NCAA playoff should mean more diversity
Schroeder: Growing regionalization of postseason a troubling development
Even now, during this brief interlude between the College Football Playoff ’s semifinals and the national championship, you can probably hear the chant. It’s swelling from somewhere in the South — no, sorry, make that from everywhere in the South — but the epicenter appears to be Atlanta:
SEC! SEC! SEC!
Which is a bad thing for college football.
Stop right now. This is not — not — an anti-SEC screed.
Good on Georgia and Alabama for reaching the College Football Playoff. Congratulations to both for advancing. If the atmosphere at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Monday will feel like an SEC championship game — well of course, they’ll say, because as the slogan goes, “it just means more” — it’s only because the Bulldogs and Crimson Tide won their way there, fair and square, under the current setup.
It’s possible ’Bama and Georgia will give us a game for the ages. It’s clear they’ll produce a worthy national champion — the SEC’s ninth in the last 12 seasons, which is a tremendous run.
But the increasing regionalization of college football’s postseason is not a good development.
Despite Alabama’s grinding, eventual Sugar Bowl dominance, it’s not inconceivable this title game could have been Clemson vs. Georgia — a battle of schools located fewer than 80 miles
apart. Had a play or two gone differently in the Rose Bowl, it would have been Oklahoma vs. Alabama. Oklahoma-Clemson wasn’t all that farfetched, either.
You pick the matchup. It didn’t really matter. From the moment the four-team bracket was announced, it was essentially a Southern regional tournament; the vast majority of the country’s college football fans were outsiders looking in.
Troubling trend
Sure, it’s a feature of the system — of 130 FBS teams, only four make the Playoff. But when the largest swaths of the country are regularly shut out, it’s a troubling trend.
“You can’t look at anything in college football as a snapshot, as a one-week or one-season snapshot,” says Bill Hancock, the Playoff ’s executive director, denying there’s a trend. “And the game has never been more popular.”
But is it? And will it be? The Playoff semifinals drew very nice TV ratings, bolstering Hancock’s argument. We’ll see whether the championship game will be as popular — but over the last few years, the ratings were better when the matchups aren’t concentrated in one region. Since 2011, going back to the old Bowl Championship Series, the most eyeballs have been when teams from different regions squared off.
The highest-rated national championship game in that span featured Oregon and Ohio State in January 2015. That was also the first season of the Playoff, so it could be an anomaly. But Oregon vs. Auburn (2011 BCS national championship, 2010 season) and Alabama-Notre Dame (2013 BCS national championship, 2012 season) rated well above the rest, too — all of which featured matchups between teams from the South.
Unless you are ESPN, the goal of the Playoff is not TV ratings but to get the “four best teams.” Along those lines, Rick Neuheisel, the former coach and current analyst, liked the Playoff selection committee’s choices this season.
“A good thing,” he called it, because in his mind the committee followed its criteria rather than gerrymandering a conference champion into the field — but don’t misunderstand.
“It’s a bad thing in the long term,” Neuheisel continues, and his point is this:
The selection criteria need to change.
‘Best’ hard to quantify
What is “best” exactly? Short answer: Whatever each committee member thinks it is. It can change from year to year, or week to week.
No conspiracy theories here, and no claims of intentional bias. Probably no one watches more football than the committee members, or tries harder to separate perception from performance. But in a short season with very few good comparison points, objective measurements — like winning a conference championship — should mean much more than an intangible “eye test.”
It’s in part why Neuheisel advocates for Playoff expansion (never mind going to eight teams, he’d like 12). And all of this is before we get to Central Florida’s case, made by departing coach Scott Frost after the Knights completed a perfect season in the Peach Bowl with a win against Auburn — a team which, you might recall, beat Alabama and Georgia this year (and lost at Clemson by a touchdown) — that they should have been in the Playoff. Failing that, UCF athletics director Danny White claimed the national championship. UCF’s regular-season schedule is the reason why, as cool and defiant as that was, it was semi-silly. Still, why shouldn’t the Knights have a chance to play for it all?
But let’s be honest. If the Playoff is ever expanded, it won’t be about providing opportunity for the Group of Five. That all-SEC BCS title game between Alabama and LSU was the impetus for the Playoff. But Alabama-Georgia hasn’t generated the same, uh, concern.
Among the Playoff ’s powerbrokers, there is no push for expansion. That’s no as in zero.
“We’ve got no interest in exploring that,” Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott says. “We really think we got it right with four teams in terms of balancing the regular season and the excitement of the Playoff.”
Scott’s sentiments are shared by the other Power Five commissioners — the guys with voting power — so eight isn’t happening anytime soon.
But when it comes to how they arrive at the four-team field, count Scott as someone who wanted otherwise. When the Playoff ’s management committee — the 11 FBS commissioners plus Notre Dame’s athletics director — devised the system, Scott wanted to make a conference championship a requirement for inclusion.
“I believed that would have been the ideal system,” Scott says. “You should have to win something to qualify for it, No. 1. And No. 2, it would ensure a national spread of interest and fan bases. It was in the long-term best interest (of college football).
“But that wasn’t the will of the group.”
‘True national representation’
According to the selection protocol, when comparing similar teams, winning a conference championship is supposed to be a tiebreaker. But winning a conference championship ought to be a prerequisite; not winning one should be a deal-breaker.
The selection criteria are set, though.
“I don’t think it’s something that’s going to be reopened,” Scott says.
But if one of the desired features of the Playoff is, as Scott puts it, “true national representation,” maybe it should be reviewed. During that 12year span we referenced earlier, Ohio State’s victory against Oregon after the 2014 season was the only national title won by a team from outside the South (ACC powers Clemson and Florida State won the others).
The easy argument is: Play better. But those bowl records, while overcooked in terms of analysis, also suggest that perhaps those teams from other regions are, in fact, playing better football than perhaps they’re sometimes credited with, while other leagues aren’t exactly the slaughterhouses we’re conditioned to expect (see Big Ten: 7-1; SEC: 4-5).
It’s also worth noting that the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12 — which have all been left out of the Playoff in the first four seasons — play nine-game conference schedules. The ACC and SEC, you might remember, play eight. That’s each league’s choice, and they have different reasons for their different formats. But it’s also why subjective comparisons are difficult and sometimes impossible — and why using objective measurements should be preferable whenever possible.
“In my mind, what is better for football is ‘more deserving’ teams,” Neuheisel says. “You ought to have to win, and you can’t just sit there and say this team is that much better.
“But until they do that, we’re stuck dealing the ‘best.’ ”
Insert your own air quotes. Again, using the current criteria, the selection committee got it right this season. And unless the Playoff expands, someone will always get left out. But when the sport’s epicenter is continually concentrated in one region, it’s also true that the perception of regional strength can outpace the actual performance.
The Playoff is not going to expand anytime soon. The selection criteria are unlikely to be altered. Which means the increasing regionalization of the sport might not change, either.
Get ready to hear a lot more over the next few days about how it just means more. And in Alabama vs. Georgia, we might be in for a really fun show.
But it would be nice if over the next few years, the College Football Playoff just meant more diversity.