How to crown a national champion
It was 101 years ago Henry L. Farrell fittingly described it as the mythical national championship. One hundred one years later, not much has changed. There have been several attempts to make it a reality, each one reactive, with a heavy dose of recency bias. The political climate seems ripe once again to usher in the newest attempt to correct a failed system. And unless sane minds prevail, we’ll end up with more of the same.
The problem isn’t that Cinci might not get in this year, just as it isn’t that UCF or Boise State have been snubbed in years passed. It’s not SEC bias, real or imaginary. Nor is it we lack variety or a more exciting postseason. Tailoring your solution to address one or more of these is short-sighted and won’t produce lasting, meaningful change. The problem is the current postseason construct does not include all the teams that have earned a shot at the title based on that year’s performance.
The polls
The NCAA, for whatever reason, was never obliged to determine a national champion. In the early 1930s, an Associated Press sports editor by the name of Alan Gould was the one-man operation that produced a weekly top 10. The fact it grew to a panel of 60 voters did nothing to alter his stated original purpose, which was “to develop interest and controversy. … Sports then was living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla. … Making it a Top 10 was an arbitrary decision.” For more than six decades, unbelievably, this was the gold standard, and safe to say it accomplished its goal, but it doesn’t accomplish ours.
Let’s pretend for a moment the AP’s goal had been pure – to determine the national champion faithfully and accurately. How many actual games are these voters watching in less than 24 hours? How are they even remotely close to being in position to properly evaluate even two teams, much less 10 or 25? The coaches’ poll, which began in 1950, was positioned even worse. A coach is painstakingly reviewing game film of his next week’s opponent. He can probably tell you more about that one team than anybody in the country, which is great, except the evaluation’s shelf life is a week and neglects every other team, the one exception technically being his own, which certainly doesn’t produce an elephant in the room. How can such a chief stakeholder be expected to not show favoritism without recusing himself?
And then there were two
Our reactive tendencies produced the Bowl Championship Series (1998-2013) and its predecessors, the Bowl Coalition (1992-1994) and the Bowl Alliance (1995-1997). Despite their differences, all three were based on the faulty premise that each and every year produces two and only two teams worthy of a shot at the title.
The BCS even attempted to appear to address the egregious flaw that plagued the sport for the 50-plus years prior by instituting computer rankings. However, Thomas Callaghan, Peter Mucha, and Mason Porter in their mathematical review of the BCS pointed out “the creators of most of these systems guard their intellectual property closely. An exception is Colley’s ranking, which is completely defined on his website. Billingsley, Massey, and Wolfe provide significant information about the ingredients for their rankings, but it is insufficient to reproduce their analysis.” If we cannot reproduce their analysis, we are left with no alternative but to blindly trust the validity of their algorithms. Even if we could do so safely, which is preposterous, the computer ranking was only one factor in the BCS formula, which also included the coaches’ poll, the AP poll, and later the Harris poll. Egregious flaws were not only baked in but were, in fact, the main ingredients.
Playoff? Playoff?!
That leaves us to address the misnomer that is the College Football Playoff. As Steve Deace of the Michigan Podcast accurately described it, it’s not a playoff; it’s an invitational. And who is doing the inviting? In regressive fashion, it’s a committee, only now it’s not sports writers, but seven current athletic directors, a college professor, two former Big Ten offensive linemen, a vice president for athletics and community wellness, a businessman responsible for the operational and financial performance of Entergy’s five utility companies, and a retired head coach. How does an athletic director who is responsible for as many as 23 varsity sports find time to judge the merits of 25-plus football teams in a 12- to 60-hour period every week for six weeks? Forget athletic directors. Name me one person who could do this. Say his/her sole profession is to evaluate college football teams. A cursory review disqualifies 77 percent of this panel. Let’s assume the remaining three members are that dedicated. They’d still be the minority faced with the uphill battle of convincing the majority of the superior quality of their findings.
Expansion
Essentially, all the CFP has done is expand the field from two to four, which brings us to today. Rumors are raging the “playoff” is in for more expansion, possibly 12 teams. It is very important you get this right. And by “you”, I mean anyone who is of rational, objective, evidence-based thought, not necessarily those who are stakeholders or stand to profit monetarily from the current or future construct. You water this thing down with 12, there’s no going back. Has there ever been a time in history when there were 12 teams in a given year that legitimately deserved a shot at the title? How about nine? Frankly, the answer is a resounding no. And based on the results of the last seven years, we also know four is not enough. Full disclosure: for more than a quarter century I’ve believed eight was the right number. But I hope the facts I’ve submitted to a candid world prove its merits.
It has to be eight for a variety of reasons. We’ve established you can’t just vote for who you think is best. It has to be competitive in nature. It must be a playoff, where the question is answered on the gridiron by the principal characters. And in the spirit of competition, let’s eliminate the idea of giving one or more teams a bye in the first round.
Very few things in this world are perfect, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying. We also shouldn’t use it as an excuse to ignore blatant shortcomings on the grounds that it’s better than what we had. The power-5 conference champions should receive automatic bids. What this measure lacks in perfection it makes up for in its eliminating subjectivity. Will the non-conference strength of schedules suffer as a result? Probably. But I don’t know how much worse it can get than seeing powerhouses play Charleston Southern, Mercer, Stony Brook, New Mexico State, The Citadel, etc. And I’m willing to live with not seeing those marquee non-conference matchups if it means taking the power out of the hands of those behind closed doors to place it in the hands of the athletes.
That leaves three spots. Outside of settling beforehand on a reproducible algorithm that produces the best evidence-based ranking of teams, I don’t see how to avoid some level of subjectivity surviving the selection process. But cutting the subjectivity down from absolute to just 37.5 percent is a substantial improvement. As an incidental biproduct, your Cincis, Central Floridas, etc. have three mathematical possibilities of getting in. Before this year, they had no shot. Again, three shots are a whole lot better than none. If by some miracle Cincinnati ultimately receives legitimate consideration this year, the non-power-five will have proven it has one shot. Nevertheless, three is better than one.
If you want to keep the bowls, knock yourself out; incorporate four into an eight-team playoff. Let the teams left out vie for the other bowl spots as they always have. All the other details are secondary and tertiary. The greatest sport on Earth deserves a proper playoff. It’s incumbent upon the people to make it a reality. How to go about that, there I cannot help you. But it starts with knowing what's right.