CHAMPIONSHIP WEEK
One game to go in both the FBS and FCS and to everyone’s surprise, Alabama and North Dakota State have reached their classification’s title game. Okay, a few people might not be surprised. The Cinderella Bearcats had their chances to make it a game versus the Crimson Tide but Alabama played the perfect wicked stepmother in defeating Cincinnati 27-6 to advance to Indianapolis. Of course, G5 critics used the outcome to argue that Cincinnati never belonged and this result should be used to exclude G5 teams in the future. These people must have missed the numerous blowout losses suffered by P5 teams in previous playoffs and in the second semifinal game where Georgia earned a second shot at the Evil Empire after the Bulldogs thumped Michigan 34-11. Will the force be with “Luke” Smart or will “Darth” Saban roll out of Indiana with a “Hoosier Daddy?” bumper sticker attached to the team bus?
F.W.I.W.
1-If consolation games are so great, why not have Michigan and Cincinnati play in the “insert corporate sponsor here” Third Place Bowl?
2-Through 44 FBS seasons, the average top four team in the Power Points Standings finished with 58.3 PP (FBS Games Only). Only two non-power teams have beat the average, 2017 UCF and 2021 Cincinnati.
3-The winner of the title game between Georgia and Alabama is guaranteed to place first in the final Power Points Standings. Therefore, 33 of 38 postseason winners will place higher than their defeated opponent. The exceptions are Kentucky, UAB, Western Kentucky, Texas Tech, and Middle Tennessee.
4-The selection committee is an awful idea. The BCS formula is also an awful idea. I see enough people argue that it should be used to rank teams. The last version of the BCS formula was basically two polls with several “computers” serving an unlikely tiebreaker role if there was a close call for second place. Even when the computers had more influence over the final result, the problem is that teams were playing by several different sets of unknown rules that allowed no one to know what beats what and schedule according to their best competitive interests. Furthermore, the formula treated rankings as statistics and operated under the flawed idea that the number of places between any two teams indicated how close those teams were to each other. For example, in the standings below, Alabama is one place and 11 points ahead of Michigan while Michigan is three places and one point ahead of Baylor. The BCS formula would treat Michigan as closer to Alabama than Baylor is to Michigan even though the criteria used to determine the standings is what dictates how close any two teams are to each other.
5-The preference for a small margin of error is the only anti-expansion argument that I respect. That said, the small margin of error allowed by the current format is propped by limited parity, uneven home and away schedules, and weak non-conference scheduling.
