Jeff Long, master of space and time

As Brandon Larrabee notes, Stewart Mandel has done a good job of tracking the comments of selection committee chairman Jeff Long as he tries to explain the weekly results coming out of his group.  Unfortunately, all that winds up doing is setting off everyone’s bullshit detectors.

Most of the controversy this week came not from the rankings themselves, but how Arkansas AD and selection committee chairman Jeff Long explained those rankings — in particular, his explanation for Mississippi State remaining at No. 4. To be clear: I personally would love Mississippi State in the playoffs, because as a South Carolina fan, I have a soft spot for non-traditional powers. And there are some defensible cases you can make for Mississippi State being in the Top 4. This is not one of them.

 Jeff Long just said the committee takes into account that some of Mississippi State’s wins came agains teams previously ranked.

— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) November 26, 2014

We can have a dispute about how bad an idea it is to take rankings at the time into account — I happen to think very — but that’s not the biggest problem here. The biggest problem here is that, aside from Alabama (which beat Mississippi State), the Bulldogs have not played a formerly ranked team since the first playoff rankings came out. That means that the only way rankings at the time could count would be if the committee were considering someone else’s rankings. Which means that this …

Long: “To clarify, when I refer to ‘ranked,’ I mean CFP-ranked.” So, nothing pre-Oct. 28.

— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) November 26, 2014

… is either a lie or irrelevant to the discussion of Mississippi State’s strength of schedule. Of course, you might also want to consider another statement from the committee.

Long specifics that they consider a “bad” loss as one to a sub-.500 team. Said doesn’t necessarily agree with Ohio St-Va Tech as an example.

— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) November 26, 2014

Hoo, boy.  I guess some bad losses aren’t as bad as others.  Jim Delany is no doubt relieved to hear that.

Then there’s the way the committee evaluates strength of schedule.  Let Dave Bartoo explain, again, with a little help from Mandel:

However, the committee notes that they use their SOS to rank teams.  It is not any of the public SOS ranks folks reference, in fact, as it would turn out, they do not use an SOS ranking.  They just call their averaging an SOS ranking.

Noted Selection Committee expert, Stewart Mandel tweeted out the following below today about the committee’s ‘SOS rankings’.  This is basically an in-season version of the commonly referred to NCAA pre-season strength of schedule rankings.  The committee takes it a step further and considers the winning percentage of the opponents of a team’s opponents on their schedule.   An example of this, for Auburn. is in the little chart to the right.

Committee doesn’t use an SOS ranking. It looks at opponents’ record and opponents’ opponents record.

— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) November 12, 2014

Stewart further advised me that for FCS teams, only the loses count against the composite opponent record.  So if Presbyterian has four loses and four wins, only the losses are added to the composite record of opponents for Ole Miss. So if you end up beating an FCS team that goes 11-1, you are only dinged for the one loss by that FCS opponent.  That is weak and a minor penalty at best. These FCS games are locks, cupcakes, gimmes, body bag games.  There is no strength in any of these games so I took it upon myself to count each game played by an FCS opponent against the FBS team that put it on the schedule. If you want to make a change and truly account for the ease of these games, hit it hard.

There are, I suppose, a couple of ways of looking at this.  One is that the selection committee is simply fumbling around with stats and analysis for which it really doesn’t have a grasp of their relevance.  The other is that you’ve got a bunch of monkeys flinging poo against the wall with the expectation that we’ll be so distracted by the exercise that we won’t pay attention to how they arrive at the final destination of the semi-finals pool.

Either way, it’s not a confidence builder.  And if we’re not confident in how the committee decides which schools are in, there’s only going to be one way to cure that fever. More cowbell Bracket creep.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat… as long as there’s shampoo in the bottle, anyway.