The Problem With College Football

Yesterday was the final day of the college football regular season, and today we learned which four teams will be competing for the national championship. And people are angry. People were already angry, and the fury of that debate has built to a crescendo with the announcement. Alabama, Clemson, and Washington are all fairly noncontroversial, but the final spot has grabbed a lot of attention without providing any simple answers.

Ohio State is the best team in the field, but does that entitle them to make the playoff? Not only did they fail to win their conference, but they didn’t even make it to the Big Ten title game. And even though their résumé is far superior to conference champions Penn State, they lost the head to head matchup of the two teams this year.

And what about the Big 12? Oklahoma has two early season losses (one of which came at home to Ohio State), but they haven’t lost since, becoming the first Big 12 team to run the table in conference since 2009. After co-champions TCU and Baylor were shut out in 2014, is the Big 12 going to be screwed again?

And what about a couple teams from Michigan that could reasonably claim to deserve a spot? Michigan was considered one of the best teams in the nation all year, and even though they lost to Ohio State, they did so on the road, in a very competitive game that could very easily have gone a different direction. And Western Michigan is one of only two undefeated teams left. If a team can win all their games and not make it, then what else can they be asked to do?

These are the arguments we will hear this year. And they’re the arguments we hear every single year. And this isn’t even the worst case scenario. If Colorado had beaten Washington, then the Big Ten could have argued they deserved two teams in. And if Oklahoma State had beaten Oklahoma for the Big 12 title, the committee would have had to weigh the questionable circumstances around their loss to Central Michigan.

We are three years into the college football playoff, and I’m already exhausted by the entire process. Last year was surprisingly straightforward, but 2014 was a disaster, with Ohio State leaping TCU and Baylor after their conference title game to claim the final spot. The fury over that decision died somewhat when the Buckeyes surprised everyone by winning the title, but it still feels unfair that they benefited so much from playing in a conference title game that the Big 12 is not allowed to host.

The problems that exist aren’t going away. After more than a decade of questionable computer rankings, the people in charge somehow found an even worse system. Now the decisions are made based on an arbitrary and opaque criteria judged by people who often have only tangential connections to the world of football.

No one knows how much of this is based on film study, how much is based on analytics, and how much is based on general consensus. No one is even sure whether they are trying to pick the four best teams or the four most deserving, which could definitely lead to major disagreements.

People are aware of these problems, and as always, there are plenty of solutions being thrown around. Some people want to bring back the computers as a component, weighted equally with the committee rankings and the traditional polls. Because while that is almost identical to the BCS, it at least will now pick the top four teams instead of just the top two

The most common suggestion is to expand even farther to an eight team playoff. With five major conferences each champion would get in, and there would still be three spots for the committee to choose at large teams. Under this scenario Alabama, Clemson, Washington, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma would all be automatic, and Ohio State would most likely earn a berth as well.

And then what? Michigan is the next highest ranked team, so I suppose they would grab the seventh spot. And then I guess Western Michigan and their undefeated record would feel entitled to be the final participant. But is going undefeated against their schedule really more impressive than what Oklahoma State did, with only two legitimate losses? Or how about USC, who struggled early like Oklahoma but came on strong with eight straight victories to close the season, including knocking off both Pac 12 title game participants?

Expanding the field won’t eliminate the controversy about who gets in. It will just make it less meaningful, as the teams that are shut out have weaker cases that they could run through and win the whole thing. But making the playoff would still be an accomplishment itself, even if they only make it to one or two games. And that doesn’t even get into the debate about seeding, which will become much more intense once truly inferior teams are brought into the mix.

If these criticisms sound familiar, that’s because we’ve heard them all before in a different sport. College basketball has a tournament field of 68 teams, and they still argue over these exact same issues. No one honestly believes the first team out could actually win the championship, but there are still plenty of bitter fights among teams looking just for a chance to say that they made a mark on the biggest stage.

We can make this playoff as large as we want, and these problems will never go away. This structure is an attempt to mimic the success that’s been found in professional sports leagues across America, but it doesn’t seem to be working at the college level. And it isn’t hard to see why. The simple problem is that there are too many teams in college football.

