SEMIFINAL LINEUP SET
Top seed Alabama faces Washington, Clemson meets Ohio State on New Year’s Eve
Controversy is essentially guaranteed in the College Football Playoff, not so much a bug in the format as a feature. So when Ohio State, which did not win its conference, was selected for the four-team bracket Sunday while Penn State, the Big Ten titlist, wasn’t, it injected a bit more drama than usual.
“I don’t think anyone likes controversy,” said Bill Hancock, the Playoff ’s executive director. “It’s a four-team tournament, and everybody knows it. But what we don’t mind is there is great competition for the four spots. Fierce competition is good for college football.”
Translation: Ohio State is in despite losing to Penn State, and Penn State is out despite winning the Big Ten? Great! And how did that square with a supposed emphasis on winning conference titles, which is one of the few objective measures available in a
subjective process?
“Football seasons are like snowflakes,” Hancock said. “They’re all different.”
That’s probably the best way to look at what is, if not delicate — the analogy only goes so far — certainly a collective, highly unscientific evaluation. And so is this:
For the third consecutive season, the selection committee, charged with selecting the “four best teams,” whatever that means and however it gets there, got it right: Alabama (obviously), Clemson, Ohio State and Washington are the correct answers to a swirling set of questions.
As it turned out, the big comparison was not between Penn State and Ohio State but between Penn State and Washington. Either way, it came down to a simple measurement.
Winning your conference matters. Beating other contenders matters. But so does the rest of the season. Ohio State’s résumé was better than Penn State’s, even though the Nittany Lions beat the Buckeyes and won the Big Ten. But Pac-12 champion Washington’s résumé was better, too.
The Huskies finished 12-1. Penn State was 11-2. We probably didn’t need to go much further.
Look at it another way. When the regular season ended Saturday, three Power Five teams had one loss. One was unbeaten (sorry Western Michigan, we said Power Five). Those teams are in the Playoff. In the end, in a sport with 12 or 13 games, wins matter most.
“Winning is vitally important,” said Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt, the selection committee’s chairman.
It has to be the most vital factor. Strength of schedule has to be important, too. Winning conference titles needs to mean plenty. Head-to-head results must count.
But in the end, you have to win. Hocutt cited Penn State’s nonconference loss to Pittsburgh and a “non-competitive loss” to Michigan (score: 49-10) as factors. Washington’s only loss was 26-13 to Southern California (which finished the season in the CFP’s top 10 and will play in the Rose Bowl against, ahem, Penn State).
We could quibble — and proba- bly should — about Washington’s terrible non-conference schedule of Rutgers, Idaho and Portland State. As one example, Oklahoma fans will forever wonder what might’ve happened if the Sooners had played that type of slate rather than Houston and Ohio State. Conversely for Ohio State, a threetouchdown road victory against Oklahoma was a pretty significant marker — and a defining difference in the comparison with Penn State, along with a win against Michigan, more than enough to convince the committee the Buckeyes were better.
That’s where they arrived in Washington vs. Penn State, too, despite the Huskies’ weak nonconference schedule.
Trying to pin the selection committee down on the hows and whys is a futile endeavor. Because college football fans want concrete reasons, we’ll all keep trying to get answers. But the structure is set up to for amorphous decisionmaking, and that’s probably as it should be in a sport that is anything but homogeneous. (We had a formula once, A+ B + C = BCS. How’d you like it?)
Hocutt could — and did, amazingly enough — talk about how the committee members “spent considerable time … discussing and analyzing all the statistical categories that measure the performance on the field each and every week.” This included — really — turnover margin. Washington, he informed us, ranked No. 1 nationally while Penn State ranked No. 50. Make of that whatever you will, but let’s hope nobody on the committee made too much of it.
The only stat that really mattered, that probably should have mattered, was the won-lost record. But inside the room, or more important inside each committee member’s head, it comes down to a subjective opinion: I believe this team is better. Stats serve only to confirm the bias. And that’s fine. So is the ensuing controversy.
At some point, the cries to expand to an eight-team bracket will grow very loud. The format would presumably feature automatic berths for the Power Five conference champions, another for the highest-ranked Group of Five conference champion and two at- large slots.
But there is no real impetus among college football’s powerbrokers to change, which only means the, uh, competition controversy will continue, even as it morphs into new and unusual forms.
This year, the committee broke new ground in selecting a team that didn’t win its conference championship. We’re still waiting on the other big move: multiple teams from one conference in the bracket. It easily could have happened this season. It probably won’t be long before it occurs. People will get all worked up about that, too.
“It’s very good there are no strings attached (to the process),” Hancock said. “All the committee has to do is select the best four teams. I think over the next 10 years, we’ll see a lot of different permutations — because every year is different.”
In other words: Let it snow.