Fixing College Football

Another year, another controversial finish to the college football regular season. By now we’ve grown accustomed to the annual debate, when teams from across the nation compete in a confusing and opaque process to decide which deserve to play for a national championship. For years people bemoaned the lack of a playoff, when computers selected the top two teams and pitted them head to head against each other. So now instead we have an arbitrary committee to produce four contenders, and somehow that didn’t solve all the problems.

Every year we go through this, and every year people begin throwing out alternative solutions. The most common is to expand the playoff further to eight teams, though I can’t say I see how that would solve this year. Most of these proposals would give automatic berths to each of the five conference winners, with another three at large slots open for the committee to pick. And then we find ourselves in the same situation as always, arguing this time over spot eight just as we have argued spots two and four for years.

No matter the proposal, we are going to come back to the same fundamental problem, one I highlighted a year ago. With 130 teams in college football and only twelve games in each team’s season, it simply isn’t possible to gather enough information to select a field for a playoff. The best teams rarely face each other, instead wasting away weeks facing off against competition like Chattanooga, Mercer, and Illinois. So when it comes time to compare these teams against each other, we’re forced to weigh impossible variables like who had the best victory, or the worst defeat, or which team won its conference, or how good each looks to the naked eye.

Expanding the playoff field won’t work. To fix college football, we need to do something more drastic. This was a proposal I mentioned here a year ago, though not one I got into the specifics of. But a year later I remain convinced that it is the best solution, so I decided to have some fun with it.

The problem with college football is that there are too many teams, and that the best teams spend half their games playing far inferior opponents. So what we have to do is eliminate the vast majority of teams. Most of the schools out there have no hope of competing for a national championship, so we might as well make it official, kicking them to a lower division and letting the top 40 sort it out each year.

Before I go any farther, I want to stress that I know this will never actually happen. This proposal will of course be shouted down for reasons that are ostensibly based on tradition, but really about television revenue. But just because it will never happen doesn’t mean we can’t have fun thinking about it (it’s never stopped me from imagining in a Vikings Super Bowl victory), so let’s go ahead.

The most glaring issue with the current playoff system is that they are trying to pick four teams from five major conferences. Every year there is going to be at least one conference champion left out (this year there are actually two!), and that just makes life more complicated than it has to be. So let’s start by cutting one of the conferences entirely. The Big 12 makes the most sense, since it nearly folded a couple years ago anyway and it’s easy to distribute its teams across the country.

The system I’m setting up will have twelve conferences in total. The top four will have ten teams each, the 40 that will be in national title contention every year. Each of these conferences will have two lower conferences associated with it, and these conferences will compete each year for a chance to be promoted to the upper level.

I don’t have a specific plan for the system of promotion and relegation, but here’s what I’d suggest. Two teams from each conference are relegated each year, replaced by the winners of the lower conferences. You can have some fun with this if you want, kicking out the team with the worst record and letting the teams with the second and third best record play at the end of the season to keep from being sent down. Alternatively we could just have one team relegated each year. I don’t have strong feelings on the subject.

In any case, the real tricky part of this is setting up the conferences from the start. Somehow we need to select which 40 teams will be in the top, and which 90 will have to work their way up by winning their conferences. And because this is still college football, there is no way to do this that isn’t arbitrary bullshit. So here’s the arbitrary bullshit I chose.

(Note that you are free to disagree with this methodology. Remember, this is a stupid thought experiment posted by one person on his blog that only 50 people will ever see.)

The easy way to do this would be to just pick the teams with the best records over the past few years. But I think that leaves out a few things that should be considered. A good selection method would take all of the following criteria into account.

• Choose teams that have done well lately
• Choose teams with a history and tradition of success
• Prioritize real national title contenders over teams that just win eight or nine games every year
• Not punish teams that have worse results as a result of a more difficult schedule

I settled on a 60 point system compiled from five categories:

·       Record over the past five years: weighted in favor of the most recent years (5 points for this year, 4 for last year, etc). Rather than using winning percentage I took the total number of wins and divided by 12, treating bowl and conference championships like extra credit and not punishing teams for losses. Capped at 15 points.

·       Historic success: 1 point for each national championship during the poll era (since 1936), 1 points for every 100 victories over its entire history. Capped at 15 points.

·     Recent Title Contention: 1 point for each appearance in the playoff semifinals, 2 points for each appearance in a title game, 5 points for a national championship, only including the past ten years. Capped at 15 points.

·       Strength of Schedule: I took the easy way out on this and just gave each team a score based on the conference it plays in. I averaged the scores from the first category and ranked the conferences 1 to 10, then assigned point values from 5.5 to 10 in increments of 0.5. Did I mention how stupid and arbitrary this is?

·       Reward for not being a disgrace to the human race: 5 points for everyone! Except you, Baylor. And you, Penn State. And you, Notre Dame. This didn’t end up making any difference, but I was worried Baylor might sneak in. Fortunately their 1-11 mark this year kept them firmly on the outside.

