If we measure these proceedings by the standard applied to the Indiana Hoosiers during the course of their difficult Friday night, then the best team in the ACC, the second-best team in the ACC and the third-best team in the SEC had no business being included in the first-ever legit College Football Playoff.
SMU, Clemson and Tennessee all were blown out of their first-round games even more severely than the beleaguered Hoosiers, who set a school record for victories, ranked No. 1 in the regular season in scoring margin then got handled at Notre Dame Stadium by the Fighting Irish and became a target for reams of social media vitriol.
It didn’t have play out like this.
MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL NEWS:
- How to watch every bowl game
- Picks, predictions for bowl and CFP games
- Critics bash one-sided CFP blowouts
- Vols suffer one of program's biggest postseason losses
Because instead of following the format that has made March Madness the most dynamic sporting event on the planet, the CFP chose to adopt an approach similar to that employed by the National Football League. It’s the one thing the NFL does wrong with its competition, and college football was foolish to follow along.
It’s this simple: The best part of the CFP format is the automatic qualification granted to the champions of the five highest-rated conferences. Every real sport offers a defined path to its championships. But the worst part of the format is the preferential seeding granted to the four highest ranked league champs
The College Football Playoff committee judged Mountain West winner Boise State to be their 9th-ranked team with the champions of the Big 12 (Arizona State) at No. 12 and ACC (Clemson) at No. 16. So why were the Broncos and Sun Devils presented with first-round byes, ahead of higher-ranked teams Texas, Penn State and Notre Dame?
It’s the same silliness that rules in the NFL, where NFC North competitors Detroit and Minnesota are both 12-2, but one of them will be forced to go on the road for a first-round playoff game against possibly the “best” team from the NFC South (8-6 Tampa or 7-7 Atlanta) or the NFC West (LA Rams or Seattle, both 8-6).
This is not logical or just, and we’re seeing the same in the CFP.
BENDER: Ohio State flips script, crushes Tennessee
Faulty CFP seeding leads to blowouts
One of the unintended consequences of this misjudgment was the four consecutive snoozers we saw over the course of 27 hours from Friday evening to late Saturday night. The final margin of victory in the first round of the first-ever legit College Football Playoff was 77 points, with all four home teams winning by double-digits.
Would it have been the same, though, if the conference champions were granted entry into the playoff but then seeded by their CFP ranking?
Here’s what the first-round matchups would have been:
– No. 9 Boise State at No. 8 Indiana
– No. 10 SMU at No. 7 Tennessee
– No. 11 Arizona State at No. 6 Ohio State
– No. 12 Clemson at No. 5 Notre Dame
There’s no question those would have been more inviting matchups, especially that 8/9 game, than what we saw in the first round as it happened. And, more important, we’d have a more equitable quarterfinal round and beyond.
With the current system, Ohio State and Oregon are meeting at the Rose Bowl, with the Buckeyes favored to take down the tournament’s No. 1 seed. Something’s not quite right if the top team in the event is an underdog on a neutral field in its first game of the tournament. Something’s even not quite righter if a team forced to play a first-round game, Penn State, is a double-digit favorite over the team, Boise, that wound up in the No. 3 seeding spot by virtue of its league title.
Assuming all the home teams won in a first-round conducted correctly, these would have been the matchups in the New Year’s Bowls:
– No. 1 Oregon vs. No. 8 Indiana
– No. 2 Georgia vs. No. 7 Tennessee
– No. 3 Texas vs. No. 6 Ohio State
– No. 4 Penn State vs. No. 5 Notre Dame
This is how a tournament is supposed to play out: creating the matchups that make the most sense, granting the greatest competitive advantages to those teams that earned preferential treatment with their regular-season performance.
MORE: Campus sites are the way to go for CFP
They won 13 consecutive games, so it’s hard to imagine Oregon ducking anyone. But don’t think they wouldn’t prefer to be playing the Hoosiers for the right to advance to the CFP semifinals rather than the Buckeyes, who lost by only a point when OSU visited Oregon’s Autzen Stadium during the regular season.
College football spent nearly a century working hard not to embrace an appropriate format for deciding its champion. So we can’t have expected them to get every detail right when they finally got around to a true playoff.
But now that we’ve seen more than a third of the competition develop, we can say for sure: It’s not perfect. Let’s not wait another century to fix it.
