There is much debate as to whether or not the system is
perfect, and this is not a post for that debate. However, in 2018 we are in
such a better place at determining a college football national champion than we
once were and that deserves attention. It should be stated that shifting away
from the BCS was the most obvious decision ever. That said, it does not mean
the decision makers involved in creating the playoff still deserve some credit
for actually doing it. We are in the age of the NFL catch rule, NBA tanking
crisis, and sometimes it is nice to just have the obvious this fixed for a
change. The college football playoff has achieved its goal of being exciting
and giving us a more accurate champion.
Since the creation of the college football playoff, the
number four ranked team has won two of four times. In those four years, the
number one ranked team has NEVER won. What that tells us is that it is
absolutely impossible to correctly rank teams in college football (or we just
are terrible at doing it). The entire process of ranking them seems pretty
random anyway. The playoff, while not perfect and maybe not enough teams, is
just such a better college football experience than what used to exist. The more
you take people in suits out of it and just allow the players to decide it the
better. It is pretty insane to even imagine a world in which we used to have
only two teams play to decide the champion (which based on our four-year sample
size would not even be an accurate champion half the time). College football is
basically random. It is part of the excitement of it. A team like Iowa can show
up and light up Ohio State because that is just how it works (or an elite program
like Syracuse can play a sort of elite team like Clemson and win). However,
some of the randomness can’t be left up to the NCAA rankings and should be
decided by watching more exciting
football games. I really don’t know if I think the playoff should expand again,
but man am I thankful that we actually have a playoff that keeps telling us how
bad we are at ranking teams.
