🏈 Still no good reason for weekly rankings from the College Football Playoff committee

[BAMANEWSBOT]

You wanted to be one of the lucky 13. You wanted to help pick the four teams that'll make the College Football Playoff. You volunteered to suffer the wrath of scorned SEC football fans.

Congratulations. Let Bill Hancock, the playoff's executive director, outline your itinerary for the regular season.

"The committee members will come to Dallas each week starting Oct. 27, and they will come in on Monday morning," Hancock said. "They will meet Monday afternoon, Monday evening, Tuesday (morning), Tuesday afternoon, and the rankings will be announced each Tuesday evening on ESPN."

Not exactly what you signed up for, is it? You thought your job was to pick the four best teams and rank them after the regular season and conference championship games were done.

Now you're going to lose two days a week from your regular job for more than a month, and you're going to lose a lot of sleep. Your charge has expanded from picking four teams one time to picking 25 teams six times, until it's time to narrow it down to just four, even though those two tasks have very little to do with each other.

Good night and good luck.

Expanding the committee's duties made no sense when it was announced a month ago, and it makes no more sense today, even after sitting in a room and hearing Hancock try to explain the reasoning.

Here's what he said this week at the SEC spring meeting: "To me, it's an area of transparency. We want folks to know how the committee's thinking, and how they're thinking from week to week. We thought about not doing a ranking until the last week, but we decided, no, it wouldn't be fair to the public to just drop down the last week when folks are going to be accustomed during the season to all the other rankings.

"That's one of the two reasons why we decided to announce the rankings during the season. No surprises. The other reason was because we are so rankings-oriented in college football that we wanted there to be a real ranking that mattered during the season that folks could look at."

Wait a minute. No surprises? That doesn't sound good for the teams that get better and better as the season goes along. It sounds very good for the teams that start in the top four in that original Oct. 28 ranking.

Hancock also gave his standard "the committee members are full of integrity" mini-speech, but not enough integrity isn't the real issue. Too much consistency could be.

Are we headed toward 2004 all over again?

Auburn didn't lose that season but couldn't win the national title because the Tigers started well down in the rankings and the original top two teams, USC and Oklahoma, never lost. The Trojans and Sooners were given an insurmountable advantage by being really good in the minds of voters going into the season.

Starting the playoff committee rankings the last week of October should eliminate that kind of preseason perception, but still there will be two natural human tendencies at work that could work against basic fairness.

Poll voters as a group tend to be predictable on two fronts: They typically don't drop a team that doesn't lose, even below another undefeated team that may be playing better, and they usually don't drop a top team that does lose very far.

So the better position a team has in that first poll on Oct. 28, the better its chances of being one of the four teams in the playoff.

Another issue: The field won't be level the first time the committee has to assess it. The first ranking comes after Oregon has played eight games and Auburn has played seven. If both have the same record, who's more likely to be ranked higher - the 8-0 team or the 7-0 team? The 7-1 team or the 6-1 team?

It's common sense, unlike asking the committee to make any kind of judgment before all the evidence is in. That's nonsense.

Continue reading...

 

[TerryP]

I moved this from the news forum here because of one point—I've seen some dumbass articles from KS before but this one eclipses those by lightyears.

 

[JoshB]

Wow... his biggest complaint being that these millionaires have to lose a cpl days from their "regular jobs" (how many of them even have regular jobs?) to come two days a week to pick a top 25 which Im sure they are all making great money for to begin with.

For decades ppl have complained about rankings starting so early in the season, this doesnt start until late October yet hes still whining that maybe this team played one more game than another team? Oh dude STFU and find something else to complain about.

 

[psychojoe]

I moved this from the news forum here because of one point—I've seen some dumbass articles from KS before but this one eclipses those by lightyears.

Ranks right there with the "Grant is not coming to Alabama" piece.

 

[TerryP]

Wow... his biggest complaint being that these millionaires have to lose a cpl days from their "regular jobs" (how many of them even have regular jobs?) to come two days a week to pick a top 25 which Im sure they are all making great money for to begin with.

For decades ppl have complained about rankings starting so early in the season, this doesnt start until late October yet hes still whining that maybe this team played one more game than another team? Oh dude STFU and find something else to complain about.

The one point that is so easy to see is the very thing these rankings provide—a degree of transparency.

