Who couldn’t have seen this coming a mile away?
The college basketball selection committee uses a computer-rating called the Rating Percentage Index (RPI) as one of many tools to pick the field.
Hancock said they could not make an RPI equivalent for football.
“We ran an RPI and it was not accurate” because there’s not enough information coming out of a 12-game regular-season, he said.
“How I envision it, and I think the commissioners do to, is (the committee will) have everything at their disposal. They’ll have computer rankings, they’ll have the writers’ poll, they’ll have the coaches’ poll, and they’ll look at it all but at the end of the day it’ll come down to the eye test. It’ll come down to common sense.
“Who did you play? Did you win your conference? Where did you play? Who was injured when you played that game? What about common opponents? What about head-to-head?”
So basically it’s like a bunch of people sitting in a bar shooting the breeze, minus the big screen TVs, hot wings and alcohol. Sounds very settling-it-on-the-fieldy to me.
In case you’re that naive, here’s what the new regime is really about.
The committee will attempt to have the highest-seeded teams in the semifinal pairings play closest to home. There will be no limit to how many teams from a conference can be selected for the final four, and the committee will not avoid pairing teams from the same conference in the semifinals.
Mike Slive has the biggest woody you could possibly imagine right now.
Get The Picture 
I don’t think there is a perfect system, but I like transparency and rules based approaches. Having a bunch of guys with this kind of power is fertile ground for corruption.
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Throw in the wings and beer and they might make better decisions.
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I hope that they ditch the SEC title game when the playoffs start. The SEC title game pretty much eliminates 1 SEC team from the final 4. Go to 9 games for the SEC schedule, drop the title game and put 2 teams in the playoffs every season and 3 in the occasional season. I am sure that everyone would love that.
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That is what a lot of FCS conferences do… but an FCS CCG is probably a money-losing effort. If we’d had the playoff this year, the SEC would’ve had an amazing CCG plus two likely teams in the playoff anyway, with UF being highly regarded at the time. Best of both worlds. And staying with 8 games means as many as 7 less losses to go around.
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Phan- you hit on an issue that Saban discussed after the SEC title game. While arguably the pac 12 and big 10 can counter by saying their teams play championship games, it is certainly not comparable to what we have seen in Atlanta over the past several years.
The bigger issue is that 4 teams using “conventional” thinking around record and simply opponents record is nonsense. Ohio State is ranked ahead of us in the AP poll. Ohio state was 6-0 in games decided by a TD or less, went to overtime with Purdue AND Wisconsin, escaped a near loss to a putrid Cal team, and beat Indiana by 3 points giving up 49 points along the way. Is that a top 10 team? While individual bowl games are subject to motivation such that each game is about each team that day, the big 10 just went 2-5, and the SEC, with two gigantic TURDS laid by UF and LSU, went 5-3. Notre Dame which by all accounts was a statistically superior but highly comperable to Big ten “champion” OSU just got tatooed in a way we have seen all to similar. Did you see T King running behind a big 10 DB for the second straight January? when 3 of our top 4 WRs don’t play and we get 450+ yards of passing, do you think it means the playing field is not level. Was a single ND DB EVER stride for stride with Cooper last night?
the disparity is absolutely huge, and a 4 team playoff is NOT going to solve the problem of fairness. Make it an 8 or ten team playoff and the selection committee’s job is easy.
if you had to make a choice this year….
bama
uga
nd
oregon
kstate
uf
stanford
bubble teams (one gets in)
lsu/a&M/carolina
OU
Obviously, I think all three of the SEC “bubble” teams are better than stanford, k-state, and ND. I don’t really know what Oregon is or isn’t, but I can say with high confidence that they are not a 12-1 team in the SEC. Further, UF presented an odd resume. Its quality wins were “off the charts” but they also had ridiculous near misses against Missouri and ULL and a lack of offensive consistency that suggested they were not as elite as their accomplishments suggested. that said, the “earned” a spot as much as anyone. they would have been the equivalent of the high NFL playoff seed that was not built for the playoffs.
the point is simple….leaving three of the teams i had listed as bubble teams out is not a huge injustice. OU was a fraud and most knew it. LSU was not a great team. A&M lost twice in the regular season without winning a title game. Carolina arguably was a very good team whose loses cost them….so they are the one team that would have a big gripe. of course, if you had a ten team play off with top 2 seeds getting bye, that would solve that problem
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“Woody.” Old school. Nice.
