A Proposed New Postseason Format To Please Everyone
It’s no secret the BCS has been the greatest and worst thing to ever happen to college football. It has created the best of times (see Texas vs. USC and Boise State vs. Oklahoma) and it has brought us the worst of times (see most other BCS bowl games.) Whether you agree with us here at the Cafeteria or not, one thing is for sure, the BCS has given us all something to talk about. But here’s what really irks me… BCS stands for Bowl Championship Series. Series, huh? What exactly is the series of bowls that leads one to the championship? There are a series of bowl games and then the championship, but none have any relationship to the other. I’m going to be updating my college football playoff proposal and fixing that. I think I’ve come up with a pretty good system to replace the current BCS format, and here it is in a nutshell.
With the recent conference shuffling going on, it has become obvious to me that no playoff format can work if it is based on conference champions all being participants. This would lead to currently great conferences having teams breakoff to form a minimum sized conference they think they can easily win for a shot at the title. Before too long our 120 FBS teams would be in a lot more than 16 conferences and the system falls apart. Plus the conferences we have no are so fickle these days there’s no telling what could happen. I decided to start from scratch.
Many people are proponents of a playoff format that uses the bowl games as venues for playoff games. This simply cannot work. All the extra travel involved would make it hard for teams and fans. Plus some bowls would get shafted that hosted Alabama vs. Northern Illinois in the first round or something. i mean, if that game was in a bowl at Texas, who is even going to consider going to watch it? It just can’t happen. So I think I’ve taken the best of both worlds in a plus one style format.
Here’s what needs to happen. First, participants in the championship game must be determined after the bowl games have all been played. This is the plus one style. It only makes sense. All the top teams are then given the opportunity to prove their stuff on the field. If Boise State ends up at #1 and people feel they didn’t deserve it, great, let them play another top tier team and prove it. Either they lose and the naysayers were right or they win and show they belong there.
The BCS bowls would take on a new format however. You only give 8 teams an invite unless you add the Cotton Bowl to the BCS mix and in that case 10 teams. But here’s how it works: 1-5, 2-6, 3-7, 4-8. The top four seeds are put in the BCS venues closest to home. This gives all 8 of the top teams (the only ones with a legitimate claim to the championship) a chance to prove themselves. However it doesn’t give the #1 seed the easy way out by pairing them with #8. Let say 1, 4, 6 and 7 win. Does 4 move to #2? Does 6 move up for beating the #2? If they added the Cotton Bowl that would be even more fun.
At any rate, the bowl games stay exactly as they are. The last 4 (or 5) games played on or around New Year’s are the BCS bowls. After all games are completed, the rankings are recalculated and then 1 plays 2 for the championship the following week at its normal time. Its a playoff of sorts. Its the bowl season of sorts. You get the best of both worlds. Not a pure playoff, but not the idiocy we see now. Still controversial? Of course. But it’s actually doable, totally feasible. It’s a perfect compromise.
There’s one good spin however, as there always is. You have to completely remove the human element from the ranking equation. Obviously every SEC team benefited from Alabama playing in the title game last year. So why wouldn’t all the SEC coaches vote Alabama as high as possible in their ballots? You have to remove any human poll from all of this. I propose it be replaced with a new poll, a new set of rankings, one based entirely on statistics and not pre-conceived notions. A system that will be developed by me in these coming months and experimented with this season.
Here’s how it works. Boise State is punished every year because of who they play, and on the flip side, teams in the SEC are rewarded every year because of who they play. Well my rankings won’t care about who you play, so much as how you play them. Let’s look at an example. Suppose Boise State on average scores 35 points a game and allows 10 points a game. Suppose they also, on average, score 50% more than their opponents typically allow and allow 50% less than their opponents typically score. Now let’s match them up with Utah State, a team that averages 10 points a game and allows 21 points a game. They typically score 10% less than their opponents allow on average and allow 10% more than their opponents score on average. Sorry for the math, bear with me.
At this rate, we would expect Boise State to score 31.5 points and allow 5 points. From Utah State’s numbers, you would expect them to score 9 points and allow 23.1 points. So, after all this complicated stuff, for Utah State to play according to expectations, they would lose about 23-9. For Boise State to play according to expectations, they would win 32-5. So in statistics we call this a Chi-Square. These are expected values. Let’s say after the game the score is 38-21, a Boise State win. We plug in the observed values and compare them to the expected values to look for statistical variance. Run that the course of the season and you see how each team played their schedule, not just the wins and losses.
