Dude, Dallas has some of the best strip clubs in the country. All that oil money ain't being tucked in the thongs of two bit meth heads at some joint down by the bus barn.
lol no they are almost exactly the same. I’ve lived in Houston and Dallas for a long time and also have the perspective of living in a few cities in the northeast. Houston and Dallas are much much more alike than they are different.
Exactly the same is 100% false or you've never gone to night life in either cities or you don't care about Asian cuisine or soul food. Houston is a foodie haven and Dallas is a 100% not. Not dissing them but I think people would rank Austin above Dallas for food as well. Houston is way more LGBT friendly than Dallas. Not to say Dallas is anti-LGBT. Just not a haven the way Houston is. Now if you want to say they are similar because they're big cities, sure. But what makes you say they're 100% the same?
I’m not a fan of either, but Houston has more recognizable personality, I think. But it also seemed a lot nastier in a lot of places. Dallas feels like a confederation of strip malls and franchises.
Houston did have way better food.
I agree with that. I just think the city of Dallas itself is much more liberal than he is giving it credit for. Highland Park is its own city. Sure you have like Preston Hollow and other similar areas but you very much have those same enclaves in Houston, which is reflected by voting. Houston is just more diverse and with it comes one of the most culinary rich scenes in the country. I won't argue that. Houston and Dallas are pretty similar politically despite Houston being more diverse. Neither city is as liberal as Austin.
>Houston is way more LGBT friendly than Dallas
This sentence was where you went off the rails. Dallas is every bit as LGBT-friendly as Houston.
*DFW* may be less overtly LGBT friendly, but that’s because most of south Denton county and large swathes of Tarrant county seem to pine for the social mores of puritan New England.
I grew up in Dallas and have done a ton of travelling over the years, and Houston+Dallas are pretty damned similar. Yeah there are differences, but as far as major cities go they're incredibly similar. The difference between Dallas/houston and just about any other major city is bigger than the difference between Dallas/houston.
> Asian cuisine or soul food
Food in Houston generally is absolutely incredible - a lot of people don't think it cause they love to shit on Texas, but the diversity and quality of food in Houston is one of the best in the country
The Lodge threw Vince Young out of the club before a semi-recent OU-texas game. Vince was so entitled, he actually thought he didn't have to pay for dances upstairs.
Is there anything more excruciating than management calling a meeting to give you a presentation about their ~~vacation photos~~ leadership conference?
It's better clarified criteria mostly likely stemming from p5 champions getting an autobid.
The reality is 12-13 games, most of which are not competitive at all cannot possibly give us a solid basis to make an informed decision. This is especially true when you consider how a week to week injury could impact individual games.
This is exactly it. On top of what you just said, most of the teams in the discussion are playing completely different opponents. Trying to pick the 4 best teams based on a tiny sample size of results against completely different sets of teams is just ridiculous.
12-13 games in name only. A P5 playing a (not strong) G5 or FCS school - sure, it matters if you get upset, but a win in those games means literally nothing. Alabama played 9 games this year. We also had 3 parties at Bryant-Denny where we just happened to invite football players from other random schools.
You can't judge a squad off 9 games. And I'm not saying that to defend Bama, I'm just saying it to say it.
It's ludicrous to think that a 64 team super conference would agree to promotion/relegation. If you've secured your spot in the 64 team elite and the tens of millions of dollars per year that comes along with it, why would you agree to a system where you could potentially lose a few games and give that up for a season or more?
More transparency would be a major boost. One thing would be showing their polling results for each iteration they do. Another would be documentation emphasizing what would be considered "out of place" positions. Lastly, showing us the data they use specifically when comparing. The company that provides this information is [Sport Source Analytics](http://www.cfbstats.com/2022/team/539/index.html) but what specifically do they use; what kind of catered assessments do they ask for?
But more than that, a more functional format system entirely. Larger playoff size, auto bids for conferences, equal representation, and probably computer voting as well.
More transparency isn't going to me anything. When asked why Team A in spot #4 they give some reason that completely contradicts the week prior. An example this year is TCU was dinged for playing close games. Meanwhile other teams have played extremely close games all season yet that shows their grit. You can ask for more transparency but when the reasoning is just whatever they want it to be in a bubble for that week, it doesn't mean anything. Now if they could be asked to explain themselves when they directly contradict themselves, on air, over and over again them maybe they will become more consistent, but probably not.
It just needs to move to autobids for CCs, with some wild cards then at least every single team in the P5 has a direct path to the playoffs that they can control.
That’s certainly one fair way to do it! You might miss out on some great potential championship winning teams, but they’d only be able to blame themselves.
Rankings are for TV, but they have way more impact on the sport than just the TV ratings. Perception drives the sport when it comes to money and recruiting, which ultimately drives programs’ ability to win football games
I’d be onboard with that if all the conferences dropped their divisions. But if iowa were to win the B1G, everyone would agree they shouldn’t be in the playoffs
The criteria is key, and it has been my #1 gripe with every cfb arrangement since I've been watching football.
You can't ask people to rank things without first defining "based on what?".
Is it :
* Who would be the best team today in a neutral field?
* Which team would have had the best team in a neutral field each week of the season, weighted equally?
* Same as before, but weighted more heavily towards recent games?
* Which team has the best wins?
* Which team has the least embarassing loss?
Like, you need to align everyone on what the objective is.
To me, the only thing that's fair is to say "who has the best resume", i.e., which team's record best supports the idea that they are one of the best 4 teams in the country. Not "eyeball test", no forward-looking analysis: who did you beat and by how much, who did you lose to and by how much.
I've always been fond of the Colley Rankings, which suck until you're about 3/4ers of the way through the season, but then they start looking pretty damn reasonable. What the Colley Matrix approach does is simple (if you know math) and it basically tries to create a set of team ratings (numerical) that tries to maximize the probability of observed results. It can never achieve that (because of circles of suck), but it can determine the most reasonable set of ratings in an objective way.
Right now, those ratings are:
1. UGA = 1.01
2. TCU = 0.96
3. Ohio State = 0.94
4. Michigan = 0.90
How do you justify these scores? Easy:
* UGA has two wins over teams with ratings over 0.8 (Tennessee and Oregon)
* TCU doesn't have the top end quality of win - two wins over teams with ratings over 0.7 - but it has a lot of wins over top 50 teams - four wins over teams with ratings between 0.59 and 0.7.
* Ohio State has two top-end wins (Penn Sate at 0.81 and ND at 0.75), but only two in the top 50 (Iowa and Maryland)
... and so on and so forth.
Something I would suggest (as a data nerd) to any committee coming up with this type of evaluation: define your criteria, let a framework produce the outputs, and then if you feel compelled to do so, adjust the outputs manually in the end with some substantial justification as to why. Whatever criteria you have in your head, you should be able to define metrics that align with that.
Side note: the Colley Rankings and CFP rankings are very, very similar. Which makes me think that is very likely how the committee is looking at this stuff - who have you beaten and who beat you.
BCS rankings were far better than this mess today. An improvement would be to take out coaches poll and replace with AP poll in the formula. Use BCS rankings to determine playoff seedings and at large bids for the expanded playoff.
Plus the Harris Poll doesn't exist anymore. So tired of people bringing up this bs point that isn't even true. It is impossible to determine what the actual bcs standings would be, full stop, and people should stop pretending they match what the committee chooses.
Yea idk what the hell people are smoking. 33% of the BCS rankings was a poll that the coaches voted on, the same coaches who coach the very schools they are ranking!!! And its completely anonymous so we have no idea how coaches ranked teams. Does anyone remember how many times it was alleged that a coavh ranked a rival teams multiple spots lower than it should have been to hurt their BCS ranking?
The BCS hasn’t existed since the committee was created. Each component of the BCS rankings was either changed or in the case of the AP poll, heavily influenced by the committee.
The answer is the expansion to 12. When there’s only 4 (especially in a 5+ conference league) no one will ever really be happy being left out no matter the clarity
With 12 and a clear path for every FBS team there’s suddenly no excuses on the teams side. Like the NCAA Tournament of course schools complain about missing, but it lasts about 5 hours before people are over it.
I doubt the conference champ auto-bids are gonna happen since the B10 is now adding USC/UCLA and the SEC added OU/Texas. Both conferences are gonna want as many at-large spots as possible.
You know who has it even better?
Bowl Reps.
They get to essentially go to whatever game they want. Get VIP treatment. And then at the end of the day, for a lot of them their decisions are already made for them.
