Cecil Hurt
TideSports.com Columnist
These are glorious football times for the SEC. Four teams from the league's Western Division are ranked in the nation's top 5. A fifth SEC team, Georgia, is just a couple of spots behind. The SEC-bashers around the country are having one big collective fit.
But SEC fans with visions of two teams in the upcoming playoff - some even talk, crazily, about three - need to cut the expectations back. Way back.
Over the past couple of weeks, in "mock selection" exercises conducted by the selection committee itself, with invited media members walking in lock-step, hints have emerged about how the committee, will operate.
We will never know for sure, since the selection will be a closed-door hush-hush zero transparency process. That should tell you something. But every criteria that was deemed "important" made it clear that the process will not be about picking the actual four best teams.
Need proof? Just listen to what people in the process are saying. There are more than three indicators, but three are enough to start.
First, there's the "conference championship" criteria. That may be great, although the NCAA basketball tournament, a supposed model for the selection committee, thrived by moving past a champions-only model.
The reality is that it is unlikely - not impossible, but unlikely - for the champion of the fourth-best conference to be better than a runner-up from the best conference. How unlikely?
In the past decade, the final BCS standings have yielded a straight ticket of four Power Conference champions as its top four only once. If I were coaching in the Big Ten or Big 12, would I push that as a criteria? Sure, because it would increase my chances of getting in ahead of a better team.
Now, even Jeff Long, the selection committee chairman, says that winning your conference "might be a criteria." So how much will it count? Five percent? Twenty percent? No one will give the honest answer, which is that it will count exactly enough to elevate a team that fits into a geographically-balanced, give-them-all-a-Juicebox agenda ahead of someone else.
Then there is the "quality loss" criteria. You hear that a lot in connection with two games (Florida State-Notre Dame and Oregon-Michigan State) because those "quality losers" don't have much in the way of quality wins.
Not surprisingly, you don't hear it in connection with Alabama-Ole Miss or Auburn-Mississippi State. A connected way of fixing the field is the "injury/suspension" consideration, which, since everyone has injuries or suspensions, is basically a license for the committee to ignore (or downright reverse) a result that "doesn't fit."
Again, you hear a lot about it in connection with Oregon and Ohio State, but not so much about the SEC or, as John Walters of Newsweek points out, about a lot of other lower-profile one-loss teams.
None of the above should be part of the committee's deliberations, which should be strictly about on-field results. But that isn't reality.
Barring a crazy finish to the season, the SEC champion should get in. The Mississippi schools and Georgia control their own destiny if they win out. Alabama and Auburn might, if they get the help they need to reach Atlanta, but if they don't, it will be a chilly waiting room if the final spot comes down to the Iron Bowl winner against a one-loss Notre Dame.
By all means, SEC fans should be proud of this week's rankings. But to use Nick Saban's Secretariat analogy, the race is only half-run - and the finish line could look a lot different than this week's polls. https://alabama.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1694670
TideSports.com Columnist
These are glorious football times for the SEC. Four teams from the league's Western Division are ranked in the nation's top 5. A fifth SEC team, Georgia, is just a couple of spots behind. The SEC-bashers around the country are having one big collective fit.
But SEC fans with visions of two teams in the upcoming playoff - some even talk, crazily, about three - need to cut the expectations back. Way back.
Over the past couple of weeks, in "mock selection" exercises conducted by the selection committee itself, with invited media members walking in lock-step, hints have emerged about how the committee, will operate.
We will never know for sure, since the selection will be a closed-door hush-hush zero transparency process. That should tell you something. But every criteria that was deemed "important" made it clear that the process will not be about picking the actual four best teams.
Need proof? Just listen to what people in the process are saying. There are more than three indicators, but three are enough to start.
First, there's the "conference championship" criteria. That may be great, although the NCAA basketball tournament, a supposed model for the selection committee, thrived by moving past a champions-only model.
The reality is that it is unlikely - not impossible, but unlikely - for the champion of the fourth-best conference to be better than a runner-up from the best conference. How unlikely?
In the past decade, the final BCS standings have yielded a straight ticket of four Power Conference champions as its top four only once. If I were coaching in the Big Ten or Big 12, would I push that as a criteria? Sure, because it would increase my chances of getting in ahead of a better team.
Now, even Jeff Long, the selection committee chairman, says that winning your conference "might be a criteria." So how much will it count? Five percent? Twenty percent? No one will give the honest answer, which is that it will count exactly enough to elevate a team that fits into a geographically-balanced, give-them-all-a-Juicebox agenda ahead of someone else.
Then there is the "quality loss" criteria. You hear that a lot in connection with two games (Florida State-Notre Dame and Oregon-Michigan State) because those "quality losers" don't have much in the way of quality wins.
Not surprisingly, you don't hear it in connection with Alabama-Ole Miss or Auburn-Mississippi State. A connected way of fixing the field is the "injury/suspension" consideration, which, since everyone has injuries or suspensions, is basically a license for the committee to ignore (or downright reverse) a result that "doesn't fit."
Again, you hear a lot about it in connection with Oregon and Ohio State, but not so much about the SEC or, as John Walters of Newsweek points out, about a lot of other lower-profile one-loss teams.
None of the above should be part of the committee's deliberations, which should be strictly about on-field results. But that isn't reality.
Barring a crazy finish to the season, the SEC champion should get in. The Mississippi schools and Georgia control their own destiny if they win out. Alabama and Auburn might, if they get the help they need to reach Atlanta, but if they don't, it will be a chilly waiting room if the final spot comes down to the Iron Bowl winner against a one-loss Notre Dame.
By all means, SEC fans should be proud of this week's rankings. But to use Nick Saban's Secretariat analogy, the race is only half-run - and the finish line could look a lot different than this week's polls. https://alabama.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1694670
