Florida is forced to punt. (Incidentially, the amazing thing about Florida’s run in this tournament is that I don’t think Whatifsports has much of a concept of the running quarterback, given Tebow’s performance!) USC seems to have the early edge, but the Gator punt pins them on the 14.

Gable runs for a little, then Johnson drops the pass from Sanchez. Sanchez has better luck with Turner and Vidal Hazleton, and a couple of 15-or-so yard gains move the Trojans to their own 48. Another Sanchez throw picks up another five from there, but Johnson gets stuffed for a short gain and a defender deflects the pass on third down. USC’s punter returns the favor done him by the Gator punter, pinning the Gators at the same spot.

But after Rainey gets stuffed at the line, Tebow hands the ball off to Demps… and he breaks into the open field! No one can catch him! 40, 30, 20, 10… Touchdown! Just like that the Gators take the lead! USC takes the ensuing kickoff out of the end zone and to the 29, but Johnson gets stuffed, Brandon Antwine records the first sack of the day, and on third-and-15 Sanchez’s pass gets broken up. The instant Florida takes the field, it’s clear the momentum has shifted: Demps picks up a yard on a draw, Harvin runs for the marker and just gets it on the measurement, then Rainey gets stuffed and Harvin gets more yardage off the draw, leaving Florida at third and 3 as the quarter ends.

Tebow gets stuffed at the line, but the ball is on the USC 34 and Urban Meyer decides to go for it on 4th down. Emmanuel Moody, however, can only get a yard. No problem for the Gator defense: the Trojans botch a screen on first down, which falls incomplete, and attempts by Johnson and Sanchez to take it further only complete another three-and-out. Florida manages to return the punt almost to midfield.

There, however, is where it ends: Tebow gets stuffed behind the line, Demps is scarsely better, and Harvin gets the pitch but can’t take it all the way to the marker. Still, USC is pinned at the 14 again. The toss to Anthony McCoy picks up six yards, and Gable takes the ball for another six and a first down. McKnight gets the ball again but this time loses significant yardage, but Turner catches the pass from Sanchez and makes up for it. Johnson plucks the ball from the air on third down and stretches it out to the 46 for a 16-yard first down. Johnson gets the ball running on the next play and takes it a decent distance again, then picks up the first down through the air again to the Florida 37. Johnson puts up more good yardage on the run, but when Sanchez attempts to throw again, Will Hill picks him off, wasting the drive.

Rainey takes the ball 14 yards, but three Moody runs pick up a total of five yards and Florida is forced to punt. Sanchez hands it off to Johnson again, then sees his pass batted down and finally hands it off to Gable, but gets nowhere, and the ensuing punt gets returned into USC territory. Rainey and Demps have some short runs before Tebow throws to Deonte Thompson, who manages to weave past defenders to the 29. Moody gets a short gain, Harvin a short loss, and Tebow throws it again, this time short of the marker – and his only completed pass of the day to someone not named Deonte Thompson. Jonathan Phillips comes in for a 39-yard field goal attempt, and the kick sails through the uprights to put Florida up by 7 with less than two minutes left in the half.

Johnson picks up a first down, but USC isn’t able to take advantage of the clock stoppage and calls timeout. Gable gets halfway to the next marker on a draw, then Sanchez sees another pass broken up and gets sacked on the next play. Florida calls timeout before the punt; after the punt, Tebow picks up a little, then throws to Thompson again to put the Gators just short of the first down. Moody then gets the ball again for a short gain, and the half ends. USC 3, Florida 10, but most observers think the Florida defense has USC bottled up, though they could still break out during the second half.

Florida takes the second-half kickoff to the 29. Kestahn Moore picks up five yards, and Rainey loses one before Florida gets flagged for a false start on third down. Moore is pinned behind the line and the Gators punt. USC doesn’t do much better; McKnight is stuffed at the line, Gable gets nailed for a loss, and Sanchez flips it up to Damian Williams, who makes it back to the original line of scrimmage. Florida, though, gets a great punt return, with USC only getting the stop at the 2. Rainey and Demps don’t get anywhere with a pair of runs, but Harvin finally pushes into the end zone. Florida takes a 17-3 lead.