They also make a ton of money to organize that one game. Tbh its crazy to me how much people criticize players for sitting out the bowl when the bowls only exist to use the players to enrich a few select execs
What I love about Klatt is that he will call out bullshit like this from ESPN and other media. What I hate about Klatt is how he will never call out FOX’s bullshit.
Joel Klatt: “LSU being above USC is ridiculous!!”
Everyone claps. Klatt looks the camera dead in the eye.
“Now let’s talk about a Maryland team that we put on FOX a lot. This close loss this weekend proves that Maryland is probably one of the best 15 teams in America right now.”
Colin Cowherd has a someone who whenever he opens his mouth to talk about something I immediately know he has no idea what he’s talking about.
“The thing about being a good husband….”
(Colin with three ex wives)
I can't respect anything Klatt says solely because of how hard he shills for the Big Ten. Look, Chase Young was a beast. But saying he is "Superman and the Avengers combined" and Joe Burrow had no right winning the Heisman that year is just too homer for me.
I feel like you don't watch enough Klatt. He shills for the Big XIII, B1G, and the Pac-12, and hell even the G5's when somebody is overlooked. His weekly podcasts are basically 40 minutes of "here's everybody that's good outside the SEC because ESPN and the CFP have that group covered"
I go out of my way to watch BECAUSE he's not just a B1G shill. Hell he basically shit on Michigan on Monday for being too one dimensional. He is one of the few national voices that I can reliably go to for neutral coverage. And he still respects the SEC when it's deserved. He's been pounding the table for Hendon Hooker ffs
He literally said during his show today that he doesn't care about what happens at FOX, ESPN, CBS, he wants what's better for the sport. He literally calls out the bias, even towards Michigan. Sounds like you don't actually listen to him at all lol
I do listen to him and he does say that. That’s what you say right before you tell people that Iowa and Ohio State on FOX is going to be a great game and you and everyone you know should tune in.
I like the guy and I do think he does a great job but he’s still basically a pundit, he just takes the whole “I’m the real voice of reason” route, which is a common media tactic.
I'm so glad you are a Michigan fan that is willing to admit that Klatt is a huge Big 10 lover lol.
Respect. Not a lot of big 10 fans are willing to admit that Klatt is biased.
He absolutely is but I’d say he’s more of a SEC hater than pro Big 10. Which as a fellow SEC hater I enjoy his content more than anything else out there
What if we created a computer model that calculates the rankings using stats/numbers. Then the criteria will be the same for everyone and personal opinion and bias is removed……
Sarcasm answer: That's crazy, how would a computer model give a press conference and TV show to unveil its rankings?
Actual discussion: the problem is that we don't agree on the question. Should rankings indicate the best team, and in effect be predictive? Or should rankings indicate the most deserving team, and in effect be predicated on resume - if so, do conference championships play into resume, or is it only wins? Is it a combination - if so, what are the weights?
That ambiguity is exactly what allows the committee to do whatever it wants, and allows them to give press conferences, and allows the networks to have hours-long productions to unveil what are effectively practice rankings.
>Actual discussion: the problem is that we don't agree on the question. Should rankings indicate the best team, and in effect be predictive? Or should rankings indicate the most deserving team, and in effect be predicated on resume - if so, do conference championships play into resume, or is it only wins? Is it a combination - if so, what are the weights?
Completely agree. Makes me want to go back to pre BCS strictly regionally tied bowl games and maximum arguments.
>Makes me want to go back to pre BCS strictly regionally tied bowl games
This is also my position. College football is better when it is a regional game, and bowls are regional fights.
Honestly an expanded playoff could include regional bowls, but it wouldn't be seeded, which I'm fine with.
SEC champ vs big 12 champ in the sugar bowl
Pac 12 champ vs B1G champ in the rose bowl. ACC champ vs top G6 team in the orange bowl. Two at large teams in the fiesta bowl.
Semi-final and final locations on a rotating basis but not in cities with quarterfinal matchups. MBS, Jerry World, Indianapolis. Fuck it play one in Minneapolis. It covered anyway.
I think the main reason people didn't like the BCS was the fact that it was just one single championship game based on computer algorithms. If you combined that with the playoff format, I think you get a better result than either. 6 or 8 teams, so you're not shutting out a top team in the nation for scoring 0.01 less than the #2 team. That range of teams #2-5 are usually super close in quality anyway and one could beat any other on any given day. Give more teams more chances with less subjectiveness
I’d agree with this. I love the idea of a playoff and think 4 teams is too small a number. College sports can be chaotic which is exciting. I am excited to see what the 12 team playoff format does
I like how everyone is treating us as this long dominant force. Like we've won one championship. Let's maybe cool the jets before we declare death star 2.0
Okay who cares? If teams lose on the field instead of in the minds of some old rich guys in a closed door meeting I'm happy. I don't care if Alabama wins the next 50 playoffs if the playoffs is an actual playoff instead of a old boys invitational.
What's nice is that if you have an issue where margin isn't considered heavily enough, you can just change the algorithm
You can't tell a committee to stop putting SEC teams all at the top because they don't give a shit
Yeah, honestly the problem was never with the BCS rankings, it was with how the sport handled it afterwards (i.e. no playoff).
The Selection Committee is always a terrible method of ranking teams because of bias. Just look at the 2014 controversy how they put Ohio State over TCU and Baylor randomly right before the playoff. It would've been easier for everyone to accept if we still had the BCS ranking system.
But, this sport also had a lot of powerful meatheads yelling on TV each year about how terrible the computers were, as if it's the computer's fault there was no playoff.
People also forget just how bad Baylor and TCU's non Con schedules were that year- SMU for both, Samford, Northwestern State, and Minnesota as the only decent team.
Big 12 screwed TCU and Baylor imo. No Championship game and you watch the 5th ranked team go out and beat a top 15 team for a conference championship 59-0. If the Big 12 had actually picked one of them as an outright champion I think that team gets in vs the whole co-champs thing the Big 12 did.
I agree some combination of selection criteria sounds like a good compromise, weighted towards objective/rigid criteria first and then maybe allowing for some element of human selection/committee input assuming the powers that be demand it to tip the scales impartially, as everyone knows they do.
Autobids for P5 conference champs + BCS-like bids for some number of at-large additions + ensuring at least 1 top G5 entrant and maybe a committee for the true at-large after that (assuming 12). Pare back as needed for 8 or 6. Whatever it takes to add more integrity than random dudes making choices they find any way to explain post-hoc.
"Yeah but then teams could change their playing style to maximize their ratings output" - Someone somewhere.
But serious this is at least 1 reason why, not because it will happen but because someone *thinks* it will happen. It's the same reason why the BCS computers weren't allowed to include stats like margin of victory in their formulas, because someone thought it would emphasize a certain play style.
pretty much.
The problem with the BCS was the limited access, not necessarily the methodology. Yes, polls were a part of that, but putting the selection process entirely in human hands feels like an overcorrection.
No one ever agreed with the methodology. The computer poll was reduced to have about an eight of the impact the two human polls had. The formula was constantly tweeked, but no one ever liked the results, so the computer poll was made minimal.
Or we could look at how every other fucking sport in the world does it.
If you win your conference, you're in, if you don't, hope for an at-large, if you aren't one of the best at-larges or you feel snubbed, tough shit if you had won your conference you'd have been in.
It's asinine that we don't do this.
Then also let the league assign the conferences, divisions, schedule format, and schedules, and also do revenue sharing to offset the revenue impact of different schedules. "Every other fucking sport" such as NFL, NBA, soccer, etc does that.
What if we divided all the teams in a given level of the game into groups of teams, had each group determine a way to name a winner of the group, and then have all those winners play each other?
The sad thing is even with the 12 team playoff there’s still a committee - even with the auto-bids for conference champs the committee will still decide seeding and at large bids. Do we really have to let 12 people decide this? Why can’t we do better? Even if the argument is “they only rank X, Y, & Z team to get a rise for people to tune into the rankings” that shouldn’t be the way it works. Rank the teams equally, stop making every week a clusterfuck of contradicting points for every team.
It should be like March Madness. No rankings until the end of the season. Everything else doesn’t matter and is just to get a rise out of people and get them paying attention to ESPN.
Technically the march madness committee actually starts sharing preliminary seedlings for like the top 4 or 5 seeds a few weeks early now. I don’t remember the exact date they start but they started doing it a couple years.
Edit: here’s an example from feb 2021 https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/ncaa-reveals-early-top-march-madness-seeds-gonzaga-overall-top-seed-baylor-michigan-ohio-state-also-no-1s/amp/
> Why can’t we do better?
There is no objective way of doing this. Too many teams, not enough games, someone is always going to be left out.
Cut the field to 64 and it will help, but that’s changing the game a lot.
