While college football fans were riveted to the two playoff games on New Year’s Day (make that one-and-a-half playoff games, as the second half of the Rose Bowl was hardly must-see T.V.), some commentators could hardly wait to seize the moment to criticize the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), college football’s previous format for determining its national champion. The point most often made by such commentators in the two games’ aftermath is that the BCS would have yielded a championship matchup that didn’t include Oregon or Ohio State, the two teams that have now earned their places in Monday’s championship game. That is true, but it is hardly the self-evident demonstration of the superiority of the new system, the superiority of the new system’s selection process, or the inherent wisdom of adding more rounds of playoffs, that those who make this observation pretend it to be.
If it had been used to fill this year’s 4-team playoff, the BCS selection process would have yielded the same four teams — and it would have done so without needlessly jerking TCU around from its penultimate to its final rankings, as the 13-member committee that determined this year’s field did. (TCU was #3 going into the season’s final week, beat Iowa State 55-3, and was rewarded by the committee by being dropped to #6.) The BCS selection process, however, would likely have changed the pairings, with Florida State meeting Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl and Oregon playing Alabama in the Rose. But if these four teams had each played as well in these hypothetical matchups as they did on New Year’s Day, then the BCS selection process would presumably have yielded the same championship matchup that the committee’s pairings have yielded.
Nothing about what has transpired, in other words, suggests that the committee-based selection process is superior to the BCS selection process. Indeed, if the committee had picked the participants for a 2-team playoff, it would have left out not only undefeated Florida State — which, before the Seminoles’ defeat at the hands of the 1-loss Ducks, had surely earned a chance to play for the title — but also Ohio State, which has now shown itself to be one of the nation’s two best teams. So, the “problem” wasn’t with the BCS selection process — a process that is actually far better than the current one — but with the number of teams invited to the playoff field in the BCS era (two).
It may well be that college football has now found the sweet spot in terms of the number of teams that are invited to its postseason playoff. At the least, this was a season that seemingly benefitted from having a 4-team playoff, rather than a 2-team playoff, because there was no clear standout team. Florida State, Oregon, Alabama, and Ohio State (listed in the order of their pre-bowl accomplishments, as indicated by the Anderson & Hester Rankings) had as many combined losses in the regular season (3) as they had combined wins over the pre-bowl top-10 — again, based on the Anderson & Hester Rankings. (In comparison, in 2005 — a season in which college football benefitted from avoiding a semifinal round — powerhouses Texas and USC combined for as many wins versus the pre-bowl top-10 as this year’s top-4 did, against no losses.) Now Oregon and Ohio State have each notched a New Year’s Day win over a top-10 team, in the process truly earning their spots in next week’s title game — not only because they each won a playoff game, but also because they are now the two teams that have accomplished the most in college football this season, based on the totality of that season. Ideally, that’s what a playoff in any sport should strive to produce for its championship game — a matchup between the two teams that have been the best overall, not merely the two teams that have been the best since the playoff started.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay, however, cannot wait to extend the playoffs (even though doing so “will probably phase out the bowls”). Gay claims that expanding the playoffs would simply be too profitable for college football not to do so: “It’s leaving money on the table.” (Funny how we were so often told that “greed” was the thing standing in the way of having a playoff.) But in direct contrast to this year’s result, Gay’s preferred 8-team (or 16-team) field would not generally result in the two best teams playing in the championship game — or in the best team winning. More often than not, at least one of the two best teams would have an off game and lose in either the quarterfinals or semifinals. (Even if the two best teams each had an 80 percent chance of winning in each of those four separate games, that works out to about a 60 percent chance that one of them would lose one of the four games.)
Nor would such an expanded, watered-down playoff clearly make more money, because it would come at the expense of the best regular season in all of sports — which makes a lot of money. Experience has shown that sacrificing a sport’s regular season for the sake of its postseason doesn’t necessary make it more lucrative (see “basketball, college”). This year, based on the committee’s rankings, 2-loss Mississippi State (which now has three losses after having been thumped by Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl) and 2-loss Michigan State (which lost by 19 to Oregon and by 12 at home to Ohio State) would both have needlessly been invited to the playoff, thereby rendering the SEC and Big Ten titles essentially meaningless. Moreover, it should go without saying that doubling the number of playoff teams reduces each team’s accomplishment — and reward — in making the playoffs, by half.
Some commentators speak of playoffs as if they are arrangements decreed by the sports gods — arrangements that infallibly ensure that the team that wins each game is always the best team. Witness the commentary from the Washington Post’s Adam Kilgore, who writes of the two teams playing for the title on January 12, “We know they are the two best teams, because we just saw them prove it on New Year’s Day.” But the notion that the team that wins a game is always the best, rather than merely the best on that given day, is rather juvenile. Is Virginia Tech really better than Ohio State because the 7-6 Hokies beat Ohio State — on the road — earlier this season? During the 2005-06 season, would 9-2 Ohio State really have been better than 12-0 USC if the Buckeyes had upset the Trojans in a semifinal matchup on New Year’s Day 2006 (thereby denying fans a chance to see this game)? (Kilgore also writes that the BCS would have left Ohio State out because of the Buckeyes’ insufficient pedigree, which is a real head-scratcher.)
In truth, “playoff” is just another word for “nothing before the playoff matters” (for the teams involved). It’s a format in which the slate is wiped clean by a sport’s powers-that-be and only the games from that point forward are deemed to count. It doesn’t reward season-long excellence; it rewards teams that get hot at the end. It’s a format that appeals to the casual fan, the marginally interested spectator who wants to be able to tune in at the end and see the whole show. And it’s also a format that appeals to the progressive mindset, which doesn’t like messiness in life and wants nearly every aspect of human affairs to be tied up in a neat little bow, even if much richness is lost as a result.
So let’s be thankful for the fact that college football now has a playoff but hasn’t sacrificed its regular season (or the bowls) in the process. Let’s celebrate the fact that (despite its ill-advised, committee-based selection system) the sport is putting its two best teams on the field to play for the national championship on Monday night. And let’s hope that there continues to be at least one sport in America in which season-long excellence is a prerequisite for postseason glory.
Anderson is co-creator of the Anderson & Hester Rankings, which were part of the BCS Standings throughout the BCS era (1998-2014).
