There’s lots of backpatting in Heather Dinich’s piece about the Lords of the CFP resting on their laurels.
“We got it right,” Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said.
Of course, she spends most of the rest of the article discussing changes they’d like to see. (Well played, ma’am, even if there’s a little shooting fish in a barrel element to it.) The obvious one is postseason expansion, for which they’re currently opposed, but as nobody takes that seriously for the long term, we can just skip past that.
The real test coming of their collective manhood is fairly trivial, except for one thing. See if you can guess.
The majority of commissioners said the only significant change in 2015 should be fewer than seven weekly rankings. When the rankings were initially discussed, it was proposed they would be released every other week.
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said he would ask the group to consider “a poll midseason, a poll at Week 9 and a poll at the end” to avoid “the abrupt fluctuations you sometimes had this year.”
Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said he would suggest three or four rankings and releasing them every other week in November, before the final ranking in December.
“That’s really the only change I would hope we have a conversation about in April,” Thompson said. “We don’t need seven. I know ESPN likes seven. It’s great ratings, but there’s other ways you get around it. It’s good information because all week you can argue back and forth … so it’s all good for the sport. But they don’t mean anything, quite honestly.” [Emphasis added.]
There’s the old eight hundred-pound gorilla in the room. Hey, Craig, most people knew they didn’t mean anything last season and that didn’t stop the WWL then.
The reason they want a change is because of the one area of unease from last season – the debate over Baylor and TCU.
“The issue was with what happened with the TCU situation: winning 55-3 and going from three to six [in the Week 16 rankings],” Aresco said. “We can talk about whether there should be continuity week to week, as opposed to starting from scratch. It’s a debate. I don’t know how I feel, myself. It’s something that publicly was one of the criticisms of the committee’s process because is it fair to the kids who think, ‘OK, we’re No. 3, and we win 55-3. We’ve been very impressive, and we fall all the way to six’? That one is something we have to talk about.”
Here’s the thing: if you’re really serious about this whole “they don’t mean anything” bit, why do you need any rankings at all before December? I think we all know the answer to that.
In the meantime, I look forward to another interview with Thompson in which he explains how you can become a little bit pregnant.