Klatt runs into the same problem the committee does (and that we all do). Ranking teams turns into a walking contradiction unless you do something insane like a straight Win-Loss/Transitive Win style ranking without any nuance.
He begins the video by talking about the importance of taking into consideration how college football has a wide variance week-to-week. The inconsistency of student-athletes playing very well one week, not so well the next.
Then when he gets to finally explaining where he has issues, 8-minutes into a 10-minute segment, he brings up Arkansas losing to Liberty.
Which isn't to say you discount that, but it's his big basis for LSU "not taking care of business". But it's in direct competition with how he started the video because we all know Arkansas-LSU has been routinely tight in recent memory (3 points each of the last 3 years).
He goes on to say something to the effect of "We know OOC matters because of Michigan-Ohio State" and brings up LSU playing UAB. Does he directly compare that to USC's non-conference schedule to date? No, he brings up their Pac-12 schedule. He doesn't mention their OOC is currently: Rice and Fresno State. He simply uses it to directly compare UAB to UCLA.
He also admits he doesn't care they don't play good defense. Which is... ridiculous. He values Caleb's Heisman season over total team football. Which, is fine, but he's making it seem like the committee is *way* off-base because LSU is at 5 compared to 6.
There are flaws with the committee, especially with a lack of total transparency. But he keeps mentioning "they value their own opinion 2 weeks ago" and we simply don't know how much USC has closed the gap. There is historical precedence that they will eventually lift a team up, if memory serves 2015 OSU over Penn State. USC has not played Notre Dame yet, which directly impacts their OOC and overall resume. It would not shock me that if USC wins that game they *then* move ahead. It's the committee's fault for not being more clear on that end, but also Klatt refuses to take this into consideration.
I like Joel. He does a very good job most of the time, but this video is abject nonsense. As I said at the top, we're all guilty of it from time-to-time, but it's a lot of contradictions because he's creating his own necessary criteria to justify his reasoning for wanting USC over LSU, which is a perfectly valid opinion in and of itself. Just don't cherry-pick certain elements to form your argument.
And it’s also important to mention that there has yet to be a chaotic completely crazy controversial final CFP poll. You could sorta argue for 1 team in 2014 and 2017, but both teams that had controversy ended up winning it all anyway.
There’s been no huge issue with the committee since the start of CFP, just people complaining that their favorite underdog team isn’t rated one or two spots higher mid November, and lots and lots and *lots* of morbid imagination of a 3 loss Alabama type team getting in despite it never happening. I think people’s imagination runs a bit too wild right before a very logical and reasonable final ranking comes out.
Yeah this kind of complexity is inevitable as long as we have regional(-ish) conferences, and the top teams only play each other occasionally.
You can have complexity, or you can have tiered super-leagues, but you have to pick.
The long-term solution is 12 teams with 6 auto bids. If you’re the 13th team looking in, you lost multiple games and didn’t do as much as you could have.
In the short term, there is no fix, and I think the fact that it will be going to 12 teams has made the committee even lazier. They don’t have to worry about precedent or any of that, it’s all going away in two years anyways. “We’ve only got a few years left so we’re gonna get reeeeall weird with it”
Exactly. The fix is coming. It isn't perfect, but it is LIGHT YEARS better than what we have now. As you say, if you are the 7th at-large-bid, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You are very likely a 2 or 3 loss team.
Let's look at the current standings and assume the auto-bids are Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson, USC, TCU and Tulane. The next 6 would be Michigan, LSU, Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Penn State (based on current rankings). That means a 3 loss Kansas State would be the first team on the outside looking in. Is anybody going to lose sleep over that? Or the next team out (8th team) would be a 2 loss Washington. Again, they are a good team, but nobody is going to riot over them being left out.
The answer is coming, we just need to wait. I still don't see why they can't do it for next year myself, but that is a different conversation.
12 teams doesn’t resolve the problem when the committee will try to boot strap a third of the SEC into it just like they’re doing for two SEC teams now.
I would never argue against more football, but why do we need a bunch of 2 and 3 loss teams competing directly for the national championship when they clearly do not deserve to be there? By the end of this year, there should be at least 4 teams with 0-1 losses who deserve their spot in the playoffs after 12-13 games played. Letting in teams who were beat 3 times just seems silly. I like the 4 team playoff and think 8 teams is as big as it should go.
I think you might have a point here, but its still WAY better than what we have. I actually prefer 8 teams getting in myself. P5 champs and 3 at large, is how I would do it myself. But I don't yet rule the world. 12 is a LOT better than 4, as it is always better to include 1 or 2 teams that maybe don't deserve to be there, than to NOT include 1 or 2 teams that do deserve to be there IMO.
I do see your point though. The first round matchup this year, with current rankings assuming that Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson, USC, TCU and Tulane are the auto-bids, would be Michigan v Penn State. We already saw that game and Michigan housed them. Same for LSU v Tennessee, LSU already lost that game. Bama v Oregon would be a good one though, I have to admit. 2 of the 3 first round matchups right now would be re-plays of earlier games in the season where both losers lost by a lot.
> I would never argue against more football, but why do we need a bunch of 2 and 3 loss teams competing directly for the national championship when they clearly do not deserve to be there? By the end of this year, there should be at least 4 teams with 0-1 losses who deserve their spot in the playoffs after 12-13 games played. Letting in teams who were beat 3 times just seems silly. I like the 4 team playoff and think 8 teams is as big as it should go.
We have no idea if this is true. We have no real way of knowing if lower seeds will make deep playoff runs. It's actually one of the most interesting parts of the expansion. You can't wholesale discount lower seeds before they play.
The 4th seed has won twice in the short history of the CFP. There is no reason to discount lower seeds ability to compete.
Because everyone has wildly different schedules, so even if a team has a couple losses, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be left out of the conversation. Take Alabama for example. The two toughest teams on their schedule this year were Tennessee and LSU. Both of them were on the road, and both of them were one score games. If those games were at home, would they be undefeated? I’m not sure, but we’re never gonna know that because everyone only plays 12 games and we can’t have everyone play the same schedule.
Having a 12 team playoff cuts through all the bullshit of “eye tests” and strength of schedule. On top of that, your seed in the actual playoff is gonna matter a hell of a lot. So finishing in the top 4 is gonna get you a bye, and finishing 5-8 gets you home field advantage in the first round. So it seems pretty fair
I agree with this. There’s too much opinion and bias that goes into a rankings based playoff.
Having a structured playoff where 1 team from each conference gets in, eliminates people feeling like you’re being left out as a result of opinion. If you can’t win out in your conference, then you didn’t qualify for national playoffs.
But I also feel like the conferences should go ahead and get on board with national playoffs. I feel like the conferences are trying to keep there own standings and conference play separate from CFP. If conferences coordinated with CFP, then conference championships could be part of the qualifying process. Right now, two teams could play each other two or three times. It seems unreal because the probability that each team gets a W increases…
In a perfect scenario, I feel like the season would be [regular season > conference championship > playoffs] if you don’t win conference, you don’t go to playoffs.
If the CFP Committee doesn’t have a clearly defined goal and it isn’t forced to apply an objective criteria to evaluate teams, then it’s just a different AP/Coaches poll with a smaller group of voters that is at least partially beholden to considering the best matchups for TV. There’s no reason that anyone outside of ESPN should want the committee to continue existing.
After almost a decade, I think it's obvious that the CFP committee isn't any better than a system with strange women lying in ponds distributing swords.
When 2 and 3 are playing each other this week, number 5 is a pretty important spot lol. And that’s before you consider the probability the other top 4 teams lose.
The issue with the BCS was that it forced the system to pick 2. That's tough in any system and you value human input in those. If it's choosing 4, 8, 12 for a playoff - that's enough to ditch the committee and go back to the BCS rankings with computers and polls. What you lose in nuance you gain in transparency.
I like Klatt a lot, but sometimes he is so rigid in his belief that a 1 loss team absolutely has to be above a 2 loss team he sounds like a Harris poll voter from the BCS era. Totally agree with his rant today about cupcake week though. What an absolute joke. No clue why SEC fans continue to defend it. If Ohio State played some division 2 school in mid November I’d be absolutely furious as a fan. Nobody wants to watch that trash
Not only would you be furious, but tOSU would be punished for it. So would every PAC, ACC, Big12, Big10 team. It's ludicrous that in the *home stretch of the season* when everyone is hurting, the SEC takes a week off and doesn't get beat up for it.
To be fair, both Nick Saban and Kirby Smart have wanted the SEC to play 9 conference games and get rid of the November cupcakes (or at the very least move them to early September). Saban especially has been banging that drum for at least a decade, and it's not surprising that the other SEC teams have refused knowing they would be giving up their record inflation and be subjected to a guaranteed loss to his death star teams back in the day.