USC takes the kickoff to the 26, but after Johnson takes it past the 30, two McKnight runs prove that the master of the previous rounds is not his normal self today, bottled up by the fantastic Gator defense. Florida gets the ball back at the 43, but runs by Moody, Rainey, and Moore only bring the ball to midfield, and they punt it back.

McKnight gets a short gain on a draw, then has his biggest play so far, going for 14 yards and a first down on a pass from Sanchez. Johnson gets a big gain for a first down on a draw, while Gable is less successful, but Sanchez connects with Williams for a big play to the Gator 25. But that’s it: McKnight gets nailed for a big loss, and Brandon Spikes picks off Sanchez for the Gators’ second interception.

Moore quickly breaks off a big run into Trojan territory, and now the Gators are threatening to score. Three straight Tebow running attempts go nowhere, however, the last one resulting in a substantial loss. This time, the loss, moving them back to the 38, is sufficient to bring in the punt unit, which ends up putting the ball on the 14. McKnight seems to continue his resurgence with runs of 4 and 11 yards – hardly the numbers he was putting up against Utah, Oklahoma and Penn State, but certainly decent – and Sanchez throws to McCoy to take the ball to the USC 46 for another first down. Johnson gets the ball and runs all the way to the sidelines for a short gain. The quarter ends on that note.

If Sanchez can keep from getting intercepted USC can still make a game out of it. Gable passes midfield and McKnight finds the first down marker before getting the pass from Sanchez. Running the ball, however, gets nowhere. Two Sanchez passes end up getting tackled for losses, stuffing the drive and forcing another punt. Demps gets a short gain on a draw, with Rainey picking up a first down on another one. Demps and Moody make further contributions, gaining a total of 5, and Tebow can’t carry it further, forcing another punt.

USC starts on their own 27. Johnson takes it to the 30 but a false-start penalty wipes it out. Two Sanchez scrambles go nowhere and USC punts, with some wondering if Pete Carroll should go for it, especially when Florida gets good field position. 8:06 left. Harvin is stuffed on first down, but Moore gets a good run on a draw, and one last pass from Tebow to Thompson is good for a first down and takes it to the 40. Tebow takes it himself on a draw, then hands it off to Rainey and Harvin, taking the ball to the 31, just short of the marker. Phillips comes in to try a 48 yard field goal attempt, which manages to make it through the uprights. Now Florida has a 17-point lead, three scores, with 5:10 left. If USC is going to come back, now is the time.

USC takes the kickoff to the 29, but lets the play clock run out before running their first play. Sanchez overthrows Williams but manages to get the ball to Turner for 18 yards, despite Florida pass interference. Pete Carroll calls timeout with 4:46 to play. Sanchez hits Williams and makes it into Florida territory and marginal field goal range. Sanchez takes it himself and runs around out of bounds, then hits McCoy to make it to the 19. 4:07 left. Then the Gator secondary locks down. Sanchez is forced to tuck it in and run for a yard, then gets the pass off and sees it batted down. On third down Sanchez overthrows Johnson. Even though they only need two touchdowns and a field goal, Carroll elects to go for it on fourth down rather than take the points, and Sanchez overthrows McCoy. 3:26 left.

Short gains by Moody and Demps bracket a 14-yard run by Rainey. Tebow just barely overthrows Harvin on second down, stopping the clock, and Demps only gains four on third-and-nine, so USC gets the ball back. But the drive has achieved its aim: over two minutes were run off the clock, and 1:14 now remains with the Trojans on the 20.

