It is a Better World with a College Football Playoff

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.