Bickering about CFP an annual rite

Published 7:00 pm Wednesday, December 6, 2017

As fate would have it, I happened to be away from the television when the final College Football Playoff rankings were announced Sunday.

But even out there on the yonder reaches of the golf course, you could feel the ground rumbling, you could hear the faint cries and screams of anguish.

We all stopped mid-shank and looked at each other.

“Alabama must have gotten in,” said one.

“Or Ohio State,” I added.

One of them, anyway. It didn’t really matter.

There were going to be aftershocks either way.

The selection committee was in an enviable position for that fourth spot after the previous day pretty well established that Clemson, Oklahoma and Georgia were in.

You could make the argument that there was no wrong answer for No. 4 as Alabama and Ohio State both field talented varsities.

But, of course, in this case, there was no right answer.

Both teams made strong enough cases for themselves — and could dig up enough dirt on each other — that it didn’t matter. The Twittersphere was going to implode. 

The college football high-brow whiners were lying in wait. They couldn’t lose.

The people who would like to run college football — your bloggers and tweeters, your internet lopers and midnight tokers — are habitually griping about … anything.

But mostly they won’t be happy until every player in college football gets a participation trophy for the CFP.

They were just getting into the starting blocks Sunday, ready to browbeat the committee on behalf of Bama/Ohio State and bemoan the sad state of affairs with such an obviously flawed system that absolutely, positively proves, once and for all, that the playoff must be expanded to eight or 16 or 32 or why not 64 teams?

It was somewhat comical for Ohio State, fresh off a sloppy Big Ten title game win over previously unbeaten Wisconsin, to throw out the argument that Alabama had won neither division nor conference championship. Objection, your honor —the Buckeyes used to same loophole last year to get in without winning any more division titles that year than Alabama did this year.

Maybe the Buckeyes could point out that, yes, true, but Clemson’s subsequent 31-0 decapitation of Ohio State in the semifinals was a cautionary tale for the folly of letting such riffraff in.

Nice try.

The committee had a tough call. So what? That’s why they get to do their chores in the lap of luxury of a Dallas-area resort hotel.

Live with it. Enjoy the playoff.

It probably will happen again next year — and make for more delightful barroom bickering.

My only problem with ending up with two SEC teams in the final four is that leaving two Power Fives might help the playoff expansionists recruit real power brokers to their corner.

I’m still in the corner that anything more than eight teams cheapens the greatest regular season in sports — and anything more than four is a logistical nightmare.

I did see one interesting proposal from Dan Wetzel, the well-respected columnist from Yahoo Sports.

He would get to an eight-team playoff game by eliminating the conference championship games, giving the Power Five conference champions automatic entry to account for five spots, which leaves three at-large teams, maybe even with a spot (gasp!) for an occasional non-Power Five school (if it goes undefeated).

Not bad, actually.

He points out that the selection committee evidently put little stock in those conference championship games anyway — at least the Big Ten version (nice try, Ohio State) — although the ACC and SEC galas did appear to function as convenient play-in games.

It would kind of address the logistical problem.

But there’s one flaw with that plan, mainly the part about eliminating the conference championship games.

True, winning one didn’t do Ohio State a big boat load of good. Maybe those cash cows really are overrated — in the current system.

But that proposal, with its automatic bids based on them, would suddenly make winning the conference championship a very big deal indeed.

If it’s a ticket to the playoffs, you almost have to have a conference championship game.

Oh, the math-challenged Big 12 (10 teams) could pull it off with its round-robin schedules.

But your other four conferences would definitely have a flawed system for picking a champion.

Even if all of leagues go to nine conference games — and they should — the 14-team SEC, Big Ten and ACC would still be playing fewer than three-quarters of their conferences.

As the SEC has learned, such a bulky conference produces widely varying strengths of schedule just within the league. 

The conference championship games at least alleviate that to a degree.

But I’m sure we’ll be back next year bickering about this same topic.

Which isn’t so bad.