Sanchez overthrows his first pass again, and this time takes it in and runs for yardage… only to see one of his linemen flagged for holding. Sanchez throws another incompletion, and another holding call is declined this time to set up third down. This time Sanchez comes through, hitting Williams for a monster gain to the 35, but then he overthrows McCoy, botches another screen, and overthrows another receiver. Oddly, on fourth down Sanchez hands it off to Johnson, who gets out of bounds… after gaining three yards. Florida gets the ball back with 24 seconds left, and one Tim Tebow knee later, Florida is your Golden Bowl Champion, completing the Grand Slam on Da Blog. Demps is named the Golden Bowl MVP, mostly because of his great touchdown run, though also because he managed to be Florida’s leading rusher, 100 yards, despite fewer carries than Rainey (Demps had 10; Rainey picked up 61 on 13).
Final score: USC 3, Florida 20

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog | Comments (0)

2008 Golden Bowl Tournament: Fiesta Bowl and Thoughts on the BCS

January 11, 2009 – 3:33 am

If you are going to put value on the idea of a national championship (and honestly, I’ve actually been wondering if we were better off under the old system when we ideally didn’t care about the national championship), wouldn’t you rather have the Golden Bowl over the BCS?

We have four teams with legit claims for the National Championship. So much for the BCS ending national championship uncertainty.

In the Golden Bowl Tournament? In the very first round Utah and USC faced off – in Salt Lake, in snowy, blizzardy conditions – and the Trojans still prevailed. USC then proceeded to shockingly dominate Oklahoma in another road game in the second round.

As for Florida and Texas? They settled their differences ON THE FIELD, in the Sugar Bowl. Now, next week, the two remaining teams – Florida and USC – will settle this once and for all in the Golden Bowl. And this week, I’ll post the final college football rankings. Florida’s #1, and holds one of what’s now two lineal titles, so next week we’ll see if they can claim the Grand Slam. (BCS title, #1 in my rankings, holding any lineal title but preferably Princeton-Yale, and Golden Bowl title.)

But first, we have a Fiesta Bowl to take care of… (I’m wondering if it’s worth it to have this game. The Golden Bowl Tournament already lengthens the regular season, and while I had told myself that as long as I was adding four games for the Golden Bowl participants, there was little reason not to add two more teams in that group, the fact is that it IS one more game and it’s a little masturbatory. On the other hand, if the point of keeping the bowls is because we have 34 winners, not 1, I should give the semifinal losers one more chance to win. I may make a Da Blog Poll on this in the future.)

Fiesta Bowl: #5 Penn State v. #3 Texas
Personally, I don’t think, if you looked at it logically as opposed to looking at the body of work or playing it out on the field, you can even make a case that USC should deserve the national championship ahead of Utah. USC played in too crappy a conference, and even though both games were close home games for the winners, they did lose to a team that lost to Utah the next week.

But USC beat a good team in the Rose Bowl, one good enough to earn a VERY good seed in my tournament, and though it was too little too late, Penn State’s defense – which couldn’t stop Glen Coffee for the first half of the Alabama game, and had even less luck against Joe McKnight – finally found their defense again in the last game. What didn’t work against Mark Sanchez and McKnight, did work against Colt McCoy – and made people reconsider their snap picks for Florida in the Golden Bowl.

For three quarters it was at least plausible that the Longhorns could compete in this game, if practically unlikely. The Nittany Lions bent but didn’t break on defense, and on their first drive, Mickey Shuler caught a screen pass from Daryll Clark and took it 58 yards to the house. Texas managed to get downfield enough for a chipshot field goal on their next drive, but Stephfon Green gets a 73-yard touchdown off a draw on the Lions’ first play from scrimmage.

After that, the Longhorns start buckling down on defense, forcing a punt, but the offense can’t even make it into Lion territory, unlike on all their first-quarter drives. In fact, Texas’ defense outplays Penn State’s in the second quarter, forcing three-and-outs while Texas tacks on another field goal and has another blocked. The Longhorns enter the locker room with confidence.

But Penn State starts getting first downs again, and Texas doesn’t return to Lion territory until a drive that ends the third quarter. The Lions don’t score, but they put the game away in the fourth quarter, starting with a field goal, and preventing Texas from even getting a first down until their last drive of the game. With five minutes left Mack Brown and McCoy are already going for it on fourth down (down only two scores and on their own 23!), giving the Lions good field position to tack on a touchdown. Another fourth-down try leads to a quick touchdown pass to Green, the player of the game for his combined 133 yards running and catching with a touchdown for each, and by the time Texas finally gets a couple of first downs it’s pointless.
Final score: Penn State 31, Texas 6

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog, College Football | Comments (0)

2008 Golden Bowl Tournament: Sugar Bowl Semifinal

January 2, 2009 – 8:00 am

Sugar Bowl: #3 Texas v. #2 Florida
The biggest test of which conference, the Big 12 or SEC, was truly better over the course of the season provided vindication for a number of different groups, and left people wondering what might have been had the quarterfinals gone just a bit differently.