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Sincerely,
Comin’ Down The Track
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Dang it!
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I’m out.
Your last line almost made me spew my coffee on the computer screen.
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Who in hell asked this group of overseers to come up with more fair rules that an 8 top-team playoff would surpass? Who in hell made them God for playoffs and how to prevent a true playoff? Not me and if other fans don’t see this as a protracted selection ruse ruled largely by Delany and ESPN who can insert the Big10 and ND fluff to appease the uninformed part of the masses, then you have been mesmerized by the cobra, not vice versa..
This stinks and to say that they will keep it that way for 12 yrs is arrogant and condescending.
These bastards won’t be allowed to continue their dog and pony show by a thinking and caring fan blog. Delany and Pac12 will continue to shoulder away Rose Bowl competition and use the media to build their teams in the public’s mind. When there is only 4 places, guess who won’t be a deserving selection? Go back through their ranking history and see how they(the Big10 and Pac12) have ranked SEC teams. More gruel please. Many of us wanted a playoff to avoid this Pome d’ Rue, but these aholes have extended the great media advantage that they have enjoyed for years.
How much longer will we be so naive as to applaud these bums for preventing a true playoff and continuing the same old-same old? You didn’t have enough of the ND bloviation at the finish of the season; the obvious over-hyped ND team and individual players you saw in the NC game and, now; continuing after the season to place them in polls above teams that could tear them a new one(as if to say that the final annihilation of ND didn’t count and their choice as to #1 before the NCG was flawless) ? All the ESPN-influenced picks (ND, FU, LSU, plus Big 10 teams) were without merit when compared to how they played all their games. They don’t analyse a damned thing, instead, they flay teams they don’t like with epithets and omissions.
UGA and TAMU can probably whip everything on the board above them along with Bama giving the best game of the bunch. Wait… we already did that with mixed results. Those three teams stand alone on their own merit w/o the hype that is given to other teams. Place So Car in there at 4th and you could see a fair selection for a 4-team playoff. In the present milieu that won’t happen, but it would have a chance to be true in the second round of an 8-team playoff.
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+1000
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I love the way the dumbasses keep using Joel Chandler Harris’s “Tarbaby” scheme to make us believe everything will be on the up and up with a 4-team selection instead of a playoff and prey on our biases to get us all tangled up. Yeah, are we going to believe the numbnuts now? They already have labeled the Briar Patch as 8 teams being synonymous with favoring 16 teams or more, but I’m sure the fans can pull a Braer Rabbit to get around that ruse and keep focused on 8 teams until they throw us in the Patch.
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Would you say that Slive is sporting a Jim Delaney?
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The inclusion of Notre Dame in last night’s BCS championship game is a great argument against the “eye ball” test because their name and media hype played a large role in them being there.
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If you accept that the goal should be that the goal should be to ensure you identify the best single team, 4 is almost always enough. If you want to identify the best 4, 4 is never enough. Likewise, if you want to identify the best 8, 8 is never enough.
The goal should be to prevent teams like OSU in 2011 and Auburn in 04 from being left out as well as ensuring there’s not an upstart undefeated team on the other side of the country that really is better than what the media thinks. (Think Auburn 04 again but note that it is possible, but not probable, that this could happen again with another conference.)
If you’re not good enough that no one with a brain could leave you out of the top 4, then you did not have a good enough season to be able to say you deserve to be national champs – even though you may be good enough to back into the championship if given the chance – think UGA 2007.
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Selecting 4 instead of 2 is not a playoff. By your reasoning we can go back to voting for the NC after the seasons are over. That’s the way we did it before and throwing two well-matched teams together in two bowls ended up being the “competition” that allowed the numbnuts to pick the most popular or usually Big10-driven team as NC. No thanks. Had a belly full of that hypocritical horseshit; enough such that most fans voted for a playoff to decide NC. Getting to that point is proving to be a problem caused by the media and the old powers that still pull our string, just now it’s in a more subtle way.
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This is going to work. Look how pure the Olympic bidding process is.
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