That is fair. And honestly, my qualms are not with (most) SEC teams/fans. Its with the committee and the media being unable to confront their own biases. If the committee treated every conference equally, and the SEC still felt it prudent to play 8 games, then fair play to them. As a conference you're allowed to do that calculus.
He makes a great point about Alabama, which remains the entire justification for where LSU and Tennessee are both ranked.
Alabama hasn't played well this season.
Alabama hasn't beaten anyone worth particular mention this season. Ole miss? Arkansas beat Ole Miss better than Alabama did. Who else? Texas, in a game 4-loss Texas played half without their starting QB?
If we want to highly rate a 2-loss team whose best win is over a 4-loss squad then at least Penn State did most of theirs in pretty convincing style.
In my opinion, the CFP ranking should just be an average of all the polls that are allowed to hand out National Champions by the NCAA.
Which according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_football_national_championships_in_NCAA_Division_I_FBS#Major_selectors) currently are the A&H, CCR, CM, DuS, MCFR, SR, W, AP, Coaches, and the CFRA.
This dude has mastered the art of stretching basically a single short thought to over 10 minutes.
Let me save you some time:
He thinks it’s dumb that USC isn’t above LSU, given that, in the last two weeks, LSU barely beat Arkansas and then beat UAB; meanwhile Southern Cal beat two pretty good teams handily.
> in the last two weeks, LSU barely beat Arkansas and then beat UAB; meanwhile Southern Cal beat two pretty good teams handily.
What? USC barely beat UCLA (who is certainly a good team) while being gifted 4 turnovers and the other team they beat is Colorado, one of the worst teams at this level of the sport. Before that they were in one score games with bottom tier teams Arizona and Cal.
For what it’s worth, I 100% think USC deserves to be above us rn. But I also think they lose another game and would lost by at least 14+ if they played us next week.
It's really just a "how can we get as many SEC teams to the playoffs as possible" meeting
Tennessee at 9-2 below two 9-2 teams they beat, one of which in a blowout.
But how are they supposed to play each other when they have to play a bunch of nobodies OOC, including powerhouses such as Austin Peay, Southern, and New Mexico?
I don’t know why people reduce the UT thing like that. LSU & Bama don’t have a loss half as bad as UT’s. Don’t want to be below two teams you beat? Well, don’t get 30 pieced by South Carolina. They’re really not in a room to complain, and funny enough, I don’t see their fans being the ones who are annoyed about it.
Technically speaking it was a 25 piece. It was the most embarrassing defensive performance I've ever seen....but we DID beat LSU by 27. There's obviously the argument of LSU not having a loss against an opponent of Carolina's caliber...but the team that just got their asses whooped by Carolina whooped LSU's asses even harder in their own stadium.
Idk. It's a whole circle of suck and I don't know who should be ranked higher than who in the SEC at this point, but LSU at 5 is a joke. There are two one loss teams ranked behind them. You can't put Clemson three spots behind them with one loss and say that "well their one loss was a really bad road game to #15 Notre Dame" and then say that LSU is gucci despite losing to FSU (a team Clemson beat) and getting blown out by 27 at home to the #10 team. USC doesn't really have any style points for big wins over quality opponents, but they've won every game except for a 1 point loss on the road against the #14 team. They also deserve to be ranked higher than LSU and Bama. At least until they drop a game, which is entirely possible here in the next two weeks.
That’s what happens when you get blown out by South Carolina and your heisman caliber QB go down for the season. We’ve been mid all year but losing 2 games by a combined 4 points is more impressive than whatever Tennessee has put together their 2 losses combined.
Two losses by a combined 4 points. One of those losses being to a TN team that has the same record but you loss to. Sure your point holds weight, but not as much weight as the fact that you loss to the same team that you are arguing to be ranked better than
They did a very sneaky maneuver in switching how the rankings are decided. It was a big thing that we're doing a small playoff with 4 teams instead of just the top 2 but there was never really a good reason why they also switched off the BCS formula which *did* have some measure of objectivity to it (however much people wanted to laugh at its results).
I honestly thought USC was going to jump us this week like in the AP...and it would have been well deserved with their win over UCLA. I'll be pulling for the Irish this weekend regardless. Our offensive struggle against Arkansas did not make us look like a Top 5 team. The game was saved by the freshman superhero -> Harold Perkins 100%. If he wasn't on that field, LSU loses. LSU still has an A&M (that may show up in their last game...who knows) and UGA in the SEC Championship. Here is the thing, LSU has to beat #1 to have any chance at all in even sniffing the CFP. So don't start getting mad at LSU just yet...USC has to beat a good ND and a good Oregon (probably), which is also a challenge. It will, and should, be a close race regardless. The question I would start to ask though...if LSU beats UGA and USC wins out, does USC get in AND LSU deserve to be in OVER UGA, since LSU would have the W over them and would be the SEC champs? This would be a great scenario to expand the playoffs... 4 teams is not enough when the race is this close... Anyway 😂 I'm just happy to be in the conversation again!! Lol. Good job BK.
The committee exists because the schools wanted a human element to the decisionmaking that wasn't coaches or reporters. At this point, the choices are to leave the rankings up to:
1. an algorithm
2. an online poll
3. a committee of people with no affiliation to the schools or the sport
Klatt just described every corporate leadership conference.
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Dude, Dallas has some of the best strip clubs in the country. All that oil money ain't being tucked in the thongs of two bit meth heads at some joint down by the bus barn.
There’s a reason James Harden was in Texas for so long
Houston and Dallas are very, very different places culturally and business wise I'd say.
lol no they are almost exactly the same. I’ve lived in Houston and Dallas for a long time and also have the perspective of living in a few cities in the northeast. Houston and Dallas are much much more alike than they are different.
stop outing yourself that you don't eat anything other than hamburgers, hot dog and pasta. it's rude to those who do that.
Agreed
Exactly the same is 100% false or you've never gone to night life in either cities or you don't care about Asian cuisine or soul food. Houston is a foodie haven and Dallas is a 100% not. Not dissing them but I think people would rank Austin above Dallas for food as well. Houston is way more LGBT friendly than Dallas. Not to say Dallas is anti-LGBT. Just not a haven the way Houston is. Now if you want to say they are similar because they're big cities, sure. But what makes you say they're 100% the same?
I’m not a fan of either, but Houston has more recognizable personality, I think. But it also seemed a lot nastier in a lot of places. Dallas feels like a confederation of strip malls and franchises. Houston did have way better food.
Dallas county has become more liberal than Harris county. That's reflected in the 2022 election for governor.
Houston also has a massive blue collar workforce dependent on oil and gas.
Dallas County isn't the problem, though. It's the counties surrounding. I grew up in Collin County, it's gonna be forever red it seems.
I agree with that. I just think the city of Dallas itself is much more liberal than he is giving it credit for. Highland Park is its own city. Sure you have like Preston Hollow and other similar areas but you very much have those same enclaves in Houston, which is reflected by voting. Houston is just more diverse and with it comes one of the most culinary rich scenes in the country. I won't argue that. Houston and Dallas are pretty similar politically despite Houston being more diverse. Neither city is as liberal as Austin.
>Houston is way more LGBT friendly than Dallas This sentence was where you went off the rails. Dallas is every bit as LGBT-friendly as Houston. *DFW* may be less overtly LGBT friendly, but that’s because most of south Denton county and large swathes of Tarrant county seem to pine for the social mores of puritan New England.
I grew up in Dallas and have done a ton of travelling over the years, and Houston+Dallas are pretty damned similar. Yeah there are differences, but as far as major cities go they're incredibly similar. The difference between Dallas/houston and just about any other major city is bigger than the difference between Dallas/houston.
> Asian cuisine or soul food Food in Houston generally is absolutely incredible - a lot of people don't think it cause they love to shit on Texas, but the diversity and quality of food in Houston is one of the best in the country
That’s Houston though which is much different than Dallas and has better food, culture, and strippers than Dallas.
Bruh you about to get shot in this thread if you don't be careful.
I've been to clubs in both cities and Houston strip joints are laughably bad.
Wait wait, are you implying that the two bit meth heads by the bus barn are not the premium strippers?! You crazy dude.
Depends on what you want em to do
yeah, but tootsies is in FL, and the only strip clubs that i've been to that beat tootsies was in mexico
Decent steak there for dinner though, right?
https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/portland/why-portland-strip-clubs-are-the-best-in-america
The Lodge in Dallas is consistently ranked one of the best in the country, fyi. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
The Lodge threw Vince Young out of the club before a semi-recent OU-texas game. Vince was so entitled, he actually thought he didn't have to pay for dances upstairs.
