CFP Rankings: The Committee’s Making a Mess

The CFP Rankings are already causing controversy and the College Football Playoff Committee is setting dangerous precedents in only its first few weeks. 

The newest batch of CFP rankings was released on Tuesday night and — despite being the last unbeaten P5 team and the defending national champions — Florida State was ranked third.

Alabama, who was ranked first, beat the former no. 1, Miss State (now fourth) last Saturday. Oregon — who committee chairman Jeff Long said had a razor thin advantage over FSU last week — was off on Saturday but remains second. FSU stays at third.

There are now two one-loss teams ahead of the only undefeated P5 team in the country.

More from Chop Chat

• FSU football: Q&A with Clemson experts at Rubbing The Rock 2023
• FSU football: 3 reasons Noles beat Clemson, two reasons they lose
• FSU football: QB Brock Glenn out with an injury for ‘a few weeks’
• FSU football: Which TV announcers will call Clemson game?
• FSU football: Is Jared Verse ready to make an impact versus Clemson?

And maybe that would be OK if Long, speaking on behalf of the committee, had a cogent argument for why that should be the case. But as anyone who watched Long explain the committee’s decision on ESPN can attest– it doesn’t sound like they have a clue what they’re doing.

You see for all its flaws the BCS was a known quantity. It was objective. You knew the things it took into consideration. You could see what was given priority, how things were weighted. And at the end of the day what it spit out was what it spit out. But there was nothing subjective about it.

This new committee approach is clearly too undefined in its infancy. Case in point: Game Control.

What, you might ask, is ‘game control?’ ESPN defined it this way on October 7th:

"“As with going from basic W-L to Strength of Record, each team’s average in-game win probability gets translated to Game Control based on how hard it would be for a top team to achieve it, given the schedule. Game Control also ends up on a 0-to-100 scale, measuring how well a team controlled games from start to finish, accounting for the difficulty of the games it has played to date.” – ESPN.com, October 7, 2014"

No where in that pseudo-legalese definition is there any mention of how one might calculate that other than to suggest that somehow they’re trying to quantify how obvious it was you were going to win your game — at every point in that game — and then boil it down to a score between zero and 100.

That seems like something you might want to spend some more time explaining. You can find a formula or breakdown of how to calculate pretty much every other metric in sports. But this mystical metric goes largely unexplained.

What we can gather from it (other than the fact that even its description sounds confused) is that this metric has led the committee to devalue the resume of an unbeaten P5 program because — for lack of a better way to put this — it didn’t always look like FSU was going to win. Florida State did win, but it didn’t always seem like it would. And somehow that matters, more than, say, a loss.

Really?

Do you have any idea how absurd that is? The committee hasn’t even been releasing these CFP rankings for a full month yet and already some troubling precedents are being set.

The Lowly ACC

For one, the ACC is clearly the low man on the P5 totem pole. That was a spot — during the BCS era — reserved for the Big East before it dissolved into what it is today, now it belongs to the Atlantic Coast Conference. It’s tough to say that more plainly than to have its unbeaten defending national champion get jumped by two teams with losses.

Sure, the college football playoff is supposed to be different and it will take different things into consideration but there need to be some baselines.

Last year, in the swan-song season of the BCS era, FSU likely would’ve led the country in game control– a more dominant team, there was not. But the Seminoles couldn’t jump Alabama until Alabama lost because you just didn’t jump the defending national champion until they lost. That just wasn’t what you did. And jumping a one-loss team over an unbeaten program from a power conference? There would have been riots.

No, at this point in the season, an unbeaten team from an AQ conference would have never been jumped by a one-loss school. That kind of treatment was reserved for the Boise States of the world.

Now FSU — the likely ACC Champion — is getting that treatment. Florida State is getting disrespected like a mid-major. And the mid-majors? Marshall is undefeated and not even in the CFP Top 25.

The social stratification of college football has been going on for years but this is a dangerous precedent to set in just the first year of the playoff. At the beginning of the season the NCAA granted unprecedented unilateral power to the P5 schools and Notre Dame. That effectively slammed the door in the face of every mid-major program in the country. In the current environment, there will never be the playoff equivalent of a BCS Buster without expanding the number of teams taken. Marshall isn’t even ranked. At least the BCS acknowledged the Marshalls of the world.