Truth be told, the Sugar Bowl was not much of a fight. That was the case pretty much from the opening bell. Two Chris Rainey runs put the Gators in Texas territory, and a Tebow throw to Riley Cooper (one of only two completed passes all day) made up for a holding penalty and set up a Rainey draw for the first down, setting up a quick field goal. After an encroachment penalty against the Gators, Cody Johnson broke open a long run to get the Longhorns in Gator territory, but they went three-and-out from there and Jeffery Demps left the defense in his wake on a 74-yard touchdown run. The next Florida drive, following a three-and-out, started with good field position right behind midfield and ended with the second Tebow completion, to Tate Casey for a 37-yard touchdown, but the extra point was shanked. Tebow couldn’t complete a pass the rest of the day, and the former Heisman winner was neutered on the ground, rushing 11 times but for a net loss of 3 yards (though that was probably a result of taking knees at the end of the game). This game would be won with the key ingredients of any football championship: running and defense. In particular, Rainey would be named the game’s MVP after running 14 times for 150 yards, and Percy Harvin and Demps also ran for over 100 yards each.

Texas would tack on a field goal before the end of the quarter, but Rainey started the second with a 53-yard touchdown run – another reason he would be named MVP, coupled with his second later in the game. Colt McCoy led his team methodically down the field again, relying mostly on himself, both throwing (5 for 6) and running (27 yards on 3 carries), ending with his one touchdown completion, to Jordan Shipley. But it would be the last time Texas scored. Florida tacked on another field goal, and not only did Texas go three-and-out twice before the half, they got the ball a third time before the half, pinned on their own 6, and proceeded to get McCoy sacked in the end zone, bringing the score to an even 28 to Texas’ 10. Florida managed to get the ball back so close they went for a field goal before the half, but the 51-yard attempt was just too long for Jonathan Phillips to make.

Not that it really mattered, because the Gators blew the game open in the second half. Texas still didn’t pick up a first down until their second drive of the half, by which point Florida had already scored again, thanks to a 58-yard run by Harvin on their first play from scrimmage that set the Gators up on the 22. The Longhorns would get just close enough to be in “no-man’s-land”, too close to punt but too far out to kick a field goal, and wound up unsuccessfully going for it on fourth and 2. Texas in fact seemed to have the momentum for a chunk of the third quarter, forcing a three-and-out before Vondrell McGee put them in field goal territory, but the 42 yard attempt sailed left. A McCoy fumble to start the fourth quarter, followed by three quick runs by Rainey, Harvin, and Kestahn Moore into the end zone, snuffed out that flame of hope and gave Florida a commanding 42-10 lead. Rainey’s second touchdown would come with 2:40 left in the game, just to drive one more nail in the Longhorns’ coffin, and bringing vindication to those who felt Oklahoma should have been in the Big 12 title game.
Final score: Texas 10, Florida 49

Final Round matchups:
Fiesta Bowl: #5 Penn State v. #3 Texas
Penn State’s rock-hard defense (that has proven to be a little less than rock-hard in this tournament) against Colt McCoy and the astounding Texas offense. The Nittany Lions will need to play like Linebacker U. if they want to capture the third-place title.

