Why I still read College Football Resource is beyond me. Call me a glutton for punishment. That’s my way of thanking him for linking to the Gnomes, I guess.
Anyway, there are regular posts about why tournaments are bad for college football. No amount of logic has before worked, so I will post my fisking here, for your pleasure.
You Knew This Was Coming
There are two major flaws to college basketball, 1)the game itself and 2)the tournament [sic]
I hate the game, too. From there we diverge in our ability to agree.
From the CFR perspective, the tournament is a failure because it doesn’t coddle the allegedly great teams enough. Inasmuch, the supposedly great teams get beat and don’t win the championship. And this means the tournament, or any tournament, which does not let the best team win is flawed.
I’ll save the game rant for another day, but this year’s tournament speaks for itself:
UCLA, Florida, LSU, George Mason
That’s two schools from a football conference, a UCLA team that is a shadow of what they’ll be two years from now, and the big one, a school nobody’s heard of or cares about.
This is the prelude to the “the public should like you for you to be considered a good team” idea where image is as important as anything else. What that actually has to do with being a good team is well beyond me.
There isn’t a man or woman alive who can answer with a straight face that these are the four best teams in college basketball. I’m not sure many would argue that any of these four are even among the top four even taking the postseason into consideration.
Basically, the tournament’s a sham.
Basically, the championship tournament determines a champion - a complex thought to be sure. This is the basis of my disagreement. I don’t think that the champion should necessarily be the best team. The only thing you can do is build a system to declare a champion, with the winning team receiving that recognition. There are far too many ways to determine the “best” team. Most wins? Average margin of victory? Scoring offense? Scoring defense? Some combination of metrics? Therefore we end up with champions; “best” teams be damned.
People criticize the BCS because of the selection process, but at least we know that the majority of the game’s best teams are playing each other in the final games of the year. What has the NCAA tournament assured us? It assured us that the regular season #8, #10, #18 and an unranked team will play for the sport’s “championship”.
No, genius, it assured us that dozens of the “best” teams played for the sport’s championship. I may well define my “best” teams as those that don’t choke in the tournament.
I don’t mind a tournament at face value, but when stuff like this year’s tournament happens, it destroys its credibility in awarding a championship. What it really is, is Survivor gone sports, last man or woman standing wins whether they’re really the best or not. The regular season has long been rendered completely irrelevant, but this year’s tournament has turned it into a traveshamockery.
Last I checked, Survivor was dramatic TV gone sports. But Survivor may have come before modern day sports tournaments, I haven’t checked a calendar recently.
I’m also glad that the “regular season has long been rendered completely irrelevant.” Teams don’t have to play to get into the tournament or anything. Nope. Apparently none of the “best” teams from the regular season can fall back on their record to get an invite. Nope. Not in college basketball.
Bringing back the topic of games being “irrelevant.” Aren’t all but one of the bowl games irrelevant to the national championship? Survey says: TRUE! On the other hand, every one of the 64 games of the NCAA tournament is relevant.
And you wonder why I’m not in favor of a NCAA football tournament?
The problem with tournaments is that they’re not always great fits for the games they are attached to.
In my mind, the only accurate tournament of the sports I watch regularly is the NBA tournament and finals. There are enough games to where the better team almost inevitably emerges, whether it be a four game sweep or a grinding seven game series. However, college basketball’s tournament is one and done. It’s not very reliable given the random nature of single elimination basketball games.
You see, winning 5 games among the “best” teams in the country to advance to the championship game can only be construed as a fluke. Yeah, that’s it… A fluke! It’s all random!
The Major League Baseball postseason is also fairly unreliable. How else to explain two world series for the Florida Marlins? Baseball often gets it right (’98 Yankees), but not always.
In other words, the games should be played until the “right” team wins. “Hey man, let’s go best two outta three… three outta five… four outta seven… five outta nine… one thousand nine hundred thirty-two outta three thousand eight hundred sixty-three…”
I have a mixed reaction to the NFL playoffs, mostly because of the lopsided nature of the conference winners of late (Patriots getting to face the Carolina Panthers? The Steelers facing the Seattle Seahawks?). Often the division title games are the de facto championship games, robbing the Super Bowl of its prescribed title-bearing duties.
Which leaves us at NCAA football. Amateur football is far less reliable in a one game situation. We see wild upsets happen like West Virginia over Georgia, or Florida State nearly toppling a far superior Penn State, and that’s in BCS competition! At least those games are treated as bowls, and not playoff games where the winner advances to a title shot.
This is always where I love the analysis from CFR. How good a team is has nothing to do with winning, losing, or margin of victory. No. The “best” teams are determined before, not after the game. It’s apparently all about talent, potential, appearance and reputation. I suggest CFR go ahead and declare the 2007 national champs based on the recruiting classes of the last 4 years.
At one point a few weeks ago, CFR specifically addressed the 2005 Clemson football team. The point was that had Clemson pulled out a couple more W’s, sorrow should have been felt for teams it would have leapfrogged in the rankings. Because despite a 10-2 or 11-1 record, they would still just have been a “good” team. Because knowing the record alone wouldn’t have accounted for the “wild elements” such as “such as home/road, early/late, the natural ups and downs of the season, soft vs. strong OOC slates, weak vs. strong schedules.”
The BCS has all kinds of flaws and other issues, but the playoffs are not the direction to go for college football. There’s [sic] too many variables going on with college student athletes. College football isn’t this land of parity as displayed by the NFL where fairly even teams are playing each other. At the highest levels there are gaps that exist. Imagine if USC or Texas had an off day and never won a college football playoff last year? Yet it was brutally obvious, even beyond the media hype, that those teams were far and away the best in college football. Yet I wouldn’t have put money down for both to have made it to a championship game if there were in fact a playoff, and that’s exactly the problem.
His logic is working against him here. If one game situations in one-and-done tourneys aren’t good enough, a single championship game by itself must also be insufficient. Gee, what if USC had an off day when it played Texas? They should get a do-over? Right? As an engineer would suggest, if you want to smooth over the “gaps,” you should take many more samples and take an average. In other words, you have a playoff, albeit among only two teams.
It’s not about fairness, or letting everyone play and giving everyone a chance. Save that for a meaningless postseason tournament that doesn’t award meaningful championships (read: NIT). It’s about getting it right, and college football isn’t well suited to having its best teams survive a playoff. We’ve seen that already in the NCAA basketball tournament, and it will happen in college football as well if we go that direction.
Do you see why I get pissed off?
Honest to God, how can I take this statement seriously, “college football isn’t well suited to having its best teams survive a playoff.” In other words, we can’t have a playoff because the “best” teams might lose.
I’m surprised we let the best teams play at all.
