Will Any Big Ten Teams Make the College Football Playoff?

The removal of the BCS system and the introduction of the new “College Football Playoff” format has been one of the major subplots of the 2014 College Football season, right next to all the upsets and the ongoing sagas involving Jameis Winston and Todd Gurley. With the BCS, everyone knew what would happen at the end of the season and there wasn’t a lot of intrigue. The two teams at the top of the AP Polls would play for the National Championship and there was actually less uproar than people will remember compared to what will happen at the end of this season.

I believe that the College Football Playoff selection committee has the hardest job in all of the sports world right now, because picking those last two teams will be so hard. The gap between the 4th and 5th teams is smaller than the gap between the 2nd and 3rd teams in nearly every case, and every team on the outside looking in has much more to complain about now that their school was passed up on not just the two spots for the BCS Championship but passed up by four whole slots. The job that the selection committee has ahead of themselves, starting this weekend with the first polls that will go out, is a long and arduous one. There are just so many questions about the system in the first year that committee has to deal with.

One of those questions is the issue with conferences. There are four spots in the College Football Playoff, of course. Should a conference get no more than one spot? Should the winner and the runner up of the SEC get in, or what about the first and second place finisher in the brutal SEC West division? Like I alluded to earlier, I’m glad I’m not on that selection committee, because I don’t know the answer to that question.

While the SEC is shooting for getting two teams into playoff, the Big Ten would be thrilled to get just one team in. The conference isn’t quite the juggernaut that it used to be, thanks to the shift of recruiting power bases from Big Ten territory to Texas and the SEC’s stomping grounds, but the conference is still one of the Power 5 that rule college football.

The creme of the crop is Michigan State and Ohio State this season. MSU is 5-1 with one big loss already against Oregon on September 6th by a final score of 46-27. Ohio State is 4-1, with the loss coming against Virginia Tech, also on September 6th. 4-1 sounds great, but Ohio State (and to some extent Michigan State) hasn’t beaten anyone. The Big 10 schedule has been diluted with the addition of Rutgers and Maryland. Both those two teams were added for their TV markets, not for their football teams. Maryland lost to Ohio State on October 4th by a score of 52-24.

The problem of the Big Ten getting worse and worse on the whole at football isn’t just Rutgers and Maryland’s fault, it’s a conference wide problem. Michigan, Indiana, Purdue and Illinois are all having down years and Penn State and Iowa are spinning their wheels a little bit. There also isn’t a team in the conference that could win more than two games playing in the SEC West.

Even after all that, someone will win the Big 10 this year, and the conference will probably come down to the game between Ohio State and Michigan State on Saturday, November 8th. Both teams should be on long winning streaks and be in the Top 10 for that game. The winner would be propelled up a few more spots in the AP Poll, possibly even into the Top 5. But the question remains — will the Big Ten’s best team be better than the SEC’s second or third best team?

The College Football Selection Committee’s first poll will tell us a lot about the answer. There is still a lot of football left to be played this season and a lot of dominos to fall, especially in the SEC. But if the selection committee puts Michigan State in the Top 6, I think they will make it in, assuming they beat Ohio State. The pairings of Ole Miss and Mississippi State, Alabama and Auburn and Notre Dame and Florida State still play each other, and Baylor plays three ranked opponents in their last four games of the season. Michigan State has the easiest schedule of any of the College Football Playoff contenders, but will the selection committee value a team that wins out against an easy schedule or value a team that has two or even three losses against a brutal schedule? No matter who the four teams are for the first College Football Playoff, one thing is for sure. The fifth team will be doing plenty of complaining.

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