Wednesday morning buffet

It’s a buffet.  Just a buffet.

• “I don’t think you can ever go too wrong calling something what it is,” Scott said. “Things that make sense tend to stand the test of time.”  So how long should we give a four-team playoff?
• Alabama and Georgia are poised to dominate this year’s NFL draft.
• Preseason homerism, Gator style.
• The AJ-C breaks down Georgia’s 2013 schedule.
• SEC! SEC! SEC!:  “The ACC, the Pac 12, the Big Ten and the Big 12 all now have a “grant of rights” agreement. The SEC doesn’t have one, but it doesn’t really need one.”
• The new playoff, and a cry in the wilderness for economic fairness.  I was wondering if somebody would step up.
• Todd Gurley:  Georgia warhorse.
• They’re excited about football at Kentucky.

About these ads

You paid good money for that?

The BCS hired Premier Sports Management to rebrand the BCS and help come up with a new name.  The result?

“College Football Playoff.”

Guys, whatever you shelled out for that, I’d have undercut PSM by half.

It could have been worse, admittedly.

“I’ll be happy with whatever,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany told reporters at the BCS meetings today, according to CBSSports.com’s Bruce Feldman’s Twitter feed. “Obviously I’m not great with names.”

And there’s your understatement of the day.

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UPDATE:  LMAO.

OU AD Joe Castiglione on hearing the name "College Football Playoff": "Is that really the name or just a space-filler?"—
Bruce Feldman (@BFeldmanCBS) April 23, 2013

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UPDATE #2:  ROTFLMAO.

While they're at it, should also rename the SEC Championship Game the "National Championship Game."—
Paul Myerberg (@PaulMyerberg) April 23, 2013

Settling how to settle it on the field

They’re meeting this week to figure out the structure and composition of the playoff selection committee.  The good news is that it sounds like they’re giving the cold shoulder to the coaches.

Current coaches have lost their voice in football’s postseason. The American Football Coaches Association, whose poll comprises one-third of the BCS formula, says it has had no communication with conference commissioners about the playoff selection process.

“When they were trying to get what turned out to be the BCS 15 years ago, the commissioners were begging us to allow our poll to be part of the process,” said Grant Teaff, executive director of the AFCA. “If they need us this time, they’ll probably let us know.”

Yeah, well, don’t sit by that phone too long, Grant.

The bad news is that the overall process may be as subjective in its own way as ever.  Maybe more.  Let our old friend Bill Hancock spin it for you.

Hancock said he believes the commissioners would give the committee “a jury charge” but ultimately it’s up to each member to determine what factors to consider, such as with the NCAA basketball committee.

“I’d be very surprised if we have an RPI or any other kind of universal metric,” Hancock said. “I think instead there will be several different sets of data that the members can look at. What kind of data? We don’t know. Obviously their decision will be made based on common sense: Who did you play? How did you play them? How did you do? Who was injured when you played? How was the weather? Just common-sense things that any sports fan would use.”

Here’s an example of common sense, from last season’s (hypothetical) playoff pool.

A team that doesn’t play in the SECCG gets in the semis ahead of a team it lost to in the regular season.  Makes you wonder what Mike Slive’s “jury instruction” to the committee would have been, doesn’t it?

All I see here is a road map on how to get to an eight-team playoff sooner.  Lather, rinse, repeat – at least as long as TV will pay for the shampoo.

Thursday morning buffet

If you’re hungry, grab a plate.

• Georgia Southern is moving to the Sun Belt Conference.  That’s good news for Georgia, as it means there will be one less FCS opponent on future schedules.
• Evidently, we think college players shouldn’t be paid, but college coaches should be paid more.  Weird.
• Speaking of paying college players, this is some well-played snark from the AJ-C, of all places.
• The media’s strange fixation with what it thinks Jadeveon Clowney ought to be doing with his football career goes in a new direction.
• John Infante thinks a little sunshine would work wonders on SEC oversigning.  Methinks Nick Saban could care less about that.
• March Madness usually inspires some really stupid thoughts about what college football can take from the basketball tourney, and CFN delivers, in spades.
• If you’re a Vol fan living in a certain place, Charlie Pierce describes how the Georgia-Tennessee water war could lead to your worst nightmare.

“It’s pretty clear to everyone that it’s headed to Cowboys Stadium.”

The first championship game in college football’s new four-team playoff is going to be played in Arlington, Texas, because it’s a site imbued with so much tradition Jerry Jones is willing to outbid one and all for the privilege of playing host.  (“Because Cowboys Stadium, which hosts the AT&T Cotton Bowl, is such an overwhelming favorite for the inaugural championship, several communities opted not to bid, sources said.”)

When it comes to college football, money is the only tradition that matters these days.  I give the whole farce of a bid process five years before they decide to make Arlington the permanent home of the title game.  On the bright side, that’ll give Bill Hancock another opportunity to assure us about how high quality the whole thing is.

More post-BCS fun and games

Just a couple of random tidbits to show how serious football’s custodians are about taking the postseason to the next level.

First, don’t let anybody tell you differently.  Shreveport is in the running to host a national semi-final game!

The group overseeing the new college football playoff announced today it has invited 31 bowl committees to consider whether they are interested in submitting a proposal to host the national semifinals and other bowl games to be played New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.

The Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl have already been chosen to host the first national semifinals of the playoff on January 1, 2015. The Orange Bowl and a yet-to-be named bowl will host the semifinals in the second year of the playoff. The two bowls that will host semifinals in the third year have yet to be named. Bids are being sought for the three to-be-named bowls.

