College Football Playoff: Your opinion no longer matters
By J.P. Scott
After years of fans clamoring for it, we finally have a College Football Playoff. I couldn’t be happier. Well, maybe I could. I’d much rather see a 16-team playoff than four, but you have to start somewhere. I’ll take it — for now.
The best thing about this new College Football Playoff, in my opinion, is that the voices of the fans, writers and coaches no longer matter in deciding who gets to play for the title. That’s a beautiful thing — something that could only be made better with automatic bids for winning your conference.
I love college football, but I’m not in love with how biased the fans, writers and coaches are. To be honest, the only place I’ve ever seen more homers and bias was when I lived in England for a short time. Fans of the the Premier League, like college football fans in America, were extremely passionate. That part was great. Not great was their wide-ranging, baseless opinions about whose team was the best. It was as if they ignored the tables that told them exactly where their teams stood based on wins and losses and looked to history and tradition to justify their smack talk.
Sound familiar?
In the new College Football Playoff, baseless opinions have been removed from the equation for the first time ever. Many fans still don’t quite understand this. After every weekend of games, college football fans fall over themselves to get to their computers and pull up the latest AP or USA Today Top 25. They’ll go to as many sites as they can to see who is in the latest “Top 4.” Then they got to Facebook groups or chat rooms to either boast or complain about their team’s ranking.
Those rankings no longer matter.
It’s going to take college football fans some time to adjust to this idea. For years, the AP and Coaches Polls were everything. Your team went out on Saturday to not only win, but to do so with style points in order to impress a bunch of strangers — most of whom had already formed an opinion anyway. Then they’d wait while those strangers compiled their lists and told them where they stood.
If you think about it, it wasn’t all that different than figure skating or Dancing with the Stars.
The AP Poll is comprised of local sports writers who come complete with local bias and an agenda. I look at the AP Poll like Congress. You have a bunch of people who represent a certain region. Their values and beliefs are different than the next guy based on where they are from and what teams they cover. Their entire goal is to help the national image and perception of teams and conferences they cover while keeping you — the fan — happy.
And thats how your opinion used to matter.
Unless your team is downright awful, you expect your local writers to spray cupcakes and rainbows all over the newspaper and internet when they talk about your team. When they do, you shower them with compliments and tell them how great they are at their jobs. When they do the opposite, you are quick mash your keyboard in the comments section of the article you just read, telling the writer how wrong he or she is and how they should look for another profession.
Writers are swayed by this, regardless of what they tell you. Again, this is how your opinion used to matter. Those rankings would be compiled, in part to make you happy, and then used as a large part of selecting the top two teams. Even the “computer” polls weren’t really unbiased. That data they processed had to be hand-jammed in by a real person with an opinion.
What we have now is, as I said earlier, the best possible system without automatic bids. You have one small group of people with knowledge of football, sports and what’s fair. You have a select group of people who have already cemented their legacies. They won’t be swayed by you the fan, beat-writers, coaches or any meaningless numbers that appear before a team on the scoreboard.
The College Football Playoff committee has made it clear that each individual game will matter and strength of schedule will be key. This means your conference does not matter. A one-loss Georgia team, for example, isn’t going to get any special bump or credit for being a one-loss SEC team. They fact that they played in what looks like a weaker SEC East and lost to what appears to be an overrated South Carolina squad is likely to stick out in the minds of the committee more than the logo of the conference you play in. This will be true across all of college football.
In addition, the committee will have its own strength of schedule process. For example, a win over UCLA looks better than a win over BYU right now because of the rankings. Anyone who has watched any college football this season knows that’s not the case. Those numbers before the team names on the scoreboard are meaningless opinions of people who don’t matter. Several committee member are on record saying basically that.
So while you are dancing because your team beat a handful of “ranked” teams during the season, the College Football Playoff committee will be pulling back the curtain on the entire process — looking closer at each game and determining why exactly each team was ranked as high as they were.
This is all new for everyone involved in college football and it will take time for the masses to get used to this idea. Personally, I think it is one that is long overdue, and I can’t wait to watch it play out and see the reactions.
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