So there we have it. Every team is assigned a score from 0 to 60, and I chose the top 40 to fill out my four conferences. A few of the teams that made it were obvious. Alabama was the only team to score a perfect 60, and they were the top by a significant margin. The only other team above 50 was Ohio State, and there were only nine schools that scored higher than 40. The lowest score belongs to Coastal Carolina, who was only promoted to Division I this year and scored 9.8. The worst performance of a team that has been at the Division I level for the past five years belongs to South Alabama, who didn’t even reach a quarter of the total of their in-state foe.

The last team to make the cut was Colorado, whose 1990 national title bumped them up to 29.1, only 0.3 points ahead of the first team out, my beloved Northwestern Wildcats. And as much as I’d love to rig the numbers, I hold myself to a high standard when it comes to random nonsense. So sorry, Northwestern, but you’ll have to try your luck in the lower conferences.

And, without further ado, here are the 40 teams that will be competing for a national title next season:

Ranking	Team	Score
1	Alabama	60
2	Ohio State	53.6
3	Clemson	50
4	Oklahoma	45.7
5	LSU	44.8
6	Auburn	43.9
7	Florida State	41.3
8	USC	41.3
9	Florida	40.7
10	Georgia	37.5
11	Miami (FL)	35.9
12	Notre Dame	35.7
13	Michigan	35.6
14	Nebraska	35.4
15	Washington	35
16	Oregon	34.6
17	Texas	34.1
18	Wisconsin	33.8
19	Michigan State	33.7
20	Tennessee	33.5
21	Texas A&M	32.7
22	Minnesota	32.6
23	Stanford	32.3
24	Virginia Tech	31.7
25	Texas Christian	31.3
26	Pitt	31.3
27	Oklahoma State	30.6
28	Iowa	30.4
29	Penn State	30.3
30	Georgia Tech	30.3
31	Utah	29.9
32	Ole Miss	29.8
33	Mississippi State	29.8
34	West Virginia	29.8
35	Louisville	29.8
36	San Diego State	29.4
37	Arkansas	29.4
38	Missouri	29.3
39	South Carolina	29.2
40	Colorado	29.1

As difficult as it is to select these 40 teams, it might be even tougher to group them into four conferences. On this list we have eight Big Ten, seven ACC, twelve SEC, six PAC 12, five Big 12, one independent, and one Mountain West (congrats to San Diego State). We need find some way to organize these teams into four conferences that group teams regionally and preserve historic rivalries. 

I ended up splitting things into roughly the southeast (SEC), the east (ACC), the middle (Big Ten), and the west (PAC 10). The trickiest part was filling out the western conference, and its footprint ends up pretty broad, as far east as Missouri, as far north as Washington, and as far south as TCU.

SEC	Big Ten	ACC	PAC 10
Alabama	Ohio State	Clemson	USC
LSU	Oklahoma	Florida State	Nebraska
Auburn	Michigan	Miami	Washington
Florida	Texas	Notre Dame	Oregon
Georgia	Wisconsin	Virginia Tech	Stanford
Tennessee	Michigan State	Pittsburgh	TCU
Ole Miss	Texas A&M	Penn State	Utah
Mississippi State	Minnesota	Georgia Tech	San Diego State
Arkansas	Oklahoma State	West Virginia	Missouri
South Carolina	Iowa	Louisville	Colorado

In the end, I actually really like how these conferences work out. Nebraska gets a bit screwed out of some traditional matchups, but we do some good things as well, reuniting battles like Texas A&M vs Texas and Pittsburgh vs West Virginia. The Big Ten has spent the past twenty years looking for a team other than Ohio State that can compete at a national level, and they finally get it in Oklahoma. And the SEC regains its traditional shape, while ditching bottom feeders Kentucky and Vanderbilt.

The structure of a season would still have twelve games. Each team would play the other nine teams in its own conference and schedule three outside, much as they do now. So if Notre Dame wants to keep playing USC, they can do that. They can even play teams from the lower level, to preserve rivalries in case of relegation (we would hate for Ohio State to lose its annual gimme win if Michigan got sent down).

The top two teams would be chosen by record in conference, with ties broken by head to head matchups or by out of conference records in the case of three way ties. There is still a potential for messy situations with three or more teams, but with a higher level of consistent competition we will see fewer teams running through with only one or two losses.

Obviously the schedules would be very different if we actually arranged things this way, but this entire experiment is just for fun, so let’s have some fun. This year the conference records would have resulted in conference title games of Clemson vs Miami, USC vs TCU or Washington, Wisconsin vs Oklahoma, and some combination of Alabama, Georgia, and Auburn. And the teams at risk of relegation would include Colorado, Nebraska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Pittsburgh, and Florida State.

We would have our eight team playoff. We would get more high quality matchups every year. We’d have the added drama of a relegation chase every year, and we’d do a better job clearly identifying the national champion. It wouldn’t be fair, but if you want fairness, you should probably just watch the NFL.