A Child Could (and Did) Know That College Football's Playoff System is Moronic

Crocodile tears for Florida State

Tatum Bethune of Florida State. (picture from Isaiah Vasquez via Getty)

In 1993, 9-0 Florida State played 9-0 Notre Dame in football, the only college sport that anyone does or should care about. My dad was all-in for Notre Dame; Dad was raised Catholic, and cheering for Notre Dame was the only part of the religion that stuck. I backed Notre Dame because I was 13 and liked whatever my dad liked. I was pro-Notre Dame, Chevrolet, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pizza Hut, and DeWalt tools because so was my dad. People who liked Florida State, Ford, The Eagles, Domino’s, and Milwaukee tools were viewed as possible communists and likely perverts.

In that classic game, Notre Dame beat Florida State by a touchdown. But the following week, Notre Dame lost to Boston College. Notre Dame and Florida State went to separate bowl games, each won, and both ended the season with one loss. Back then, the national champion was determined by a vote by coaches and sports writers, a close cousin of today’s selection committee system. Florida State edged out Notre Dame in the vote even though both teams had the same number of losses and Notre Dame beat Florida State when they actually played each other in a game of football.

13 year-old me was furious. “This is the greatest injustice in human history!” I thought (editor’s note: It was not). Notre Dame beat Florida State head-to-head! How could a bunch of whiskey-soaked sports writers and good ol’ boy football coaches hand Florida State the title? What kind of shit-for-brains system was this?

As it turns out, that shit-for-brains system was the only tradition that college football was determined to preserve. In the past 30 years, the bowl system has been decimated and conferences have been torn to shreds, but college football is still trying to pick a champ by deferring to a Council Of The Wise. Ironically, Florida State is this year’s aggrieved party: They finished 13-0 but weren’t one of the four teams selected to play for the title. And, obviously, it would be incredibly petty of me to delight in Florida State’s suffering due to something that happened well before any of today’s players were born, and yet here it comes: Fuck off, Florida State. I guess your current coach didn’t suck off the Council Of The Wise as effectively as Bobby Bowden did.

In the past few decades, college football’s system for crowning a champion has undergone many changes but stayed fundamentally the same. In 1998, the Bowl Championship System sent the two highest-ranked teams — as determined by an end-of-the-year vote — to a winner-take-all title game. But this didn’t work well; the third-ranked team always had a strong case that they should be in the top two. So, in 2014, a four-team playoff emerged. That’s still in place, and — as we see — the fifth-ranked team is always pissed off. Next year, they’ll switch to a 12 team system, so finally — finally — we’ll have an end to the controversy…right? Except…wait a minute…what if 13 is also a number? Could the 13th-ranked team possibly bitch and moan? Of course they will. Don’t these schools have mathematics departments — isn’t there a college football sabermetrics geek somewhere who can prove that 13 is, indeed, a whole number adjacent to 12?

Incredibly, college football doesn’t understand that the voting — not the number of teams in the playoff — is the problem. I say “incredibly” because even when I was 13 — an age at which I thought Africa was a country and was only 60 percent sure that Yoda wasn’t real — I knew that voting for a champion was dumb. I understood that there is no fair way to compare different teams playing different (short) schedules in different conferences. I noticed that no other sport used rankings; every other sport had a play-your-way-to-the-title system. College football is the only sport that plays a short season that produces several teams with similar resumes, and then commences a weird-ass Hillbilly Papal Enclave to bestow blessings on a few teams deemed worthy.

Florida State has a solid case: They won all of their games. What else did the committee want them to do? Some version of this happens just about every year: There’s usually a team from a small conference — a Jim Jones University or an East Guam Barber College — that runs the table and asks “What about us?” Florida State stands out because their conference — the ACC — is semi-respectable. But the truth is that some teams are fucked from the start and could never succeed no matter what they do. Which is exactly the type of harsh reality that college is supposed to shield you from for a few glorious years.

Of course, Alabama — the team that got in at Florida State’s expense — also has a strong case. They play in the SEC, which is perpetually strong; 14 of the past 20 champions came from the SEC. Alabama only lost to Texas, who went 12-1 and won the Big 12. So, Alabama would argue, should they miss out because Florida State beat North Alabama — a school that is logically 1/4 as good as Real Alabama — and a bunch of ACC basketball schools? Everyone knows that the ACC is the only conference that considers college basketball a real sport, as opposed to a casino game invented by Bally’s to drive gambling during Spring Drinking Season (St. Patrick’s Day/spring break/Mardi Gras). Alabama shouldn’t be punished for playing in the Big Boy Division, or so goes the argument that I assume was made by their white suit-wearing, brow-dabbing, old-timey southern lawyers.

How do you reconcile these two arguments? Simple: You don’t. Each argument is strong, there is no way to know which team is better. What does “better” even mean in this context? Better today or better over the course of the season? Better based on the games they actually played, or better on paper? If it’s the latter, then why even bother playing the games? No other sport even asks such an abstract question; every other sport has teams play each other until all but one is eliminated. The only other major sport that uses a selection committee is college basketball, but that system works because: 1) You can get in automatically by winning your conference or conference tournament, and 2) A ridiculous 68 teams qualify, and it’s hard to argue that you should be national champion if a serious argument can be made that you’re not as good as whoever finished eighth in the Big East.

The selection committee tries to determine who’s best by looking at how teams fared against common opponents. This method is a statistician’s nightmare: It’s a small sample with no control group and a constantly changing pool of subjects. The transitive property doesn’t work in college football. To wit: Texas is currently ranked #3, but they lost to Oklahoma, who lost to Kansas, who lost to Texas Tech, who lost to Wyoming, who lost to Air Force, who lost to Army. So, according to the transitive property, poor little Army — which prioritizes dumb things like academics and service over football — could beat Texas. Which would be Army’s biggest win since Operation Desert Storm.

Voting is nonsensical and should be ditched altogether. Teams should have to play their way into the playoffs, like in every other sport. You think you’re the best team in the country? Then first, win your conference (or possibly your division within your conference, if people want to give more spots to tougher conferences). The important thing is that every team should have a path to the title. Teams in smaller conferences shouldn’t be told “haha no” at the start of the season; they should have a way to prove themselves, even if it involves playing more rounds in a playoff. When your team gets eliminated, they should be eliminated by an actual other college football team, not by the selection committee.

Next year’s 12-team system will be a slightly better, because some conference champions will be guaranteed a spot. But there will still be an almighty clusterfuck at the bottom of the bracket. A 9-3 team that lost a conference championship game will be compared to a 9-2 team that didn’t even play one. A 13-0 Mountain West champ will be compared to an 11-2 ACC team that beat USC by 40 and lost to Vanderbilt by 70. And all of those teams will be compared to stubbornly independent Notre Dame, who I’m now old enough to admit should just join a fucking conference if they want to be part of this. There will be no good way to sort things out; someone will get screwed, guaranteed. I just hope that someone is Florida State again, because, seriously, NOTRE DAME BEAT THEM HEAD-TO-HEAD!

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