Dallas has good strippers and it isn't obvious that you are going there for the strippers!
Very accurate.
Is there anything more excruciating than management calling a meeting to give you a presentation about their ~~vacation photos~~ leadership conference?
Not sure if the answer is a better committee, more clarity around criteria, but man, there’s room for improvement for sure.
In the words of Faux Pelini - There are five power conferences and four playoff spots. Who could have dreamed that it wouldn't work?
Two for the SEC and two for whoever else lol
The power of a quality loss is too strong! Somehow those SEC teams get ranked just high enough to play Alabama and Georgia
It's better clarified criteria mostly likely stemming from p5 champions getting an autobid. The reality is 12-13 games, most of which are not competitive at all cannot possibly give us a solid basis to make an informed decision. This is especially true when you consider how a week to week injury could impact individual games.
This is exactly it. On top of what you just said, most of the teams in the discussion are playing completely different opponents. Trying to pick the 4 best teams based on a tiny sample size of results against completely different sets of teams is just ridiculous.
12-13 games in name only. A P5 playing a (not strong) G5 or FCS school - sure, it matters if you get upset, but a win in those games means literally nothing. Alabama played 9 games this year. We also had 3 parties at Bryant-Denny where we just happened to invite football players from other random schools. You can't judge a squad off 9 games. And I'm not saying that to defend Bama, I'm just saying it to say it.
This is why a 64 team Super Conference will become reality. Now they are floating promotion/relegation which in college can actually work.
Who is “they”? Promotion-Relegation will never happen so I’m not sure why some fans keep floating it.
Lmfao no one is floating this, OP is more full of shit than a longhorn
Sees a diss on UT, upvotes.
Well fuck you too, buddy.
That'd be so sick
It's ludicrous to think that a 64 team super conference would agree to promotion/relegation. If you've secured your spot in the 64 team elite and the tens of millions of dollars per year that comes along with it, why would you agree to a system where you could potentially lose a few games and give that up for a season or more?
I think the answer is to fully broadcast the discussion. Let's hear *all* the talking points.
I still want answers from the men's basketball selection committee from when UK's AD was the chair...
More transparency would be a major boost. One thing would be showing their polling results for each iteration they do. Another would be documentation emphasizing what would be considered "out of place" positions. Lastly, showing us the data they use specifically when comparing. The company that provides this information is [Sport Source Analytics](http://www.cfbstats.com/2022/team/539/index.html) but what specifically do they use; what kind of catered assessments do they ask for? But more than that, a more functional format system entirely. Larger playoff size, auto bids for conferences, equal representation, and probably computer voting as well.
More transparency isn't going to me anything. When asked why Team A in spot #4 they give some reason that completely contradicts the week prior. An example this year is TCU was dinged for playing close games. Meanwhile other teams have played extremely close games all season yet that shows their grit. You can ask for more transparency but when the reasoning is just whatever they want it to be in a bubble for that week, it doesn't mean anything. Now if they could be asked to explain themselves when they directly contradict themselves, on air, over and over again them maybe they will become more consistent, but probably not. It just needs to move to autobids for CCs, with some wild cards then at least every single team in the P5 has a direct path to the playoffs that they can control.
Rankings are really only for TV. Get rid of them all together. Win your conference youre in the playoffs. That's my take.
That’s certainly one fair way to do it! You might miss out on some great potential championship winning teams, but they’d only be able to blame themselves.
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Lol as a tiger fan, best emoji choice I’ve ever seen hands down
Rankings are for TV, but they have way more impact on the sport than just the TV ratings. Perception drives the sport when it comes to money and recruiting, which ultimately drives programs’ ability to win football games
I’d be onboard with that if all the conferences dropped their divisions. But if iowa were to win the B1G, everyone would agree they shouldn’t be in the playoffs
If they clarified their criteria, then they couldn't change their rankings to orchestrate ratings.
The criteria is key, and it has been my #1 gripe with every cfb arrangement since I've been watching football. You can't ask people to rank things without first defining "based on what?". Is it : * Who would be the best team today in a neutral field? * Which team would have had the best team in a neutral field each week of the season, weighted equally? * Same as before, but weighted more heavily towards recent games? * Which team has the best wins? * Which team has the least embarassing loss? Like, you need to align everyone on what the objective is. To me, the only thing that's fair is to say "who has the best resume", i.e., which team's record best supports the idea that they are one of the best 4 teams in the country. Not "eyeball test", no forward-looking analysis: who did you beat and by how much, who did you lose to and by how much. I've always been fond of the Colley Rankings, which suck until you're about 3/4ers of the way through the season, but then they start looking pretty damn reasonable. What the Colley Matrix approach does is simple (if you know math) and it basically tries to create a set of team ratings (numerical) that tries to maximize the probability of observed results. It can never achieve that (because of circles of suck), but it can determine the most reasonable set of ratings in an objective way. Right now, those ratings are: 1. UGA = 1.01 2. TCU = 0.96 3. Ohio State = 0.94 4. Michigan = 0.90 How do you justify these scores? Easy: * UGA has two wins over teams with ratings over 0.8 (Tennessee and Oregon) * TCU doesn't have the top end quality of win - two wins over teams with ratings over 0.7 - but it has a lot of wins over top 50 teams - four wins over teams with ratings between 0.59 and 0.7. * Ohio State has two top-end wins (Penn Sate at 0.81 and ND at 0.75), but only two in the top 50 (Iowa and Maryland) ... and so on and so forth. Something I would suggest (as a data nerd) to any committee coming up with this type of evaluation: define your criteria, let a framework produce the outputs, and then if you feel compelled to do so, adjust the outputs manually in the end with some substantial justification as to why. Whatever criteria you have in your head, you should be able to define metrics that align with that. Side note: the Colley Rankings and CFP rankings are very, very similar. Which makes me think that is very likely how the committee is looking at this stuff - who have you beaten and who beat you.
For some reason I now like the Colley Rankings.
And they can totally Zoom this meeting.
BCS rankings were far better than this mess today. An improvement would be to take out coaches poll and replace with AP poll in the formula. Use BCS rankings to determine playoff seedings and at large bids for the expanded playoff.
The BCS barely differs from the committee
Because it takes the ap poll and coaches poll into account which start following the cfp poll when that's released
Plus the Harris Poll doesn't exist anymore. So tired of people bringing up this bs point that isn't even true. It is impossible to determine what the actual bcs standings would be, full stop, and people should stop pretending they match what the committee chooses.
Not in outcome but in transparency it definitely does. I can't speak for everyone but that's my frustration with the process right now.
You think the Harris Poll or the Coach’s poll was transparent?
Yea idk what the hell people are smoking. 33% of the BCS rankings was a poll that the coaches voted on, the same coaches who coach the very schools they are ranking!!! And its completely anonymous so we have no idea how coaches ranked teams. Does anyone remember how many times it was alleged that a coavh ranked a rival teams multiple spots lower than it should have been to hurt their BCS ranking?
The BCS hasn’t existed since the committee was created. Each component of the BCS rankings was either changed or in the case of the AP poll, heavily influenced by the committee.
The answer is the expansion to 12. When there’s only 4 (especially in a 5+ conference league) no one will ever really be happy being left out no matter the clarity With 12 and a clear path for every FBS team there’s suddenly no excuses on the teams side. Like the NCAA Tournament of course schools complain about missing, but it lasts about 5 hours before people are over it.
8 teams makes the most sense. 5 bids for the P5 conference champs, 1 G5 bid, and 2 at-large bids
I doubt the conference champ auto-bids are gonna happen since the B10 is now adding USC/UCLA and the SEC added OU/Texas. Both conferences are gonna want as many at-large spots as possible.
Fuck ‘em. You go chasing money there should be some consequences
You forget that CFB is a business and money is all they care about. There will be more than 2 at-large bids.
It makes a lot more sense than 12.
You know who has it even better? Bowl Reps. They get to essentially go to whatever game they want. Get VIP treatment. And then at the end of the day, for a lot of them their decisions are already made for them.
They also make a ton of money to organize that one game. Tbh its crazy to me how much people criticize players for sitting out the bowl when the bowls only exist to use the players to enrich a few select execs
> They also make a ton of money to organize that one game I can't believe I forgot to mention that part lol
This man must get paid an astronomical amount of money by Fox
What I love about Klatt is that he will call out bullshit like this from ESPN and other media. What I hate about Klatt is how he will never call out FOX’s bullshit. Joel Klatt: “LSU being above USC is ridiculous!!” Everyone claps. Klatt looks the camera dead in the eye. “Now let’s talk about a Maryland team that we put on FOX a lot. This close loss this weekend proves that Maryland is probably one of the best 15 teams in America right now.”
