The 12-team College Football Playoffs was supposed to bring an added measure of fairness, access, and democracy in determining a national champion.
Instead, the CFP Selection Committee is acting as SEC and Big 10 surrogates with a naked agenda of getting as many traditional blue blood schools into the playoffs as possible. The committee’s outright favoritism of the SEC and Big 10 and its accompanying disdain for the Big 12, ACC, and non-Power conferences has left the vast majority of college football fans feeling somewhere between hoodwinked and outraged.
Fans of the top five or six SEC and Big 10 schools love the new system that bends over backward to favor their programs.
Every other college football fan thinks the new system is biased and unfair. To illustrate that point, this week Big 12 and ACC presidents met to discuss Project Rudy proposing new models for the College Football Playoffs. Not surprisingly, the SEC and Big 10 chose not to participate.
In this week's "Anger Index" at ESPN highlighting the schools that have the biggest gripes about the CFP Selection Committee's process, here's what David Hale wrote about BYU: "Perhaps the Cougars' losses (to Arizona State and Kansas) are reason enough for exclusion (though by that logic, we should be waving goodbye to Alabama and Ole Miss, too), but the fact that BYU isn't even in the conversation is ridiculous."
Yes, the CFP Selection Committee is biased against BYU. And, yes, their bias extends to the entire Big 12 and ACC.
Here are three proposals to fix the 12-team College Football Playoffs and make it more fair for BYU and its Big 12 brethren:
Option 1: The 3-2-1 model
This model slightly favors the SEC and Big 10 while ensuring equitable access to the rest of the college football world:
- SEC and Big 10 get three automatic qualifiers (two teams in the conference championship plus one at-large)
- Big 12 and ACC get two automatic qualifiers (two teams in the conference championship)
- The highest-rated non-Power Four conference champion is included
- The next highest ranked team is invited, regardless of conference
This is the best solution. It leaves the SEC and Big 10 with three automatic bids and then they can argue over which conference’s fourth-best team should get the last remaining at-large bid, assuming it comes from one of their conferences. Frankly, if the fourth best SEC or Big 10 school makes the playoffs, neither conference should have anything to complain about (though they would still complain).
Regarding Notre Dame, let them prove they’re better than the fourth-best team in the SEC or Big 10. If the Fighting Irish don’t like that system then they should either win more games against quality teams or join a conference.
This option also protects the Big 12 and ACC against the committee’s bias. Each conference gets at least two teams into the playoffs, and losing a conference championship game won’t be held against them. It also gives them the ability to claim a third at-large playoff spot if there’s a deserving team.
This is the most logical and equitable solve to fix the biased system that exists today.
Who’s with me?
Option 2: The Algorithm
The next option is to just take human bias out of the equation. The committee agrees on a rubric for determining the 12 “best” teams in the country and is transparent about the criteria they will use.
There is no shortage of metrics that could be applied here: Strength of schedule, quality wins, bad losses, FPI, Saragin, Coaches poll, AP poll, composite recruiting rankings, etc.
College football has done this before. From 1998 to 2013 computers determined which teams would compete in the Bowl Championship Series.
Did college football fans love the computer-based system that determined their team’s fate? No. Was it perfect? Also, no. But did it remove biases like “the eye test” and “We think Team A would beat Team B in a hypothetical matchup”? Yes, to a degree it did.
This 2021 article from The Ringer summarizes very well what happened when college football moved away from the algorithm and back to subjective rankings: “But the method of selecting playoff teams—having a committee of 13 people decide who belongs in the field—is worse than the BCS in every other way. It is less transparent, more prone to biases and conflicts of interest, and more prone to be affected by one person’s bad opinions.”
Today’s system is rife with bias, conflicts of interest, bad opinions, and lack of transparency. A well-crafted and publicly communicated computer algorithm could remove the human bias, provided, of course, that the inputs that feed the system are also free of bias.
Option 3: Remain as-is but the committee admits to its biases
The final approach is just to keep today’s current system but ask the CFP Selection Committee to just be honest about what they are trying to do.
As a fan of BYU and the Big 12, I hate what’s happening this year because it’s patently obvious what the committee is trying to do. Hearing them lie about it and twist themselves into pretzels attempting to justify their pro-SEC and Big 10 bias is intellectually insulting.
If the process doesn’t change, the committee should just issue the following statement:
“Our goal as a CFP Committee is to ensure the teams selected to compete in the playoffs will generate as much national interest and TV viewers as possible. We believe that adding as many viable, traditional blue-blood SEC and Big 10 teams as possible will help us achieve this goal. In most years we are going to select at least four schools from each of these conferences while minimizing the number of Big 12, ACC, and non-Power schools as possible.
Let’s be candid: The talent gap between the top handful of SEC and Big 10 teams is vastly superior to the top teams in other conferences. They recruit the best. They play the best. They have the richest histories of decades-long success. SEC and Big 10 teams should be rewarded for this.
Big 12 and ACC teams, if you want more seats at the table, you need to improve your product. We can’t have another debacle like Georgia plastering TCU 65-7 in the 2022 national championship. In the 2021 semifinals Cincinnati didn’t even score a touchdown in their 27-6 loss to Alabama. You’ve had your chances, and you’ve blown it. Improve your conference, schedule tougher non-conference games, prove you can compete against the big boys, and we’ll talk again in 10 years.”
The way the CFP Selection Committee operates today is insulting to all but the top four or five schools in the SEC, Big 10, and Notre Dame. The system isn’t going to change even though there are better models (e.g., The 3-2-1 approach), so the committee should just admit to its objective and biases.
Don’t urinate on the legs of the vast majority of college football fans and tell us it’s raining.
We can already smell what’s cascading down on us.