One more thing

December 13, 2014 at 9:44 am, by Carl

OK, I promise to leave the College Football playoff thing alone here and get back to helping you, my faithful readers, think about living well. But, I heard from a few people that maybe I was missing a key aspect about the Conferences. So, back to the data to see what can be gleaned. Overall, my argument with the system is that when you listen to the “experts,” most of the time they act as if all 64 of the Power 5 teams are basically equal. Now, if that were true, this would be a moot point. We absolutely could just go with the conference champs and be done with it. But any cursory glance through the conferences tells you they aren’t true. It is the rare time with Iowa really is a dominant team or Kansas or Washington or Wake Forest. Sure, in some years, a random team—like Vanderbilt the previous couple of years—has a good run. In the long run,though, we know that Ohio State, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, USC and a few other schools in the four non-SEC conferences will dominate their leagues.

In the SEC, however, except for Vandy and Kentucky…you can look to any of the remaining 12 teams….okay, in the past, Mississippi and Mississippi State have been lower tier compared the powerful. Still, rather than 1-3 tough teams and 4-6 push-over teams, the SEC has about 7-9 teams each year that would dominate in the other leagues. What that means is moving through the league season is not equal, and if an Pac 12 team gets through their 2-3 tough games undefeated, then it is very easy for them. I tried to show that last time by looking at the records of the opponents, but let’s just take a league look.

When you look at the teams with losing records played by our comparison teams (remember, last time I looked at the top teams and also included Ole Miss and Auburn), the trend that emerges is that the opponents faced with losing records all come from within the conference…except within the SEC and Pac 12. Here’s the list by conference. The ACC leads the pack as weakest conference with seven of their 14 teams having a .500 or worse record, with three of the seven teams having losing records. The other conferences aren’t much better:

ACC—7 teams .500 or worse, 3 losing (half the teams)
B10—6 teams .500 or worse, 4 losing (almost half)
B12—5 teams .500 or worse, 3 losing (half the teams)
SEC—5 teams .500 or worse, 2 losing….only 2 of 14 teams had losing records
P12—4 teams .500 or worse, 4 losing…so, 4 of the 12 teams had losing records

Think about that…if you were in the ACC, you knew that half of the possible conference opponents would be .500 or worse. We all know that a .500 record is what gets coaches fired in the NCAA….that may be an okay record in the NFL and get some teams into the playoffs, but in college sports that typically won’t cut it. A .500 team is weak. It also means that when you are facing that weaker team, you know you can coast along a bit. You might lose, but typically you won’t. Those best teams, whether FSU or Ohio St, do win. But, when you only have two weak teams, then you know that most weeks, the game you are facing will be brutal.

Everyone often says the Pac 12 is really the equal of the SEC, so okay. Let’s look. If we matched the top four teams from each conference, it would look like this based on the 2014 results.

Alabama vs Oregon
Miss St vs Arizona
Ole Miss vs UCLA
Missouri vs Arizona St

Let’s call them even…it could go either way, though I bet the line would give the edge to the SEC each time. Again, my argument has never been that the best teams nationwide aren’t very good. They are. Ohio St is a very good team as is TCU. They have good athletes at those schools. My argument is that those teams play a 2, 3, or 4 game schedule while the SEC team plays a 6, 7, or 8 game schedule over very tough teams. If you go 6-2 against very tough opponents, that is harder to do that to go 3-0 or 2-1 against just three hard teams. However, drill down further, starting at the bottom of the pile to make this point…and to include the SEC’s weakest teams, we’ll start from the very bottom. The last SEC team vs the last P12 team would be Vandy vs Colorado. Then:

UK vs Washington St
UT vs Oregon St.
Arkansas vs California
South Carolina vs. Washington

The SEC team is stronger in each of those five games. I suppose one of those Pac12 teams could win, but the line would be huge even on a neutral field.

But wait, you protest, lets look at the ACC. On a recent Saturday late in the season, we did and the ACC won all 4 games, so that must mean the ACC is better. Right? Not so fast, as Lee Corso would say. Here were those games: FSU vs UF, Ga Tech vs UGA, Clemson vs South Carolina, and Louisville vs UK,. But dig deeper to consider who those teams actually are. We had the #1 ACC team playing the #9 SEC team; #2 ACC vs #5 SEC, #3 ACC vs #10 SEC, and the #4 ACC team playing the #13 SEC team. Three of the four games were very close, with only Clemson winning easily. Ga Tech actually earned more respect because they played and beat a top SEC team, the fifth best team in the conference. The supposedly best team in the country, FSU, had to hang on for dear life against the 9^th team in the SEC.

If though, you had played those same SEC schools against their matched ACC ranked team, you would have played UF vs UNC, Duke vs UGA, South Carolina vs Miami and then poor little Kentucky vs Wake Forest. In those games, I would take, and the betting line would be, the SEC team every time except maybe the Miami game. And I would have still taken South Carolina.

Well to restate my conclusion from last time, the only way to settle this year after year is on the field. We need a 16 team playoff. It’s easy to do. Everyone knows its easy to do. Sadly, for the same reasons it took 30+ years to get to four teams, it will take much longer to get to 16. in the meantime, get ready for an unfair top 4 again and again. The only way to truly be fair is to use a playoff system that allows enough teams in to counterbalance the unfair reality that some conferences are very strong and the others are very weak.

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