SEC confirms it is also considering a "play-in tournament" with B1G
SEC, Big Ten discussing new formats for football championship weekend
Oh my god, make it stop
Also sorry for paywall
@g0d0fm15ch13f But why? They finally have a good playoff structure now.
I wish I knew, in my mind that's effectively what the 12 team playoff is anyway. Seeds 5-12 are playing into the tournament. I think kinda like @CMLVI@lemmy.world said, this is solely an ego move from the SEC and B1G.
It's the 2 conferences feeling like they should get the teams in that "deserve" to make it. SMU, Boise, Indiana in over a team like Bama?
They CANNOT let things like "win your games" be the criteria to get in, because then it devalue the conference as a whole; the W/L has to equal out to .500. So additional things get manufactured; SOS, Strength of Record, transitive wins and similar opponents. They grasp at EVERYTHING except the on-field result. Bama lost to unranked Vanderbilt. They lost to ranked Tennessee (who also barely got into the playoffs, and were absolutely blown out). They got blown out by unranked OU.
But don't look at that; look at all these stats that say they're a top team...
It's maddening as a fan of the sport, and it's going to remain this way until the NCAA grows some nuts and kills conferences and devises a way to get scheduling done in a meaningful way across some arbitrary line for the "premier" teams. Relegation, different leagues, recruiting rankings for "like power", idk, I'm not paid enough to devise the solution. But something to standardize it. Nothing is perfect, but it can't be much worse than the current setup.
Or...
B1G and SEC break away, drop the dead weight in their conferences, and do the super league the NFL and conferences are dreaming of. Simple.
Wins and losses should matter, but they've gone too far in ignoring strength of schedule. If you are playing highschool teams, being undefeated doesn't mean anything in that scenario. Bama would have been a better game than the second best ACC or Big12 team, and Indiana. Still probably a loss, but that's the case either way.
If Bama doesn't lose to unranked Vanderbilt and get obliterated by OU, then they're in. They showed, with the product they put on the field that they were undeserving of the spot. Simple as that.
I'm not saying bama would be amazing, I'm saying even with the "worse" record, they were better than the bottom 4 (and probably Arizona State and Boise State). It wouldn't change the outcome, but it would lead to better games. It's not worth pretending that the ACC or Big12 have two or even one legitimate contender in a playoff.
At that point, though, why play a regular season? The teams can be selected without looking at results. If Bama cannot get the job done against OU the week before playoff selection, what other chance do they need? The excuses that get dropped at their feet are astounding. Win. Your. Games. That's should be the goal of every team, every season. If you win your games, you get in. No one can argue wins. Anyone can argue losses.
Yeah but the teams in the ncg both lost to terrible teams, ND especially. I think anOSU fans will genuinely still consider this a spoiled season 10 years down the road because they lost the game. And in my mind, that has GOT to be enough to keep a team from being the best in the nation. If we won every game except florida, I would enjoy the NC, but I would still look back at the season as a faliure. The media moguls don't understand this. And I can't reasonably vote against this. At the end of the day, I'm still a cfb sicko, and I will watch the playoff as it continues to expand, even though its not what I want.
And this has been my argument for years. It's silly to pretend that all 13-whatever teams in DI-FBS play the same sport. Hell in a conference like the B1G it's silly to pretend that all teams in a conference play the same sport. COLLEGE FOOTBALL DOESN'T NEED A NATIONAL CHAMPION. Let the teams play against their regional rivals. The fans and students are manic and show true hate (in a mostly controlled way) in these games, and that is so dang fun. 2022 TSIO was the essentially the first time in my life that that game had the same national implications that it used to, but I've never once given a damn about the whole state of alabama. If you really want to argue about who the best team any given year is, argue over it like kids arguing about baseball card stats. But the cat's out of the bag now, there can be no going back to no cfp and certainly not back to no title game.
Yeah, they need to do something. Playoff isn't going away. I don't get why the conferences are singular entities, even separate from the institutions...they need shuttered in everything-but-name and schedules handed out to the schools from a governing body over the "league". It's still not perfect, cause injuries and stuff change arcs, transfers and stuff make it hard to predict future performance, and 1000 other reasons, but the solution would be that every team ends up with an "average" schedule that can be compared, instead of this "well that conference is bad and this one is good, because perception".
Even in the NFL, this year's playoffs were like 80% blowouts, Superbowl included. So you always have off years. No one is clamoring for a major change to the playoffs, tho...
Because the SEC and B1G feel they are above the ACC, the B12, and everyone else. They want a bigger cut of the pie.
And I literally cannot wait for this charade to finally end. Let those shit head schools break off finally and reset CFB. I'm also eagerly awaiting all the second tier schools to finally get dropped. The number of Arkansas and Miss State and Ole Miss and Northwestern and Illinois fans that parrot "we're original members, they CaAaAn'T leave us out of a new conference or kick us out" is astronomical. Anything is on the table when you're working in the billions of dollars and they don't understand that.