The College Football Playoff Selection Committee is charged with deciding which four teams to invite to college football’s postseason playoff. It’s hard to imagine an easier scenario for the 12-person committee than for there to be only four major undefeated teams, one from each of the four strongest conferences—thereby ensuring not only unbeaten squads but wide geographical representation. Sure enough, that was exactly the situation the committee faced this week, yet it still somehow managed to botch it.
Instead of awarding the top four spots to (8-0) Alabama, (8-0) Clemson, (8-0) Michigan, and (8-0) Washington—the top four teams in the Anderson & Hester Computer Rankings—the committee bumped the Huskies to #5 and filled the #4 spot with (7-1) Texas A&M, which lost a 33-14 nail-biter to Alabama. Texas A&M and Washington have each beaten one team in the committee’s top-25, and in each case that win was on the road—at (6-2) Auburn for A&M, at (7-2) Utah for Washington. The difference is that the Huskies haven’t lost.
One can only imagine the outcry if the committee had selected a second Southeastern Conference team for the playoff, despite its having a loss, over an undefeated Pac-12 team. Thankfully, this week’s rankings—the first of the season—don’t really matter. Only the ones on December 4 do. Still, it speaks volumes about the reliability of the entirely subjective committee that it thinks Texas A&M would deserve the invite over Washington if the season were to end today.
The old Bowl Championship Series Standings, which combined subjective polls with objective computer rankings, likely would have had the following top-4: 1. Alabama, 2. Clemson, 3. Michigan, and 4. Washington.
Approximating the BCS Standings requires using the coaches poll, the A.P. poll (the best stand-in for the Harris poll, which was created by and for the BCS and no longer exists), and four former BCS computer rankings (Anderson & Hester, Billingsley, Colley, and Wolfe). The two other BCS computer rankings, Sagarin and Massey, no longer publish the versions of their rankings that met the BCS’s requirement of not incorporating margin of victory, so we can’t know what they would have had. (The BCS dropped the high and the low computer rankings each week and kept the middle four. Since the four BCS computer rankings to which we have access might or might not have been among the ones dropped in any given week, the most sensible way to approximate the computer portion of the BCS Standings seems to be to tally the four computer rankings with the high and low rankings dropped, tally them a second time without dropping any of the four, and then average those two tallies.)
Putting all of this together, here’s an estimate of how the BCS Standings would have looked this week—through the top half-dozen teams—with each team’s point-value listed (one of the beauties of the BCS was that the spacing between teams was apparent): 1. Alabama, 1.000; 2. Clemson, .936; 3. Michigan, .931; 4. Washington, .883; 5. Ohio State, .802; 6. Texas A&M, .788.
Such a solid list makes one wonder why the powers-that-be went to a committee.
Anderson is co-creator (with Chris Hester) of the Anderson & Hester College Football Computer Rankings, which were part of the BCS throughout its entire 16-year run.
