College Football Playoff Committee Tasked With Policing Schedules
How much will the quest for the College Football Playoff impact scheduling? The CFP committee will make that determination based on how much it weighs strength of schedule.
College football returns in eight days.
With it comes a slate of great games such as Georgia-Clemson and TCU-LSU.
Of course, as usual, lesser games will usher in the season as well.
Look at some of these amazing appetizers: Buffalo at Ohio State, Toledo at Florida, Nicholls at Oregon and Rice at Texas A&M.
Containing this much excitement is a true challenge.
The great hope is that the College Football Playoff will eliminate soft schedules by encouraging programs to load up on strength-of-schedule builders.
Much of that will depend on how the yet-unspecified committee treats matters such as one-loss programs with easy schedules in comparison to two-loss programs with brutal slates.
Some leagues seem to be taking future scheduling seriously. Three, the Big 12, Big Ten and Pac-12, have adopted nine-game conference schedules.
Big Ten teams have also made further commitments to drop all FCS games from their future schedules. By going to nine conference games, it also means there won’t be as many “guarantee games” against MAC teams.
The SEC, meanwhile, has overwhelming spoken out against going to a nine-game schedule – essentially standing pat with tried-and-true practice of one big-conference game and three cupcakes in the non-conference. Coaches voted 11-1 against nine league contests with only Alabama coach Nick Saban favoring the deal.
In preparation for the coming debates, coaches from high-profile Big 12 teams fired shots across the bow at the SEC. Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops said during the offseason that the bottom half of the SEC hasn’t “done much at all.” Texas coach Mack Brown backed Stoops’ comments, saying the Big 12 is the more balanced conference.
Saban, meanwhile, thinks SEC teams can fall back on the strength of the top of the league.
“I don’t think there’s enough weight put on the quality of your schedule and the opponents that you play, which in our league is very, very important, because we had six teams in the top 10 last year at the end of the season,” Saban said during an April SEC teleconference. “We play each other, and that has a huge impact on the quality of team you have, regardless of how many games you lose. There are things like that that I think we can do better.”
Therein marks the flaw in Saban’s logic. While there were six top-10 teams in the SEC last year, Alabama was one and the Crimson Tide didn’t play two others. So those six top-10 teams meant playing three top-10 games.
In fairness, Saban has been one of the more aggressive non-conference schedulers in the league.
The conference debates can be rendered largely moot if major programs up the ante in the non-conference schedules.
For that to happen, though, the College Football Playoff committee needs to do its job and truly evaluate the best four teams in the nation.
Two of the last three seasons would have provided unbelievable controversies.
Notre Dame and Alabama would have been obvious selections. So, too, would have been Ohio State if the Buckeyes were eligible to play in the postseason. Since they weren’t, let’s take a look at two more spots rather than one.
Florida (11-1 when the committee would have met) struggled enormously in November wins over Missouri and Louisiana-Lafayette but scored a big victory over Florida State in the final week of the regular season.
Georgia, meanwhile, also went 11-1 in the regular season and lost on the final play of the game to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game.
Georgia played Buffalo, Florida Atlantic, Georgia Southern and Georgia Tech in the non-conference and faced Ole Miss and Auburn from the SEC West.
Florida, on the other hand, played Bowling Green, Louisiana-Lafayette, Jacksonville State and Florida State in the non-conference but stood out by playing – and beating – Texas A&M and LSU in the SEC West.
The Bulldogs beat the Gators head-to-head, but also suffered a 35-7 loss at South Carolina – a team Florida upended 44-11.
Assuming the committee would have picked one, which would it have been?
What about Kansas State? Where would the Wildcats have factored in? They also went 11-1 during the regular season, but had no conference championship game in which to play.
They played Missouri State, Miami and North Texas in the non-conference schedule with their only loss – albeit a blowout – coming in a road game against Baylor.
How would the committee have determined the Wildcats stacked up with Florida and/or Georgia?
Nov 17, 2012; Eugene, OR, USA; Oregon Ducks fans display banners against the Stanford Cardinal at Autzen Stadium. Oregon and Stanford would have posed an interesting challenge to the College Football Playoff committee. Mandatory Credit: Scott Olmos-USA TODAY Sports
What about the Oregon-Stanford debate?
The Ducks (11-1) played Arkansas State, Fresno State and Tennessee Tech before getting into the Pac-12 schedule. They lost one game all season – in overtime to Stanford.
The Cardinal, meanwhile, went 10-2 during the regular season, losing only at Washington and in overtime at Notre Dame, which finished the regular season ranked No. 1. Stanford won the head-to-head battle against the Ducks and also won the Pac-12 Championship Game. In addition to the Fighting Irish, Stanford played San Jose State and Duke in the non-conference schedule.
No team played more than one high-profile team during the non-conference schedule, so how would the committee have decided? Regardless of whom it chose, debates at annoyingly high decibels would have ensued – for the sake of irritating debate.
The 2011 season would have been far more cut-and-dry. LSU, Oklahoma State, Alabama and Stanford would have been obvious selections, with only one-loss Boise State really having much of an argument. The Broncos losing at home to TCU – combined with a weak non-conference schedule – would have likely sunk them.
How the 2010 College Football Playoff unfolded would have also created chaos. Again, there would have been two obvious choices in Auburn and Oregon.
From there? Well, it would have been a disaster.
No. 3 TCU, then in the Mountain West, went undefeated but its toughest non-conference games came against a 5-7 Oregon State team and a 7-5 Baylor team. Even the second-best team in the conference, Utah, offered little help despite losing just twice because the Utes finished 19th in the BCS standings.
Would the committee have left the Horned Frogs out altogether?
Stanford ranked fourth in the final BCS standings after an 11-1 season. The Cardinal lost only to No. 2 Oregon in Eugene, but it lost in a 52-31 rout. Stanford played Notre Dame and a three-win Wake Forest team outside the Pac-10.
Both teams ranked higher in the BCS standings than the three Big Ten teams that tied for the conference title.
At the time, there was no Big Ten Championship Game. So differentiating between Michigan State, Ohio State and Wisconsin teams with identical 11-1 records would have proven a tough challenge.
The Spartans won the head-to-head battle with the Badgers and beat a five-loss Notre Dame team in the non-conference. However, Iowa dominated Michigan State, 37-6, and the Spartans ranked ninth in the final BCS standings while Wisconsin came in fifth and the Buckeyes placed sixth.
Ohio State played Miami and nobody else in the non-conference. Its only loss came at Camp Randall Stadium to Wisconsin, 31-18.
Wisconsin’s top out-of-league win, meanwhile, came in a one-point victory over a six-win Arizona State team. All three major polls – the AP, USA Today Coaches and Harris Interactive – all ranked the Badgers ahead of Stanford, though the BCS did not.
How would the committee have handled that mess?
The best way, it would seem, would be to judge teams based on their strength of schedule. Then again, if one of those teams had taken a bigger chance in the non-conference slate and lost those games, would they have been in consideration at all?
It’s the committee’s job to ensure that it uses schedules as more than a tie-breaker, but rather as an enormous component of its selection.
If it fails, we are doomed to more of the same yawn-inducing, uninspired scheduling epidemic rampant in today’s college football.