In the current environment, there will never be the playoff equivalent of a BCS Buster without expanding the number of teams taken. Marshall isn’t even ranked. At least the BCS acknowledged the Marshalls of the world.

And now, amongst the P5, there’s further separation. The ACC is at the bottom. The conference formerly known as the Big Ten is just barely above the ACC. The Pac 12 and the Big 12 are comfortably situated on that second tier and the SEC sits atop.

ESPN Creates a Bigger Monster

ESPN has said that its financial stake in the SEC has nothing to do with the way that SEC teams are portrayed on the Worldwide Leader. Brent Musburger — who didn’t get the hint he was being put out pasture and accepted a demotion to call games on ESPN’s newly-formed SEC network — said at the start of the year that ESPN covers the conference the way it does because “like it or not, these guys are the best.”

And while that’s largely been true over the past decade, ESPN has played a bigger role in that than it cares to admit. For starters, the hundreds of millions of dollars that ESPN pays for the rights to broadcast the SEC gets distributed amongst the schools. That’s standard for any TV deal, but ESPN — in order to obtain the rights — paid considerably more than it would (or has) for any other conference TV contract.

Now, the SEC had developed its brand to a point where the market said its TV contract should be worth that much. That’s perfectly fine. But by signing that deal ESPN has now widened the gap between the SEC and every other conference by putting more money directly into the budgets of each one of these athletic programs. SEC programs now have more resources at their disposal. They have a tool in the SEC network that gives them an advantage over non-SEC schools in head-to-head recruiting. Not to mention ESPN, as an industry leader, helps set the trends in regards to the tone and perspective of the conference’s media coverage.

And ESPN knows it can feed its investment and make it grow even faster if it gins up the system a little. It would be naive to think ESPN doesn’t want to maximize its investment. It’s insulting to our collective intelligence that the network claims it wouldn’t. It’s done in subtle and not so subtle ways. Everything from continually repeating the trope that all the best players play in the SEC (despite the NFL Draft saying that’s not really accurate) to inventing silly statistical metrics like ‘game control’ all the way to creating the misnomer that any win over an SEC team is a quality win– with the exception of Vanderbilt.

ESPN perpetuates the SEC narrative because, after investing heavily in the SEC, that’s what’s best for ESPN. And in turn, that narrative influences everything. It’s all over the place getting hammered home: The SEC is just the best, period.

It’s conventional wisdom at this point because ESPN told us it was.

Consider that a 5-5 Arkansas team gets mentioned as a quality win on the network. No other conference has a .500 team with only a single conference win on its resume that gets that much respect.

Mississippi State gets credit for three quality wins– those teams have 11 losses between them. LSU and Texas A&M — both of whom were overrated when the Bulldogs beat them — each have four losses while Auburn now has three. Only Auburn is still in the top 25 (largely because, hey, SEC, baby). But ESPN freezes SEC wins in the moment. They become a snapshot in time. Mississippi State still gets credit for beating no. 8, no. 6 and no. 2 this season while FSU’s win over then-no. 5 Notre Dame practically never happened.

That’s the same sort of thinking that faults FSU for its schedule and gives SEC schools a pass for playing four cupcakes and its own conference– something only the SEC can get away with.

These schedules are made years ahead of time. The committee — which again, is supposed to consider other things — should take into account that any team who schedules Notre Dame, Florida and Oklahoma State out of conference did so in good faith. That’s a quality schedule. There’s no way you could foresee three of college football’s most notable programs all being out of the top three in the same season.

But according to ESPN — who sets the national narraitive — FSU hasn’t played anyone. It has a soft schedule. LSU, TAMU and Auburn are down this year too– but MSU gets to count those as quality wins. They are, all three, still in the SEC after all.

Nobody is denying that the SEC has been host to some of the best college football in the country over the past ten years. But ESPN pretending like it isn’t trying to ensure things stay that way is laughable.

And we’re seeing the ramifications play out on the CFP Selection Committee.

They’re talking about game control.

Alabama — who lost to two-loss Ole Miss — has had more “game control” than unbeaten FSU. You know, except for at the end of that one game they lost. That’s like arguing George Foreman had more match control in Muhammad Ali’s infamous Rope-A-Dope.

Style points are nice, but wins are what matters.

At least the BCS never forgot that.