Hell, it’s not even the Committee anymore. Seems like everyone is doing some heavy lifting in the justification department nowadays.
Remember how bad Georgia slid down the rankings after a “bad loss”? Losing away against a team that was, not so long after, in the top 10 of the CFP rankings still remained a “bad loss” (or was it an ugly loss? A complete loss? An Iberian Losse?) even as recent as last week.
Meanwhile, Alabama loses to one of the most hapless offenses in the SEC, by twenty-one points, and they slide down four slots…and we haven’t even gotten to the insanity of the CFP Committee’s rankings yet. I’m sure there’s justification for keeping Indiana in the top 5 this week because Ohio State was held to 360 something yards, or that some bad special teams hampered the Hoosier attempt, or that the relative humidity in Columbus was such that it affected the special teams play, and that’s a bad thing that happened in the second greatest loss all season, which is second only to tOSU’s loss to Oregon and just ahead of Penn State’s loss to tOSU. Never has a season been filled with such high quality losses that give teams so much pride.
Congrats, we’ve arrived at the moral victory era. Who knew the thing that most coaches denounced after taking the L – “we don’t believe in moral victories” – now has become something to consider. “We lost, but it’s a good loss that should move us up in the polls”.
But wait…what is a “bad loss”? In all honesty here, the loss to Alabama was just as bad as Ole Miss yet Ole Miss was deemed worse. While we rallied to come back and actually lead against Alabama, the first two quarters of play was putrid. Ole Miss was four quarters of putrid, but one could chalk that up to weather and injuries. Mykel aside, Georgia was healthier and playing in better conditions in Tuscaloosa, but in my eyes they were both bad. Maybe that’s how you look at things when, you know, you don’t cheat your ass off to get there (hello Michigan) or when people aren’t lifting you in high because of “good losses”. But peep this shit:
Georgia has as many top 10 wins than Oregon, Texas, Penn State, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Miami, Indiana, and SMU, combined. No one else on the list has a SOS in the single digits outside of Georgia, as well. But wait…there at the bottom is a definition of a bad loss! A loss to an untanked team…Alabama has them, Ole Miss has them, and so does Tennessee! And Miami! And especially NOTRE DAME. Yet somehow the “worst loss” that gets batted around is Georgia’s loss to a ranked Ole Miss. It’s as clear as volcanic mud!
It’s become so buffoonish that it feels like Disney has taken the reigns of the rankings, and the Bad News Bears of each week are justified as worthy, not because of stats or the eye test, but because of feelings. Things are now justified as “good” or “bad” and at this point let’s just call the SEC the Empire and the BIG the Rebel Alliance. We can ask a 900 year old Jim Henson muppet to be our moral compass in these times and he can teach us all the ways of the Farce. (That’s not a autocorrect typo, fwiw).
We all made a mistake last year in assuming Saban left because of the NIL and Portal era in football. Maybe it really was that he saw this nonsense coming, and decided to hang it up accomplishing what he did before a Committee of idiots started deciding his fate for him.
Can’t wait for this evening. The CFP Committee has become my muse that I never wanted, and it looks like they’ll be giving everyone a good bit to say for quite a while.
The reason “it feels like Disney has taken the reigns of the ranking” is because it actually has taken reign of the rankings.
Remember ESPN dreamed up “The College Football Playoff” to provide programming for which it could command top dollar advertising rates. It sold the concept to the 4 biggest bowls on the basis that each would get a “big game” three of every four years and talked them into being members with it in the LLC that owned “The College Football Playoff.” Neither ESPN or the bowls wanted to televise Boise State, Tulane, and SMU in the games so they created “The Committee ” to populate the brackets with teams the casual fans would want to see. “The Committee ” is nothing more or less than a casting committee for a television series.
The College Football Playoff is to a real playoff as Dancing With The Stars is to a real competitive dancing competition.
Previously, we believed the season meant something, one loss and you’re done, maybe….this could not be any truer today, as the cfp committee is/has confirmed, just win all your games and we may not screw with you, lose one (good or bad?), two or three and in the Mickey cfp ranking tumbler ya go, where the shit stops, nobody knows…in the future, ABC and have a blank nil check in your pocket….GO DAWGS!!