In the NFL a sixteen game season is used to select twelve teams to go to the playoffs. The rules for making the playoffs are straightforward and noncontroversial. The division winners make it, then four more teams are selected as wild cards. These teams are picked by their records, with tiebreakers based on some combination of head to head victories, division record, conference record, and record against common opponents. There is no ambiguous ranking system, and no overlapping criteria. It is straightforward, and it is logical.

This works in the NFL for several reasons. First of all, a sixteen game schedule gives more time than the twelve or thirteen of college football to eliminate the variance and reveal the best teams. In addition, the schedules of the NFL are standardized so, some small differences aside, each team plays roughly the same level of competition. And finally, every team plays at least four common game with the other teams in their conference. There are easier comparisons to be made, rather than trying to debate whether a 53 point victory over Kansas is more impressive than a 28 point victory over Washington State.

The problem with college football is that there are simply too many teams. The NFL uses sixteen games to pick twelve out of 32. College football uses thirteen games to select four out of 128. These teams are spread across the country, playing in isolated subgroups that offer only flimsy comparisons among the best of the best.

Things weren’t always this way in college football. The playoff has only been around for three years, and the idea of a national championship game has only been around for twenty. Before that the postseason was a simple matter of bowl games, usually just the best of the conferences facing off in traditional matchups.

Back then college football was a regional game. National championships were handed out based on the year end polls, and there was plenty of controversy, but it wasn’t as big a deal. Because back then a national title wasn’t the sole goal that a team had coming into the year. They played for conference titles and for bowl wins, and if a national championship came along, then that was just another banner to hang.

As the national championship has grown in importance, the other prizes have diminished. Yesterday Oklahoma and Oklahoma State faced off in a de facto Big 12 title game, in what should have been one of the most exciting games of the day. Two top ten teams, traditional rivals, facing off for the right to call themselves champions of one of the power conferences. And yet, the winner would still be shut out of the playoff, so the game received almost no attention, just a warmup to the real show coming later in the day.

The same thing can be seen in the Big Ten. Penn State can call themselves the conference champions, but Ohio State is getting the real prize. Urban Meyer has won only a single Big Ten championship in his first five years, yet he is being discussed as one of the most successful coaches in the storied program’s history.

The problem is clear, and as far as I can see there are two solutions. The first is my favorite, and that’s to go backwards. College football is too broad and too varied, and the idea of crowning a single team as the best in the country simply isn’t feasible. So we should just forget all about it. We should turn college football into the regional game it once was, where conference titles and bowl victories were the goals to be strived for.

College football shouldn’t have a national championship. I believe that, and I’m not going to be convinced that this isn’t the best outcome for the sport. But I also recognize that it is absurd and unrealistic, for all the reasons that trying to turn something back in time is always absurd and unrealistic. The national title is what college football is all about, and that isn’t going to change.

Going backwards won’t work, and staying still won’t work. So the only real choice is to embrace the changes slowly working their way into college football. We need to completely overhaul the system, abandoning the conferences and the traditional structure for the sake of identifying and crowning a single champion.

This won’t work with 128 teams. So we’ll have to cut some out. Obviously the best of the best have to stay in, the teams like Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State that are competitive every single year. And the bottom feeders of the lesser divisions like the MAC and the Sun Belt Conference are out. We could restrict it just to the Power 5 conferences that exist already, but that would still leave us with 66 teams. So we’ll have to cut some of the trash like Rutgers, Kansas, and Boston College as well. And maybe even some of the middle-lower teams as well, the ones that have no real chance of ever competing for a title like Mississippi State, Texas Tech, and Northwestern.

Cut it down to 30-40 teams, and then we’ll have something to work with. Let them schedule a couple early season games against teams from the lower division, but other than that force them to play exclusively against the best of the best.

This sounds unfair to the lower teams, and it is, but the current system is unfair already. We could maybe borrow an idea from soccer and have a system of promotion and relegation. But one way or another, the same teams are competing every single year, and making it an official division isn’t going to change anything.

College football is changing, and right now it is caught in the middle of the two workable scenarios. The four team playoff is not going to be around forever, as eventually people will realize they are having the same arguments every year and turn their attention to the fundamental flaws of the current system. But for now we can just wait and watch and argue.

And when it’s all over, we can turn off college football and watch the professionals have a real playoff.