Golden Bowl II: #9 USC v. #2 Florida
The National Championship game pits two teams that know the key to winning a championship is a fantastic defense. Both also sport amazing playmakers on offense, with USC keyed by Mark Sanchez and Joe McKnight and Florida led by Tim Tebow and Percy Harvin. Florida has long been considered better tested by their schedule, but beyond Alabama, Georgia, and Ole Miss they didn’t play much of anybody (at least if you believe some Big 12 partisans), while USC had to face a real team in the first round and had to dispatch the #1 seed in the tournament on the road in the second. And the way Tebow has been mostly neutered, it’s not out of the question to think USC could do it again, and shut down the rest of the Florida offense in the process… then again, Florida’s defense has actually been as good as advertised, unlike Penn State’s…

Fiesta Bowl coming next weekend. The Golden Bowl will be played over Martin Luther King weekend.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog | Comments (0)

2008 Golden Bowl Tournament: Non-Semifinal BCS Bowls

January 1, 2009 – 6:48 pm

Orange Bowl: Texas Tech v. Cincinnati
A close, hard-fought contest proved once and for all that Cincinnati deserved every bit of the seeding they got in the Golden Bowl Tournament – and left the rest of the actual tournament with a high bar to follow.

The tone was set early when Graham Harrell’s third pass attempt was intercepted, and returned to the 18, setting up an easy touchdown pass to Dominick Goodman. Unfazed, Harrell led the Red Raiders right down the field, with some help from a couple of throws to Michael Crabtree, including one that Crabtree managed to take into the endzone. After a three-and-out and a Red Raider first down that went nowhere, the Bearcats – pinned inside their own 20 by a holding penalty – marched down the field to the 6 heading into the second quarter before the Raider defense stuffed everything they tried and held them to a field goal. The Red Raiders struck back with their own drive, but faced with fourth-and-1 on the 30, decided to kick a field goal of their own – and watched it sail wide right.

The Bearcats started another good drive before a second-down sack of Tony Pike put them at third-and-17 from the 36. The next play was an incompletion, and the Bearcats were forced to punt – and proceeded to force a three-and-out, after which they picked up where they left off, culminating with Pike-to-Goodman for another touchdown, putting the Bearcats up by ten. Harrell led the Red Raiders on another valiant drive, but on second-and-goal from the five, no timeouts, and twenty-one seconds left, Harrell drops back to pass instead of handing the ball off – and overthrows Shannon Woods, making it third-and-goal with fifteen seconds left. Enough time not to be an ideal circumstance to bring out the field goal unit on any but fourth down, but not enough to comfortably run another play and still get a field goal off (at least if the Raiders had run the ball on second down Harrell could have worked the clock down to three-to-five seconds before spiking the ball). Still, it’s somewhat bewildering Mike Leach doesn’t at least call for another pass and instead brings out the field goal unit anyway, and perhaps more bewildering when the resulting chip shot bangs off the upright. Cincinnati enters the half with all the momentum and a full ten-point lead, and the analysts wonder if the Red Raiders can get more than a fluke stop.

Baron Batch runs off a 63-yard run before finally getting stopped on the 7 on the second play from scrimmage in the second half, setting up a quick Red Raider touchdown, but the Raider defense still can’t stop the Bearcat offense as Pike goes 4-for-5 on the ensuing drive. The incompletion, an overthrown touchdown attempt, helps hold Cincinnati to a 39-yard field goal, keeping the game within a score, and the Raider offense catches a little bit of fire of its own. While the Bearcats are operating slowly and methodically, the Red Raiders score their points with big plays like a 32-yard completion from Harrell to Eric Morris, and a throw to Tramain Swindall that makes Swindall look like a Heisman candidate before he finally dives into the endzone.

After another Cincinnati touchdown, though, the Bearcat defense forces a three-and-out and the Bearcats prove just as unstoppable with yet another touchdown drive that spans the quarter break. Harrell keeps the Raiders in the game with a touchdown drive of his own, but Jacob Ramsey breaks off a 46-yard run that sets up a field goal. The Red Raiders get the ball back with 6:32 left, but burn a lot of clock en route to the end zone and can’t complete the two-point conversion, so Cincinnati still has a 36-34 lead. Astoundingly (even though there’s still 2:43 remaining), considering how little the Raider defense has been able to stop the Bearcats all day, Leach does not call for an onside kick on the ensuing kickoff – but the Raider defense vindicates his confidence by finally forcing a three-and-out. But Harrell’s comeback attempt is a disaster: sacked on first down, an 11-yard completion with 17 to go on second, and two incompletions. Cincinnati sneaks out of Miami with the victory, but Graham Harrell is named the game’s MVP for keeping the Red Raiders in the game when Cincinnati ran all up and down on the Raider defense.
Final score: Texas Tech 34, Cincinnati 36

