Conference games damage playoff hopes
The rhetoric surrounding the cannibalization within the Pac-12 doesn’t usually get roiling until November.
But the coaches got a head start on their arguments during Tuesday’s conference call, three days after the underdogs in all five Pac-12 games pulled off upsets and essentially eliminated any chance of the conference placing a team in the College Football Playoff.
Oregon State rallied from 28 down to beat Colorado in overtime. Cal didn’t score an offensive touchdown, but it beat then-No. 15 Washington.
Arizona State snapped USC’s 19-game home winning streak. Then-No. 19 Oregon inexplicably lost 44-15 at Arizona.
“I think it absolutely hurts us,” said Stanford head coach David Shaw, whose home loss to Washington State left the Cougars as the conference’s only remaining one-loss team.
Washington State jumped to No. 10 in this week’s Associated Press poll, representing the Pac-12’s only team in the top 15. The SEC has five teams in the top 13 and the Big Ten and Big 12 each have three in the top 15.
No. 16 Utah is the only other Pac-12 team in the poll. Heck, the American Athletic Conference has two among the top 17 — No. 9 Central Florida and No. 17 Houston — and the Mountain West Conference has two in the top 20 (No. 18 Utah State and No. 20 Fresno State).
Washington head coach Chris Petersen suggested expanding the playoff and including each conference winner. Shaw said college football should standardize scheduling across all conferences.
The coaches made a lot of valid arguments about the parity of teams and diversity of schemes in the Pac-12 and the rigorous travel and tough road environments in the conference, but their best points had to do with imbalanced scheduling.
“We are a deep conference,” Shaw said. “We are a difficult conference. We have a lot of things that other people don’t do. A lot of teams in our conference will play four or five straight conference games, sometimes without a bye or a nonconference opponent mixed in there.
“I think the Pac-12 office has talked a lot about these issues, and I’m looking forward to more discussions in how to make sure all the conferences have very similar ways to schedule. That’s the best way we can truly evaluate or compare.”
The Pac-12, Big Ten and Big 12 play nine-game conference schedules and are the only Power 5 conferences to entirely miss the CFP at least once since college football adopted a four-team format in 2014. The Pac-12 is in danger of missing the final four for the third time in five years.
The SEC has five CFP berths and two national titles in the first three years of the current format. Its teams play eight conference games and spend one week in November playing inferior nonconference competition — which pads the win column and allows the best players to rest.
Next month, No. 1 Alabama plays Citadel, No. 4 LSU plays Rice, No. 6 Georgia plays Massachusetts, No. 11 Kentucky plays Middle Tennessee, and No. 13 Florida plays Idaho.
Meanwhile, the Pac-12 will continue its in-conference slog — a grind that already has included Washington State beating Utah, which beat Stanford, which beat Oregon, which beat Washington, which beat Colorado, which beat Arizona State, which beat USC, which beat Washington State. Poof. There’s a cycle that knocks the conference out of CFP contention.