CFP learns it can’t please everyone
Published 10:27 am Friday, November 21, 2014
Still in its infancy, the esteemed College Football Playoff selection committee is already learning a valuable life’s lesson.
Namely, no good deed goes unpunished.
There’s really no reason for the committee to be releasing a weekly update on their thinking process, the sausage making for eventually narrowing the list to an all-important Final Four for the college game.
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The wisest, most learned minds in the game have cautioned against overreaction and tried to point out that the only Final Four that means squat is the final one that comes out on Sunday, December 7, a date which may once again live in infamy.
There’s really not much reason for the committee to be meeting yet.
But here the 11 guys and one Condoleezza Rice are willing to not only give up their time to barricade themselves in a luxury, resort hotel in Dallas once a week, they go public with their latest findings every week.
They don’t have to do that.
They do it as a public service.
They do it so college football fans and media will have something to talk about.
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Why do you think they do it on a Tuesday? It’s a habitually slow news day for college football and, perhaps not coincidentally, for ESPN.
But they do it, sort of as a civic duty.
And — wouldn’t you know it? — already there is whining from coast to coast.
Anybody with half a brain could look at the first couple of rankings and figure out that, although outside the top four at the time, Alabama had nothing to worry about if it just kept winning.
Anybody, that is, except your average Roll Tide fan, many of whom — not just Phyllis from Mulga — went nuclear ballistic in both rants and tirades at the mere thought of Alabama not included in even a meaningless warm-up, run-it-up-the-flagpole poll.
Thank goodness Alabama is safely stationed at the current No. 1 before secession talks begin again.
But other precincts have been heard from too.
It seems these rankings are being a tad overanalyzed, what with the pressing need of the common good to know in advance if, and or but this happens, what effect it will have on this, that and the other.
There has been some strange logic already applied with the rants.
As I understood it, the four-team playoff came about because, all too often under the old (two-team) BCS system to pick a championship game, there was at times less than unanimous agreement about who the No. 2 team should be.
The more-the-merrier crowd is already using the fluctuations in the CFP rankings, particularly the Nos. 3 and 4 spots, as absolute, final proof-positive that this only proves, once and for all, that the playoff must be expanded to eight teams, like yesterday.
They’re not even waiting for the final results. The fact that with a month of games still to play it wasn’t crystal clear which four teams had clearly separated themselves from 120 others was all they needed to pounce.
Actually, this was predictable.
With the vocal playoff centrists, it doesn’t take much. The price of tea in China can be viewed and twisted as the final straw that proves that the playoff must be expanded. And when it gets to eight, there will be just as much proof forthcoming that it must be 16 or 32 or … who knows?
I’d rather view it as if the expansion to four, which was a good thing, was more like a pressure-release valve on the final two.
And, if you’re questionable at the No. 4 spot, or end up angered at being No. 5 or No. 6, logic would seem to suggest that you have business sniffing around the No. 2 spot.
So go to the Orange Bowl and have fun.
But already they have picked up their most influential leader now that Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner John Swofford has gone on record as preferring an eight-team playoff.
There would be collateral damage with this, according to an ESPN report, which said that to get to eight they would probably have to give up the conference championship games to work in what would be a quarterfinal playoff round.
This could be a stumbling block.
Never mind how some conferences, which spent the last decade expanding to the limit, are supposed to determine a conference champion, which is supposed to mean something to the selection committee.
Or maybe the ACC championship game doesn’t mean much. Maybe the conference championship game is just another of the many, many things in college football that the SEC does better than anybody else.
It is truly a spectacle with an electricity in the air you won’t find in any bowl game short of the BCS championship game.
Maybe the CFP semifinals will top it.
But I’m not sure quarterfinals would make it worth it to have no conference champions outside of the Big 12.
At least, that’s my rebuttal, and I’m sticking to it.
l
Scooter Hobbs covers LSU
athletics. Email him at
shobbs@americanpress.com