SMQ: As usual, talent rules the day in College Football Playoff semifinals
By Zach Bigalke
What is the remedy to the talent disparity in college football?
Before we discuss potential remedies, we first need to determine whether these talent disparities are actually a problem and pinpoint why they might be a problem.
Is it a problem that less-talented teams sometimes break through and win their conference crowns? Would college football be more valuable if we used recruiting rankings to set the postseason field before the regular season even starts? I imagine most of you reading this far into the column would agree that there is little appeal in watering down what to the most impactful and intense regular season, from season to season, of any sport.
Thus we must accept chaos on some level as an inevitability at the FBS level. The most talented teams won’t always reach the end of the regular season with unblemished records or conference championships to boast.
That means talent disparities will also become an inevitability once teams are matched in semifinal games set up along intersectional lines. (Since the formation of the College Football Playoff in the 2014 season, there has never been a semifinal pairing of two teams from the same conference.)
In the grand debate over whether the best teams or the most deserving teams belong in the College Football Playoff, the reality is that we cannot parse one from the other. The most deserving teams are those teams that play the best throughout the course of the regular season. Usually teams with more talent are going to win more games than teams with less talent, and go on to win conference titles and claim Playoff berths or New Year’s Six invitations.
That doesn’t always happen, though. Baylor, not Oklahoma or Texas, won the Big 12 this season despite the fact that both the Longhorns and Sooners ranked in the top 10 in composite talent in 2021 while Baylor was fourth in the Big 12 and 41st nationally. Likewise, it was Pittsburgh (36th in composite talent) that won the ACC title this year instead of Clemson (4th), Miami (13th), North Carolina (18th), or Florida State (20th).
To advance forward and assess what might “remedy” the issue of semifinal talent disparities, then, we must accept two truths:
- Uncertainty is a good thing as it pertains to conference races, and
- Conference championships should matter in some way in determining who makes the College Football Playoff and how teams are seeded.
If we accept both of these truths, there is really only one way to potentially rectify the talent disparities within individual matchups. The simple solution is to expand the number of access points to the College Football Playoff with a larger bracket.
The Blue-Chip Ratio still dictates that the usual suspects will most likely reach the College Football Playoff national championship game after playing three or four games against an expanded field rather than the current two-game setup. But an expanded field means that more of those elite compilations of talent will qualify as part of the select dozen in any given year, and once they are in the Playoff anything is possible.
(Remember, after all, that Ohio State was the No. 4 seed when they won it all in 2014. A year earlier, under the BCS system, the Buckeyes would have headed to the Rose Bowl without any realistic chance to climb all the way to No. 1 in the final polls.)
Expanded access means both a pathway for more conference champions to make the field (which ups the chance for chaos events that place teams with less accumulated talent into the College Football Playoff) and a pathway for more wild-card selections to make the field (which ups the chance for teams that fall in the Blue-Chip Ratio zone to get into the initial bracket).
The first risks the chance that talent gaps will form, but they will more likely winnow themselves out by the time quarterfinals and semifinals roll around. The latter ensures that a wider field of blue-chip rosters will have a legitimate chance to go all the way.
With that in mind, what would this year’s field have looked like from a talent compilation standpoint?