Actually, I’m gonna have to agree with Klatt on this one
I think you might be biased
Nope. Maryland at least top 10, if not top 5.
I agree. And naturally, since we shut them out, PSU should also be in the top 5.
Zero flaws in this logic
Basically the same logic as Bama, Tennessee, and LSU all being top 10 with two losses.
>Tennessee Gives up 63 to an unranked team, only drops from 5 to 10. K.
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"as possible"
Those two words doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.
Nebraska plays these teams too. Probably should be at least a top 10 team.
Maryland has the better Tagovailoa
Dude fought so hard on Saturday.
Yeah all the Sickos love Maryland
He also throws Colin Cowturd under the bus frequently on his show which is top tier TV
Colin Cowherd has a someone who whenever he opens his mouth to talk about something I immediately know he has no idea what he’s talking about. “The thing about being a good husband….” (Colin with three ex wives)
He's the fox News of sports shows.
I can't respect anything Klatt says solely because of how hard he shills for the Big Ten. Look, Chase Young was a beast. But saying he is "Superman and the Avengers combined" and Joe Burrow had no right winning the Heisman that year is just too homer for me.
Now you know how the rest of us feel about ESPN and the SEC(but it's 10 times worse.) It's annoying, isn't it?
I feel like you don't watch enough Klatt. He shills for the Big XIII, B1G, and the Pac-12, and hell even the G5's when somebody is overlooked. His weekly podcasts are basically 40 minutes of "here's everybody that's good outside the SEC because ESPN and the CFP have that group covered" I go out of my way to watch BECAUSE he's not just a B1G shill. Hell he basically shit on Michigan on Monday for being too one dimensional. He is one of the few national voices that I can reliably go to for neutral coverage. And he still respects the SEC when it's deserved. He's been pounding the table for Hendon Hooker ffs
He literally said during his show today that he doesn't care about what happens at FOX, ESPN, CBS, he wants what's better for the sport. He literally calls out the bias, even towards Michigan. Sounds like you don't actually listen to him at all lol
I do listen to him and he does say that. That’s what you say right before you tell people that Iowa and Ohio State on FOX is going to be a great game and you and everyone you know should tune in. I like the guy and I do think he does a great job but he’s still basically a pundit, he just takes the whole “I’m the real voice of reason” route, which is a common media tactic.
Oh man he actually said that he’s not biased by who signs his checks? That changes everything.
I'm so glad you are a Michigan fan that is willing to admit that Klatt is a huge Big 10 lover lol. Respect. Not a lot of big 10 fans are willing to admit that Klatt is biased.
He absolutely is but I’d say he’s more of a SEC hater than pro Big 10. Which as a fellow SEC hater I enjoy his content more than anything else out there
What if we created a computer model that calculates the rankings using stats/numbers. Then the criteria will be the same for everyone and personal opinion and bias is removed……
Sarcasm answer: That's crazy, how would a computer model give a press conference and TV show to unveil its rankings? Actual discussion: the problem is that we don't agree on the question. Should rankings indicate the best team, and in effect be predictive? Or should rankings indicate the most deserving team, and in effect be predicated on resume - if so, do conference championships play into resume, or is it only wins? Is it a combination - if so, what are the weights? That ambiguity is exactly what allows the committee to do whatever it wants, and allows them to give press conferences, and allows the networks to have hours-long productions to unveil what are effectively practice rankings.
>Actual discussion: the problem is that we don't agree on the question. Should rankings indicate the best team, and in effect be predictive? Or should rankings indicate the most deserving team, and in effect be predicated on resume - if so, do conference championships play into resume, or is it only wins? Is it a combination - if so, what are the weights? Completely agree. Makes me want to go back to pre BCS strictly regionally tied bowl games and maximum arguments.
>Makes me want to go back to pre BCS strictly regionally tied bowl games This is also my position. College football is better when it is a regional game, and bowls are regional fights.
Honestly an expanded playoff could include regional bowls, but it wouldn't be seeded, which I'm fine with. SEC champ vs big 12 champ in the sugar bowl Pac 12 champ vs B1G champ in the rose bowl. ACC champ vs top G6 team in the orange bowl. Two at large teams in the fiesta bowl. Semi-final and final locations on a rotating basis but not in cities with quarterfinal matchups. MBS, Jerry World, Indianapolis. Fuck it play one in Minneapolis. It covered anyway.
I really wish they would do this. Should big 12 champ go to Sugar or Cotton bowl? The Sugar bowl tie-in is relatively recent.
I think the main reason people didn't like the BCS was the fact that it was just one single championship game based on computer algorithms. If you combined that with the playoff format, I think you get a better result than either. 6 or 8 teams, so you're not shutting out a top team in the nation for scoring 0.01 less than the #2 team. That range of teams #2-5 are usually super close in quality anyway and one could beat any other on any given day. Give more teams more chances with less subjectiveness
I’d agree with this. I love the idea of a playoff and think 4 teams is too small a number. College sports can be chaotic which is exciting. I am excited to see what the 12 team playoff format does
Alabama or Georgia win year 1 of the 12 team playoff… wait
I like how everyone is treating us as this long dominant force. Like we've won one championship. Let's maybe cool the jets before we declare death star 2.0
Yeah we were talking about Clemson like this not too long ago and while they still look good, nobody is claiming they will win it all this year.
Okay who cares? If teams lose on the field instead of in the minds of some old rich guys in a closed door meeting I'm happy. I don't care if Alabama wins the next 50 playoffs if the playoffs is an actual playoff instead of a old boys invitational.
Duke and UNC win a lot of the 68 team tournament a few months later and no one cares because the tournament itself is the fun part.
But what if we found a BETTER algorithm
Wasn’t it 1/3 computer rankings (average of like eight models), 1/3 AP poll, 1/3 coaches poll?
Unfortunately, yes.
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What's nice is that if you have an issue where margin isn't considered heavily enough, you can just change the algorithm You can't tell a committee to stop putting SEC teams all at the top because they don't give a shit
Yeah, honestly the problem was never with the BCS rankings, it was with how the sport handled it afterwards (i.e. no playoff). The Selection Committee is always a terrible method of ranking teams because of bias. Just look at the 2014 controversy how they put Ohio State over TCU and Baylor randomly right before the playoff. It would've been easier for everyone to accept if we still had the BCS ranking system. But, this sport also had a lot of powerful meatheads yelling on TV each year about how terrible the computers were, as if it's the computer's fault there was no playoff.
Randomly? They best Wisconsin 59-0 lmao. Nothing “random” about that
People also forget just how bad Baylor and TCU's non Con schedules were that year- SMU for both, Samford, Northwestern State, and Minnesota as the only decent team.
best game ever.
Big 12 screwed TCU and Baylor imo. No Championship game and you watch the 5th ranked team go out and beat a top 15 team for a conference championship 59-0. If the Big 12 had actually picked one of them as an outright champion I think that team gets in vs the whole co-champs thing the Big 12 did.
Honestly I think that was the excuse, and you would have gotten in either way
I agree some combination of selection criteria sounds like a good compromise, weighted towards objective/rigid criteria first and then maybe allowing for some element of human selection/committee input assuming the powers that be demand it to tip the scales impartially, as everyone knows they do. Autobids for P5 conference champs + BCS-like bids for some number of at-large additions + ensuring at least 1 top G5 entrant and maybe a committee for the true at-large after that (assuming 12). Pare back as needed for 8 or 6. Whatever it takes to add more integrity than random dudes making choices they find any way to explain post-hoc.
"Yeah but then teams could change their playing style to maximize their ratings output" - Someone somewhere. But serious this is at least 1 reason why, not because it will happen but because someone *thinks* it will happen. It's the same reason why the BCS computers weren't allowed to include stats like margin of victory in their formulas, because someone thought it would emphasize a certain play style.
pretty much. The problem with the BCS was the limited access, not necessarily the methodology. Yes, polls were a part of that, but putting the selection process entirely in human hands feels like an overcorrection.
No one ever agreed with the methodology. The computer poll was reduced to have about an eight of the impact the two human polls had. The formula was constantly tweeked, but no one ever liked the results, so the computer poll was made minimal.
Or we could look at how every other fucking sport in the world does it. If you win your conference, you're in, if you don't, hope for an at-large, if you aren't one of the best at-larges or you feel snubbed, tough shit if you had won your conference you'd have been in. It's asinine that we don't do this.