Down Island Way,
The best exclamation I have ever heard.
Good job.
“Casting committee for a television series” might be the most poignant sentence I’ve read on this whole circus.
JPM, I need to thank you for stepping in and helping keep the best football blog ever intact. Your postings are articulate, concise, and sprinkled with humor much like The Senator himself posted. Everyone else that contributes has done an admirable job too. I appreciate the effort and hope you continue. Thanks!
‘Chutes and Ladders’. I like what you did there. Pretty good analogy.
JP, awesome as always to lead the charge.
The committee is a feature not a bug of Disney/ESPN’s control of the CFP. Greg Sankey (or Slive) allowed Jim Delany to roll him when he proposed the committee as the only way the B1G would go along with a 4-team playoff. It was a terrible idea from the beginning. It was the way to make sure the large TV markets in the east, Midwest and west coast stayed involved.
Exactly, ee. LSU v Alabama in 2011 is what created this methodology.
Kirby’s pissed at the Cummittee whether he says it or not. And a pissed off Kirby is a dangerous thing. Just win baby!!
FTMF and the nerds
#FTMF
Nice post/rant JP. Usually people provide a chart to make things more clear. I look at whatever the hell that chart is and can’t figure out if we are ranked where we should be, whether we should be #1, or whether we should be #11. And I agree, we have two bad losses. The committee can get bent.
We all knew the playoffs would end up like this…the whole purpose was always to promote the BIG, ND, etc. at the expense of the SEC. Here we are..we just didn’t think it would be this quick and so blatantly obvious (and ridiculous). The SEC needs to tell Mickey…”You take our top three teams every year or you take none of them”
The CFB Playoff is nothing but a made-for-tv event designed to extract the maximum amount of money possible from the fans, I mean consumers. Brands and media markets matter more than on-field results or even minor details like strength of schedule. Of course, this has been fueled at the local level by out-of-control conference expansion and the insatiable greed of the SEC and the B10 to consume ever larger pieces of any money pie placed in front of them. I just do not see where it ends. Other than the games on Saturday afternoons, which are still awesome, the whole thing is a shitshow of self-interest and greed which, at this point, has nothing to do with “college” other than whats on the uniforms. I mean, a fucking billionaire with no connection to the University of Michigan just helped them fund an eight-figure NIL deal for a kid still in high school. That’s were we are with this sport. Rant over. Go Dawgs!
And a fine rant it was!
Sportswriters for the AP, not working for Disney, need to pump the need for the committee to be transparent and allow cameras, recordings or at least a pool reporter in the damn meeting room. This isn’t national defense secrets they are debating. The lack of transparency tells us everything we need to know…this is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and all decisions are being made in the best interest of the economic benefactors. Not the sport. Not the kids. And most certainly not the fans who are cynically used to argue that yes, indeed, these rankings and matchups are “what the fans want”. No..we want a fair, open and sensible solution. Instead we get Danny Kannell’s and Colin Cowherd’s rants being rewarded.
FPD, you don’t trust Heather Dinich?
Very true. The funny thing (at least to me) is that September and October all the talk was that “no way a 3 loss team gets in” and “maybe a 2 loss team will be excluded based on their schedule” and so forth and so on. And now here we are. There WILL be at least one or two three loss teams in the playoff. Why? Because this is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, as you point out FPD, and to avoid 3 loss teams you have to populate the playoff with teams like Iowa State, Tulane, Army, or other schools that no one cares about. ESPN, hence the committee, would much rather have a 3 loss Bama team in the playoff than a 2 loss Arizona State team. You could almost hear the wailing and teeth-gnashing last Saturday night from Bristol as Colorado’s chances for the CFP went down in flames.
The hand wringing by the execs should lead to some pretty good gymnastics between now and December 8th. I wasn’t going to watch tonight after the absurdity I saw last week. Case in point…a “good win” for Texas was beating 5-5 Arkansas on the road by 10 and at the same time Tennessee’s “bad loss” was losing to Arkansas on the road by 5. However, I have decided that I will watch tonight just to see how the committee begins to poise itself for justification on December 8th to include certain teams that it needs in the playoff to garner the attention and exclude teams that will cause the same disinterest that occurred in the four-team playoff era for the NY6 game that got saddled with the G5 team.