College Football Playoff Chaos

By the time this Saturday’s football games end there is potential for chaos before the committee meets to select the four college football playoff teams.

It could be so easy if Clemson and Alabama win…you would have the Big Ten Champion, the Big 12 champion, the SEC champion, and the ACC Champion all with one loss or fewer. The committee could mail it in.

But given the crazy endings we’ve seen in 2015, I wouldn’t bet that this regular season will go gently into that good night. If there is an upset, the possible candidates outside the current Top 5 are likely the following teams: Ohio State, Stanford, and UNC.

Let’s say UNC pulls the upset and Stanford beats USC … now the argument settles on 12-1 ACC Champion UNC, 11-2 PAC 12 Champion Stanford, and an 11-1 Ohio State. There is precedent for selecting Ohio State. In 2011, Alabama was not the SEC Champion but was picked to play in the national title game.

Let’s root for an upset and let the fun begin. Is an 11-1 Ohio State team better than UNC or Stanford? Stanford lost to Big Ten team Northwestern but beat Notre Dame. UNC beat the Big Ten’s Illinois but lost to the worst SEC team in South Carolina. Ohio State defeated ACC team Virginia Tech on the road in the season opener. Around and around it goes.

The cross-conference sample size is simply too small to accurately gauge which conference is really stronger.

Some say the SEC is the strongest, but to compare them to the Big Ten you have only one game to measure; an opening week game between Alabama and Wisconsin. Is the ACC better than the Big Ten? Those conferences played seven games with the Big Ten winning four. What about the Pac 12 and the Big Ten? They played five games and the Big Ten won three.

But perception often becomes reality. Alabama is perceived by many as the best team in the country. That took hold after Alabama bounced LSU (then ranked No. 2 in the country). Alabama also defeated four other teams that were ranked at the time they played them: No. 20 Wisconsin, No. 8 Georgia, No. 9 Texas A&M, and No. 17 Mississippi State.

But as is often the case, reality and perception are divergent. SEC teams schedule non-conference games they can win. They get a pass because of an entrenched narrative that it is the strongest conference. It allows seven or eight SEC teams to be ranked early in the year.

Of the 56 non-conference games the SEC scheduled this year (note one LSU game was cancelled for weather) only 11 were against Power-5 schools — that is just 19.6 percent. The Big Ten scheduled 30.3 percent of their games against Power-5 Schools.

Look at how the season played out. The current ranking of the highest-ranked teams Alabama defeated are No. 21 LSU and No. 25 Tennessee. Both of those games were in Tuscaloosa. Michigan State, by contrast, has wins over current No. 16 Oregon and on the road at No. 15 Michigan and No. 6 Ohio State.

To put the SEC scheduling in perspective, they finished 6-5 against Power 5 schools. The Pac 12 finished 5-5, the Big 12 finished 4-4, the ACC finished 6-9 (7-14 if you count the 1-5 record against Notre Dame under an ACC-Notre Dame contract). The Big Ten finished 9-8.

On the flipside of scheduling Power-5 teams are how the conferences schedule FCS (formerly Division 1-AA) opponents. The ACC played 15 games against FCS teams representing 28.6 percent of their non-conference games. Only two Power-5 teams played two FCS teams this season: UNC and Boston College — both ACC schools. The SEC scheduled as many FCS games (11) as Power-5 games. The Big Ten scheduled 17 Power-5 games and just seven FCS games — by far the lowest percentage of any conference.

In 2016, as the Big Ten joins the Big 12 and Pac 12 in playing nine conference games, there’ll be less opportunity to schedule Power-5 games. But to some school’s credit they are being aggressive in scheduling next year with Ohio State going to Oklahoma next year and Wisconsin playing LSU in Lambeau Field (that has to be the College Game Day spot that week). In 2017, Michigan will play Florida in Arlington, Texas.

But generally the more conference games teams play the more insular college football becomes. The more insular it becomes the more arguments there will be over the four teams picked and then the drumbeat will start for an eight-game playoff. Given the physical demands on the young men playing the game, their bodies are already taxed enough playing 15 games to win a national title.

Arkansas Coach Brett Bielema advocated getting all conferences back to eight-game conference schedules and mandate non-conference Power-5 games as the ninth “conference” game. He’s right.

In an era when fans are paying more for everything, give them more variety and create more excitement. I’d gladly trade a cross-division Big Ten game for one with Georgia or Texas or Clemson.

With a bigger sample size of Power-5 match-ups, we’d level the playing field and have a better idea of relative conference strengths giving the committee another tool to make the right call as well as giving fans better football during the season.