“This is about giving as many fans as possible the opportunity to enjoy the new playoff and the other bowls in person,” said Bill Hancock, Executive Director of the BCS and the future playoff. “A rotating event means more fans in more places will be able to experience the excitement of the new playoff. Because of the criteria, we don’t expect every bowl to proceed with a bid, but we want to extend an offer to all that are part of the college football bowl tradition.”

Damn, I wish some billionaire with more money than sense would back a play for Shreveport to be a host, just to watch Hancock weasel out of it.  (Shoot, there’s got to be more bang for the buck in that than there was in all those RomneyPACs last fall.  Combined.)  Somebody help a third-tier bowl out.

Of course, we all know the reality here.

BCS says 31 bowls may bid for right to host semifinals in playoff. Doesn't matter: 3 open spots will go to Fiesta, Cotton & Chick-fil-A—
Brett McMurphy (@McMurphyESPN) March 15, 2013

Time waster.

Next, Stewart Mandel organizes a brief symposium on the role statistical analysis should play in assembling the semi-finals field (the teams, not Shreveport).  It’s well-meaning, but… well, let’s put it this way.  Here’s whom Mandel elicited for opinions:

• Bill Connelly, author of SB Nation’s Football Study Hall and Football Outsiders’ S&P efficiency ratings

• Ed Feng, publisher of ThePowerRank.com and Sports Illustrated contributor

• Brian Fremeau, author of BCFToys.com and Football Outsiders’ FEI efficiency ratings

• Jerry Palm, CBSSports.com bracketologist and former publisher of CollegeBCS.com and CollegeRPI.com

• Ken Pomeroy, publisher of the KenPom.com basketball efficiency ratings

And here’s whom Hancock says they’re looking for:

1. People connected with each conference, but not necessarily current staff members — more likely retired ADs or coaches.

2. One or two former media members who covered college football.

3. “Nationally known and respected football people who know the game and made their name in college football.” Former players might fit this bill.

Yeah, those two groups have so much in common.  If you put them in the form of a Venn diagram, you’d wind up with a couple of circles that didn’t overlap, with a line drawn between them labeled “Bill Hancock”.

Hint:  If you just described all the playoff trappings as the most conservative way to generate the most money, it would save us all a lot of effort, Bill.

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UPDATE:  Michael Elkon writes something that went through my head when I composed this post earlier.

Thankfully, we are coming to the end of the BCS era. The decisions that were previously made by suspect pollsters and denuded computer programs will now be named by an as-yet unnamed roster of committee members. College football’s innumeracy will no longer be written into the rules. Instead, we will just have to hope that the individuals tasked with selecting four teams will do a better job of utilizing mathematically sound reasoning. It would be something new for college football to go down that path. (Bill Hancock’s comments on the composition of the committee are not confidence-inspiring.)

Baseball has made major strides and yet even now, we are far more likely to see batting average on the screen when a batter comes to the plate as opposed to on-base percentage. How long are we going to have to wait for college football to make similar progress and where will that progress be reflected? In baseball, the use of outdated numbers does not affect the competition. Because of the subjectivity inherent in picking teams to play for the national title, it potentially matters when ESPN uses bad numbers to analyze teams and then Hancock’s “retired ADs and coaches” form their beliefs based on those numbers.

Baseball is much, much farther along in its usage of advanced stats than college football – yet even there, as Michael notes, there’s still plenty of resistance masked as adherence to traditional (read:  less accurate) measures.  It’s not rational to think that college football is ready to go to a place that even baseball hasn’t fully embraced.  Sadly, that’s the case even though more is at stake.

Some Cinderellas are more equal than others.

While this whole NYT piece is a marvel to behold, this paragraph is the most awesome of all:

Andy Glockner of SI.com and Jeff Goodman of CBS Sports are not fans of what Glockner terms the “small conference entertainment complex.” They argue that sending a team that wins a tournament rather than an entire regular season isn’t necessarily fair and that a worse team is more likely to emerge from a tournament rather than a regular season.  [Emphasis added.]

Well, yeah.  But brackets are fun!

Honestly, I don’t know how these people keep their stories straight.

Just haggling over the fee

Gag me with a spoon:

The conference commissioners and college administrators who oversee college football’s new championship format, which will begin in 2014, expect to unveil its name and logo at their meeting in Pasadena, Calif., next month, executive director Bill Hancock said.

That title, Hancock said, will not include a sponsor.

“It won’t be ‘The Vizio Championship Tournament,’” Hancock said, using the Rose Bowl title sponsor as an example. “The Final Four doesn’t have one. The Masters doesn’t. The Super Bowl. That’s the kind of event we have.”

The group has narrowed the candidates for the name to a “small number,” Hancock said. It will be simple, straightforward and, as he described it, “not cutesy.”

So, the man who said we didn’t need the event now says the event doesn’t need a sponsor.  This is just an oblique way of saying “nobody’s offered us enough money – yet.”  One day, somebody will.  And I’m sure it will be totally classy.  Bill will let us know that.

Hitting that expanded playoffs sweet spot

Settling it on the field, for the win:

Elias: 3rd straight SB won by team that was no more than 4 games above .500. Happened twice in prior 44 Super Bowls ('88 49ers, '07 Giants).—
ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) February 04, 2013

MOAR.

It’s January 13, 2020. Do you know where your playoff game is?

College football’s new playoff rotation results in the longest football seasons ever.

I guess Bill Hancock’s gonna have to find a new talking point about academics.