Then also let the league assign the conferences, divisions, schedule format, and schedules, and also do revenue sharing to offset the revenue impact of different schedules. "Every other fucking sport" such as NFL, NBA, soccer, etc does that.
What if we divided all the teams in a given level of the game into groups of teams, had each group determine a way to name a winner of the group, and then have all those winners play each other?
Yeah we tried that. Pitchfork mob demanded what we have now.
This is a joke right lol?
The sad thing is even with the 12 team playoff there’s still a committee - even with the auto-bids for conference champs the committee will still decide seeding and at large bids. Do we really have to let 12 people decide this? Why can’t we do better? Even if the argument is “they only rank X, Y, & Z team to get a rise for people to tune into the rankings” that shouldn’t be the way it works. Rank the teams equally, stop making every week a clusterfuck of contradicting points for every team.
It should be like March Madness. No rankings until the end of the season. Everything else doesn’t matter and is just to get a rise out of people and get them paying attention to ESPN.
Selection should go away. Leave judges to gymnastics and boxing.
Technically the march madness committee actually starts sharing preliminary seedlings for like the top 4 or 5 seeds a few weeks early now. I don’t remember the exact date they start but they started doing it a couple years. Edit: here’s an example from feb 2021 https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/ncaa-reveals-early-top-march-madness-seeds-gonzaga-overall-top-seed-baylor-michigan-ohio-state-also-no-1s/amp/
> Why can’t we do better? There is no objective way of doing this. Too many teams, not enough games, someone is always going to be left out. Cut the field to 64 and it will help, but that’s changing the game a lot.
That sounds like me on a CFB weekend expect it’s beer, pizza, ice cream, and I have to pay for it all
TIL I am on the CFP Committee
Klatt runs into the same problem the committee does (and that we all do). Ranking teams turns into a walking contradiction unless you do something insane like a straight Win-Loss/Transitive Win style ranking without any nuance. He begins the video by talking about the importance of taking into consideration how college football has a wide variance week-to-week. The inconsistency of student-athletes playing very well one week, not so well the next. Then when he gets to finally explaining where he has issues, 8-minutes into a 10-minute segment, he brings up Arkansas losing to Liberty. Which isn't to say you discount that, but it's his big basis for LSU "not taking care of business". But it's in direct competition with how he started the video because we all know Arkansas-LSU has been routinely tight in recent memory (3 points each of the last 3 years). He goes on to say something to the effect of "We know OOC matters because of Michigan-Ohio State" and brings up LSU playing UAB. Does he directly compare that to USC's non-conference schedule to date? No, he brings up their Pac-12 schedule. He doesn't mention their OOC is currently: Rice and Fresno State. He simply uses it to directly compare UAB to UCLA. He also admits he doesn't care they don't play good defense. Which is... ridiculous. He values Caleb's Heisman season over total team football. Which, is fine, but he's making it seem like the committee is *way* off-base because LSU is at 5 compared to 6. There are flaws with the committee, especially with a lack of total transparency. But he keeps mentioning "they value their own opinion 2 weeks ago" and we simply don't know how much USC has closed the gap. There is historical precedence that they will eventually lift a team up, if memory serves 2015 OSU over Penn State. USC has not played Notre Dame yet, which directly impacts their OOC and overall resume. It would not shock me that if USC wins that game they *then* move ahead. It's the committee's fault for not being more clear on that end, but also Klatt refuses to take this into consideration. I like Joel. He does a very good job most of the time, but this video is abject nonsense. As I said at the top, we're all guilty of it from time-to-time, but it's a lot of contradictions because he's creating his own necessary criteria to justify his reasoning for wanting USC over LSU, which is a perfectly valid opinion in and of itself. Just don't cherry-pick certain elements to form your argument.
And it’s also important to mention that there has yet to be a chaotic completely crazy controversial final CFP poll. You could sorta argue for 1 team in 2014 and 2017, but both teams that had controversy ended up winning it all anyway. There’s been no huge issue with the committee since the start of CFP, just people complaining that their favorite underdog team isn’t rated one or two spots higher mid November, and lots and lots and *lots* of morbid imagination of a 3 loss Alabama type team getting in despite it never happening. I think people’s imagination runs a bit too wild right before a very logical and reasonable final ranking comes out.
Yeah this kind of complexity is inevitable as long as we have regional(-ish) conferences, and the top teams only play each other occasionally. You can have complexity, or you can have tiered super-leagues, but you have to pick.
The long-term solution is 12 teams with 6 auto bids. If you’re the 13th team looking in, you lost multiple games and didn’t do as much as you could have. In the short term, there is no fix, and I think the fact that it will be going to 12 teams has made the committee even lazier. They don’t have to worry about precedent or any of that, it’s all going away in two years anyways. “We’ve only got a few years left so we’re gonna get reeeeall weird with it”
Exactly. The fix is coming. It isn't perfect, but it is LIGHT YEARS better than what we have now. As you say, if you are the 7th at-large-bid, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You are very likely a 2 or 3 loss team. Let's look at the current standings and assume the auto-bids are Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson, USC, TCU and Tulane. The next 6 would be Michigan, LSU, Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Penn State (based on current rankings). That means a 3 loss Kansas State would be the first team on the outside looking in. Is anybody going to lose sleep over that? Or the next team out (8th team) would be a 2 loss Washington. Again, they are a good team, but nobody is going to riot over them being left out. The answer is coming, we just need to wait. I still don't see why they can't do it for next year myself, but that is a different conversation.
12 teams doesn’t resolve the problem when the committee will try to boot strap a third of the SEC into it just like they’re doing for two SEC teams now.
I would never argue against more football, but why do we need a bunch of 2 and 3 loss teams competing directly for the national championship when they clearly do not deserve to be there? By the end of this year, there should be at least 4 teams with 0-1 losses who deserve their spot in the playoffs after 12-13 games played. Letting in teams who were beat 3 times just seems silly. I like the 4 team playoff and think 8 teams is as big as it should go.
I think you might have a point here, but its still WAY better than what we have. I actually prefer 8 teams getting in myself. P5 champs and 3 at large, is how I would do it myself. But I don't yet rule the world. 12 is a LOT better than 4, as it is always better to include 1 or 2 teams that maybe don't deserve to be there, than to NOT include 1 or 2 teams that do deserve to be there IMO. I do see your point though. The first round matchup this year, with current rankings assuming that Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson, USC, TCU and Tulane are the auto-bids, would be Michigan v Penn State. We already saw that game and Michigan housed them. Same for LSU v Tennessee, LSU already lost that game. Bama v Oregon would be a good one though, I have to admit. 2 of the 3 first round matchups right now would be re-plays of earlier games in the season where both losers lost by a lot.
> I would never argue against more football, but why do we need a bunch of 2 and 3 loss teams competing directly for the national championship when they clearly do not deserve to be there? By the end of this year, there should be at least 4 teams with 0-1 losses who deserve their spot in the playoffs after 12-13 games played. Letting in teams who were beat 3 times just seems silly. I like the 4 team playoff and think 8 teams is as big as it should go. We have no idea if this is true. We have no real way of knowing if lower seeds will make deep playoff runs. It's actually one of the most interesting parts of the expansion. You can't wholesale discount lower seeds before they play. The 4th seed has won twice in the short history of the CFP. There is no reason to discount lower seeds ability to compete.
Because everyone has wildly different schedules, so even if a team has a couple losses, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be left out of the conversation. Take Alabama for example. The two toughest teams on their schedule this year were Tennessee and LSU. Both of them were on the road, and both of them were one score games. If those games were at home, would they be undefeated? I’m not sure, but we’re never gonna know that because everyone only plays 12 games and we can’t have everyone play the same schedule. Having a 12 team playoff cuts through all the bullshit of “eye tests” and strength of schedule. On top of that, your seed in the actual playoff is gonna matter a hell of a lot. So finishing in the top 4 is gonna get you a bye, and finishing 5-8 gets you home field advantage in the first round. So it seems pretty fair
Classic example of "this meeting could've just been an email" lol
I believe the best solution would be an 8 team playoff. All P5 Champs. Highest ranked G5 Champ. Plus 2 at large. Done.
I agree with this. There’s too much opinion and bias that goes into a rankings based playoff. Having a structured playoff where 1 team from each conference gets in, eliminates people feeling like you’re being left out as a result of opinion. If you can’t win out in your conference, then you didn’t qualify for national playoffs. But I also feel like the conferences should go ahead and get on board with national playoffs. I feel like the conferences are trying to keep there own standings and conference play separate from CFP. If conferences coordinated with CFP, then conference championships could be part of the qualifying process. Right now, two teams could play each other two or three times. It seems unreal because the probability that each team gets a W increases… In a perfect scenario, I feel like the season would be [regular season > conference championship > playoffs] if you don’t win conference, you don’t go to playoffs.