Cotton Bowl: Oklahoma v. Alabama
Stewing from two weeks of pundits suggesting they might be soft or not mentally prepared, the Sooners – once having visions of championships dancing in their heads – vow to make the most of their consolation prize and show people why they had been the #1 seed. After a three-and-out and an Alabama missed field goal, Sam Bradford methodically leads the Sooners down the field and into the end zone. Glen Coffee does most of the work on the ensuing Alabama drive, but it gets stopped on the 6 and forces another field goal, made this time. On Alabama’s next drive early in the second, Coffee takes it into the end zone himself and gives the Tide what would be their only lead of the game. Oklahoma’s next drive is a three-and-out, but the defense stops Alabama in their own territory and a 65-yard touchdown run gives the Sooners the lead for good.

That long touchdown is arguably the turning point of the game. Alabama doesn’t get a first down for the rest of the half and Oklahoma’s next drive, already starting in Alabama territory, starts with two Chris Brown runs before Jermaine Gresham catches a Bradford pass and outruns the defense for a 36-yard touchdown. Oklahoma enters the half with a 21-10 lead, but Alabama methodically makes its way down the field to cut that lead to four to start the second half, this time with John Parker Wilson taking a more central role. Oklahoma brushes it off, though, when Brown breaks open another touchdown run of more than 60 yards. Alabama makes another effort on their next drive, but get stopped near midfield. Oklahoma, though, doesn’t do much better on their next drive and Alabama manages to take the punt almost to where it was punted from to start the fourth quarter.

Wilson hits Nick Walker for a 36-yard gain to set up a throw to Coffee for the touchdown (a risky touchdown throw on fourth-and-1 from the 8), picking up the two-point conversion to get within a field goal. But once again, Oklahoma brushes it off with another big play, this time a long run on the second play from scrimmage that just barely gets tackled a yard short of the end zone. After the eventual TD, Alabama has Coffee and Mark Ingram (and occasionally Roy Upchurch) trade carries until they get inside the Sooner 40 with six minutes left, after which they rely more on Wilson’s arm. Although he gets an 18-yard first down completion on his first try, the next three plays are a short completion, an incompletion, and a sack, holding the Tide to a field goal with a little less than five minutes to play. Alabama opts to kick it away and Oklahoma makes them pay, taking the kickoff to their own 31, having Bradford make a 20-yard completion to the Tide 33, and breaking open yet another touchdown run from there. The demoralized Tide get nowhere on the ensuing drive, but the defense do manage to get enough of a stop to force the Sooners to kick a field goal on fourth down. There’s nowhere near enough time to make up a 17-point deficit, though.
Final score: Oklahoma 45, Alabama 28

USC is in the Golden Bowl. Who will join them, Texas or Florida? Tune in tomorrow and find out!

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog | Comments (0)

2008 Golden Bowl Tournament: Minor Bowls Part II

January 1, 2009 – 8:00 am

As there’s only one bowl after today that’s affected by the Golden Bowl Tournament as listed here, I’m clearing them all out right now. (And don’t you wish the Chick-fil-A Bowl was the one told of here instead of the one we got?) For whatever reason it appears SportsLine isn’t doing expected weather conditions anymore.

Outback Bowl: Ole Miss 28, Michigan State 21
Cordera Eason (43-yard TD run) and Ashlee Palmer (game-ending INT) are Mississippi state heroes.

Capitol One Bowl: Ohio State 21, Georgia 27
Big Ten haters are going to have a field day with this one.

Gator Bowl: Nebraska 30, Georgia Tech 37
The Huskers stayed in it much better than most people expected, and still had a shot to win at the end, making it into the red zone on their last possession.

Liberty Bowl: LSU 34, East Carolina 20
LSU gets more of a challenge here than they did in the real-life Chick-fil-A Bowl.

More bowls still to come!

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Classic Da Blog | Comments (0)