It’s been two weeks of the College Football Playoff poll and two weeks of seemingly unending controversy.
What the selection committee values, playing in one conference, and what fans and other analysts value, seems to be two very different things. There are any number of rankings that are controversial, confusing, or downright inexplicable. And committee chair Hunter Yurachek’s attempted explanations during the post-release interview have only served to make things worse, rather than provide clarification for their thinking.
But it’s easy to complain, subjectively, saying that one ranking or another doesn’t make sense or isn’t consistent with prior thinking. What though, would be the best system for putting teams in order? Or at least, a significantly better one that doesn’t overly rely on the often-misleading “eye test” and inherent biases from committee members.
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Fortunately, some outside analysts have come up with their own way of comparing a more objective set of rankings to the committee’s uh, heavily influenced poll.
ESPN’s Bill Connelly created a blended set of metrics to better evaluate important performance metrics. Essentially using an 80/20 combination, with the 80 side being resume rankings, strength of record, the “football power index,” and the 20 side being forward-looking ratings.
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These are opponent adjusted, and focus more heavily on underlying efficiency on offense, defense and special teams. That’s a better methodology for predicting how teams perform moving forward, considering wins and losses are noisy and often influenced by fluky outcomes.
So how does it look?
Well, you’ll be stunned to hear that, once again, a specific conference has received a tremendous benefit of the doubt that they do not deserve, and that the Miami Hurricanes can feel especially aggrieved with the treatment they received after taking their first loss. Here’s the list, with the arrows representing the position these teams are in Connelly’s rankings, relative to the playoff poll. For example, Miami at No. 2 in Connelly’s list is five spots higher than they are in the actual rankings.
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Pretty impressive for there to be just one spot that matches! This is just one set of rankings, not necessarily definitive, and others have different outcomes, but it’s an indication of how the committee values things that they shouldn’t, while ignoring things they should care about.
Unsurprisingly, Kentucky is the biggest “miss” by the committee, as the Wildcats are still getting an immense amount of credit for their “SEC” schedule, ignoring that their performances don’t warrant it. South Carolina is eight spots too high in the committee poll, again, given a tremendous amount of deference to simply existing in the SEC.
On the other hand, Boise State is nine spots too low, because the committee is incapable of appreciating performances against teams that do not play in the SEC.
Indiana and Wake Forest are underrated, Alabama is overrated, surprise, surprise, and Miami’s six spot drop after losing to Notre Dame looks even more absurd. What might be a surprise though, and what would create some controversy, is the rankings for Ohio State and LSU.
The Buckeyes and Tigers both now have three losses, but computer-driven metrics give them credit for how they’ve played, while being unaware of Julian Sayin’s injury. Efficiency-driven systems are much slower to react to losses to good teams than humans are, and the Buckeyes’ three losses have been to Texas, USC and Oregon, while their win over Indiana and dominance against other opponents like Iowa still pushes them into the top-15.
Similarly, LSU gets credit for playing well in losses to Ole Miss and Kentucky, putting them higher than the committee’s ranking.
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Overall though, there are nine SEC teams in the CFB playoff top-25 poll. Seven of them are higher than they’d be using an objective metric. Missouri sits at No. 28 in Connelly’s rankings, and No. 22 in the poll. Just because. On average, even including LSU at -8 spots, the average miss per SEC team was 2.5 spots higher than their performance-based ranking.
That is the problem; the SEC has spent years building itself up through concerted marketing efforts, the people that run the sport believe them, for some reason, and then teams are rated based on inaccurate assumptions. That’s bad! There are tens of millions of dollars and jobs at stake, and the committee’s obsession with rewarding SEC mediocrity is jeopardizing all of it. And the very legitimacy of the process.
The worst part? If, by some miracle, the committee corrected for this bias moving forward, the SEC fans, boosters and commissioner Greg Sankey would be livid. Beyond livid. The complaining, whining, anger and press conferences would be relentless. Until they got their way again anyway.
Once you get used to privilege, it’s hard to give it up.