Maybe I'm looking at this too simply. Let's say a team is ranked #4 for several weeks to close out the season. That would mean the committee has believed that team is the fourth best team in the country, right? So, if for some reason they suddenly decided not to include that team they've voted as the fourth best team in the playoffs a decision like that would deserve criticism—A LOT of criticism!

If these rankings do anything they should prevent the committee just arbitrarily slipping a team in the semifinals.

 

[JoshB]

Just for fun :bandhead:

http://blog.al.com/kevin-scarbinsky/2009/01/scarbinsky_anthony_grant_is_no.html

 

[rick4bama]

I guess we will see when the first poll come out by the committe.

 

[MissingRing]

I think that the selection committee idea is flawed in the abstract and destined to generate controversy. Under the poll-based systems (BCS and pre-BCS), opinion as to correct team ranking was at least broad-based. Personal bias was an inherent part of the system, but this did not, in the main, undermine the integrity of the system because no single vote or computer input was dispositive of the issue.

Under the selection committee concept, personal bias matters, a lot, and the recusal policy is weak. This leads back to a discussion about the composition of the committee. The architects of the selection committee are sending two contradictory messages. One is that the committee members will consist of individuals who have subject matter expertise in college football. The other is that these individuals will be of such noble character that they can logically and dispassionately decide which teams most deserve to participate in a series of playoff games. In order to meet the criterion of being college football "experts" - to have at least a meaningful connection to the game - the members must necessarily have ties to particular institutions and conferences. And, in fact, this is the case (e.g., Pat Haden/Pac-12, Archie Manning/SEC), yet no one should be naïve enough to think that these ties will not influence voting, which, in a 13 person format, is both impactful and regrettable.

I predict that the selection committee will eventually give way to a system of selection based solely on conference championship winners.

 

[TerryP]

I think that the selection committee idea is flawed in the abstract and destined to generate controversy. Under the poll-based systems (BCS and pre-BCS), opinion as to correct team ranking was at least broad-based. Personal bias was an inherent part of the system, but this did not, in the main, undermine the integrity of the system because no single vote or computer input was dispositive of the issue.

The opinions on who is the best four teams in college football will continue to be broad based in 2014—to a greater degree.

The polls, both human and computer, aren't going away. They'll still be published each week. We're going to see Tuesday afternoons become comparisons between the AP, the Coaches, the Super 16, the Sagarin, and the other polls we have now. We'll still have power index ratings and the like.

I may be wrong, but I don't see this committee straying away from what these other polls are publishing. By doing so they would be inviting a lot of open criticism in a very public forum. As much as I believe they'll try to maintain a degree of individuality, I don't believe—for a millisecond—the committee won't be looking to see how the coaches are voting or how the AP is voting. They'll still be looking at things like Sagarin's strength of schedule components.

Under the selection committee concept, personal bias matters, a lot, and the recusal policy is weak. This leads back to a discussion about the composition of the committee. The architects of the selection committee are sending two contradictory messages. One is that the committee members will consist of individuals who have subject matter expertise in college football. The other is that these individuals will be of such noble character that they can logically and dispassionately decide which teams most deserve to participate in a series of playoff games. In order to meet the criterion of being college football "experts" - to have at least a meaningful connection to the game - the members must necessarily have ties to particular institutions and conferences. And, in fact, this is the case (e.g., Pat Haden/Pac-12, Archie Manning/SEC), yet no one should be naïve enough to think that these ties will not influence voting, which, in a 13 person format, is both impactful and regrettable.

You've got a cynical view. It's not right or wrong. It is a supposition. I'm more inclined to thing it's going to work better than a lot assume UNTIL I'm proven wrong. College football and controversy have gone hand in hand for decades. Expecting more isn't a stretch.

There's is something you bring up here that leads me on a different thought path—the ties to conferences influencing voting.

I'm hijacking this thread a bit just to point to one storyline I've seen repeated (as recently as this week) regarding Bill Battle's recommendations for the selection committee. This has nothing to do with your post, just a thought from part of the content.

I've seen the majority of those complaining about Battle using his recommendations as the staple of their angst. This corp group also talks about the committee and mentions the same thing you do—conference bias. Here's where I see fallacy in their complaints.

The committee is going to be biased based on their conference affiliations but guys like Roy Kramer were bad recommendations so Battle hasn't a clue to what he's doing? I'm left shaking my head, again, at the thinking I see from some of our fan base.