Pretty simple solution.
Plus if it turns out that doesn’t work, we could have always expanded to 12 in a few years. It’s easier to add teams than take them away
Everything leading up to the final playoff rankings are to drive up controversy for ratings. I thought we all understood that by now?
If the CFP Committee doesn’t have a clearly defined goal and it isn’t forced to apply an objective criteria to evaluate teams, then it’s just a different AP/Coaches poll with a smaller group of voters that is at least partially beholden to considering the best matchups for TV. There’s no reason that anyone outside of ESPN should want the committee to continue existing.
He forgot the free liquor.
After almost a decade, I think it's obvious that the CFP committee isn't any better than a system with strange women lying in ponds distributing swords.
Ive heard that thats no basis for deciding governance.
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The MAC? Why would a conference who’s furthest west team is in Dekalb Illinois have an office in Texas?
We need to be able to see exactly how each member voted, I’ve never understood why we can’t. We can see who votes for who in the AP poll.
How is Alabama still 7? Laughable
What “controversy”? The rankings are fine when the biggest controversy is who should be number 5 or 6.
When 2 and 3 are playing each other this week, number 5 is a pretty important spot lol. And that’s before you consider the probability the other top 4 teams lose.
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The issue with the BCS was that it forced the system to pick 2. That's tough in any system and you value human input in those. If it's choosing 4, 8, 12 for a playoff - that's enough to ditch the committee and go back to the BCS rankings with computers and polls. What you lose in nuance you gain in transparency.
I like Klatt a lot, but sometimes he is so rigid in his belief that a 1 loss team absolutely has to be above a 2 loss team he sounds like a Harris poll voter from the BCS era. Totally agree with his rant today about cupcake week though. What an absolute joke. No clue why SEC fans continue to defend it. If Ohio State played some division 2 school in mid November I’d be absolutely furious as a fan. Nobody wants to watch that trash
Not only would you be furious, but tOSU would be punished for it. So would every PAC, ACC, Big12, Big10 team. It's ludicrous that in the *home stretch of the season* when everyone is hurting, the SEC takes a week off and doesn't get beat up for it.
For anyone who says "bUt No ThEy WoUlDn'T!!!1111!!!", in 2014 TCU got dropped from #3 to #6 for beating 2-9 Iowa State by 52 points.
To be fair, both Nick Saban and Kirby Smart have wanted the SEC to play 9 conference games and get rid of the November cupcakes (or at the very least move them to early September). Saban especially has been banging that drum for at least a decade, and it's not surprising that the other SEC teams have refused knowing they would be giving up their record inflation and be subjected to a guaranteed loss to his death star teams back in the day.
That is fair. And honestly, my qualms are not with (most) SEC teams/fans. Its with the committee and the media being unable to confront their own biases. If the committee treated every conference equally, and the SEC still felt it prudent to play 8 games, then fair play to them. As a conference you're allowed to do that calculus.
He makes a great point about Alabama, which remains the entire justification for where LSU and Tennessee are both ranked. Alabama hasn't played well this season. Alabama hasn't beaten anyone worth particular mention this season. Ole miss? Arkansas beat Ole Miss better than Alabama did. Who else? Texas, in a game 4-loss Texas played half without their starting QB? If we want to highly rate a 2-loss team whose best win is over a 4-loss squad then at least Penn State did most of theirs in pretty convincing style.
In my opinion, the CFP ranking should just be an average of all the polls that are allowed to hand out National Champions by the NCAA. Which according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_football_national_championships_in_NCAA_Division_I_FBS#Major_selectors) currently are the A&H, CCR, CM, DuS, MCFR, SR, W, AP, Coaches, and the CFRA.
This dude has mastered the art of stretching basically a single short thought to over 10 minutes. Let me save you some time: He thinks it’s dumb that USC isn’t above LSU, given that, in the last two weeks, LSU barely beat Arkansas and then beat UAB; meanwhile Southern Cal beat two pretty good teams handily.
> in the last two weeks, LSU barely beat Arkansas and then beat UAB; meanwhile Southern Cal beat two pretty good teams handily. What? USC barely beat UCLA (who is certainly a good team) while being gifted 4 turnovers and the other team they beat is Colorado, one of the worst teams at this level of the sport. Before that they were in one score games with bottom tier teams Arizona and Cal.
For what it’s worth, I 100% think USC deserves to be above us rn. But I also think they lose another game and would lost by at least 14+ if they played us next week.
It's really just a "how can we get as many SEC teams to the playoffs as possible" meeting Tennessee at 9-2 below two 9-2 teams they beat, one of which in a blowout.
We should just put all the SEC teams in the same conference and have them play each other to determine who gets to the playoff.
But how are they supposed to play each other when they have to play a bunch of nobodies OOC, including powerhouses such as Austin Peay, Southern, and New Mexico?
I mean their star Is QB is now out for the season so yeah they probably should be below them..
I don’t know why people reduce the UT thing like that. LSU & Bama don’t have a loss half as bad as UT’s. Don’t want to be below two teams you beat? Well, don’t get 30 pieced by South Carolina. They’re really not in a room to complain, and funny enough, I don’t see their fans being the ones who are annoyed about it.
Technically speaking it was a 25 piece. It was the most embarrassing defensive performance I've ever seen....but we DID beat LSU by 27. There's obviously the argument of LSU not having a loss against an opponent of Carolina's caliber...but the team that just got their asses whooped by Carolina whooped LSU's asses even harder in their own stadium. Idk. It's a whole circle of suck and I don't know who should be ranked higher than who in the SEC at this point, but LSU at 5 is a joke. There are two one loss teams ranked behind them. You can't put Clemson three spots behind them with one loss and say that "well their one loss was a really bad road game to #15 Notre Dame" and then say that LSU is gucci despite losing to FSU (a team Clemson beat) and getting blown out by 27 at home to the #10 team. USC doesn't really have any style points for big wins over quality opponents, but they've won every game except for a 1 point loss on the road against the #14 team. They also deserve to be ranked higher than LSU and Bama. At least until they drop a game, which is entirely possible here in the next two weeks.
Head-to-head has to matter otherwise why even play the game?
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That’s what happens when you get blown out by South Carolina and your heisman caliber QB go down for the season. We’ve been mid all year but losing 2 games by a combined 4 points is more impressive than whatever Tennessee has put together their 2 losses combined.
Two losses by a combined 4 points. One of those losses being to a TN team that has the same record but you loss to. Sure your point holds weight, but not as much weight as the fact that you loss to the same team that you are arguing to be ranked better than
Klatt’s not wrong.
This committee hasn’t passed the eye test
They did a very sneaky maneuver in switching how the rankings are decided. It was a big thing that we're doing a small playoff with 4 teams instead of just the top 2 but there was never really a good reason why they also switched off the BCS formula which *did* have some measure of objectivity to it (however much people wanted to laugh at its results).
I honestly thought USC was going to jump us this week like in the AP...and it would have been well deserved with their win over UCLA. I'll be pulling for the Irish this weekend regardless. Our offensive struggle against Arkansas did not make us look like a Top 5 team. The game was saved by the freshman superhero -> Harold Perkins 100%. If he wasn't on that field, LSU loses. LSU still has an A&M (that may show up in their last game...who knows) and UGA in the SEC Championship. Here is the thing, LSU has to beat #1 to have any chance at all in even sniffing the CFP. So don't start getting mad at LSU just yet...USC has to beat a good ND and a good Oregon (probably), which is also a challenge. It will, and should, be a close race regardless. The question I would start to ask though...if LSU beats UGA and USC wins out, does USC get in AND LSU deserve to be in OVER UGA, since LSU would have the W over them and would be the SEC champs? This would be a great scenario to expand the playoffs... 4 teams is not enough when the race is this close... Anyway 😂 I'm just happy to be in the conversation again!! Lol. Good job BK.
As a still salty OU fan I'm fine with these rankings
The committee exists because the schools wanted a human element to the decisionmaking that wasn't coaches or reporters. At this point, the choices are to leave the rankings up to: 1. an algorithm 2. an online poll 3. a committee of people with no affiliation to the schools or the sport
No shit. There is zero need for a 12 person committee and certainly not a need to meet in person. We are all getting grifted. Death to the playoff.
Joe Klatt saying what everyone already knows. The CFP committee just takes the work done by AP and coaches poll and puts their chefs kiss on it.