Sorry if I lost any of you on that, I swear it makes sense in my head. What we are basically doing is just saying teams like Boise State play worse competition, so we would expect them to score more points and allow less points in those games than in games when they play stronger competition. Teams who play according to expectations do well. Teams who play below expectations do poorly. And the teams who exceed expectations throughout the season are the teams ranked at the top. This would replace the USA Today poll as an unbiased way to rank teams based on how they play their schedule.
There would be filters in place to prevent teams from keeping in their starters to run up the score to 90 points. Then at the end of the year you have a purely unbiased 1-8 and send them to the BCS bowls. It’s a work in progress, but I think this may be the best way to go in the end.
What do you think, good idea or not?
Comments
If you’re giving up on 16 teams, you’ve got to at least have the top 8 in a playoff, I say. Those are the ones with a legitimate shot. But Bones is right, at least one of the games has to be played at home.
As to the seeding thing, I just assumed that the team that has the best regular season should get rewarded with an easier starting game. Sure, some pundits might advocate that Alabama defeating 2-loss Ohio State is less impressive than Boise offing Cincinnati, but the next week Alabama would play the TCU/Florida winner and Boise would play the Texas/Oregon winner.
I guess at this juncture it’s all just semi-pointless “what-if”-ing, though it is fun.
My regional complaint is primarily fan based, and it might be that I’m getting personal with it. Travel to the BCS bowls is pricy for people who live relatively close to the sites, and I can’t imagine it’s cheaper for people who live FURTHER away. I went to watch Virginia Tech at the Orange Bowl in January 2009, and the drive to Miami from my home in North Carolina was 12 hours. We stayed in Miami 2 nights and 1 in Jacksonville on the return route, and the cost was tremendous, roughly equal to 3 trips to Blacksburg, VA to watch Tech at home. I think some sort of regional playoff system, maybe even having the first game of any playoff be a home game, would be better for the fans, that way they’d only have to make 2 monster road trips during a season, as opposed to 3, which could up revenues and ticket sales for the games.
I like most of this, but the seeding needs to change to a “standard” seeding: 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, 4-5, following down a normal chain: 1/8 winner plays 4/5 winner and 2/7 winner plays 3/6 winner, followed by the championship game.
Last season, that puts Alabama vs Ohio State, Texas vs Oregon, Cincinnati vs Boise State, and TCU vs Florida in the first round of the playoff, which would have been a heck of a good series, though for my money that would have led to another Texas/Alabama final. (I’ve been wrong before, though)
Other than the seeding issue, my only other problem is regional: All of the BCS venues are in the South. Sure, that’s because the Northern half of the country is frozen solid during bowl season, but shouldn’t teams like Penn State and Ohio State stop getting the shaft for their environment? Southern Cal, during their cheating days, got to play a home game for their bowl. How is that fair to teams that play in 30 degree weather and snowstorms? I’d love to see Texas Tech’s pretty pass attack weather Boise, Idaho in January…
Any hoo, my point is that if Ohio State or Cincinnati or Boise State, etc. etc. grabs a high seed, they still don’t get a real home game with the choices of Arizona, California, Florida, or Louisiana. Still, I like the idea you propose and I’m totally on board with it aside from these 2 minor quibbles.
As much as I respect your opinion, oh Sloppy One, I have to disagree with you. I’ll write my response in an all-new post since I tend to get long-winded.
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Hey I’m all for it, I just don’t think it will ever happen. Right now you are going to have conference championship games go through the first week of December. Army and Navy will have to move their game up if they want in the playoffs, that’s for sure. But at the way things are, the bowl games aren’t going anywhere. Those begin after the second week of December. No playoff could possibly go on at the same time as the bowl games, they will never go for that.
One solution is to reschedule the bowl games I guess. Make sure they are all done sooner. But there are so many now that seems tough. I can’t see a legit playoff happening because of the time frame. The earliest we could start a playoff would be second week of December and latest would be first week of January. So maybe something like this.
Second week of December the week after conference championships, take the top 8 teams, regardless of conference affiliation, and put 1-8, 2-7, 3-6 and 4-8. Have the higher seeds get the home game. Winners play each other in two of the BCS bowls on New Years Day. Winners of those bowl games go to the championship. All other bowls played between first round and New Years Day. BCS bowls go on a rotating basis.
As long as there are no auto bids and the human factor is removed so there is no bias, something like that could work.