Why a weekly College Football Playoff rankings show is dumb

The task of the College Football Playoff committee has never been easy, although it has often been obvious. In the four-team era, there were numerous seasons with just four clear candidates; other years, there was maybe a single decision to be made.

Yet despite that, the committee was routinely vilified for bias, hypocrisy and inconsistency, mainly because of the folly of the weekly rankings show each Tuesday (beginning in November) on ESPN.

It was there that for five weeks — despite limited data — the committee had to roll out rankings as if the “season ended today,” which it didn’t.

It made massive controversies out of issues that would naturally play themselves out — like ranking two teams that were set to play each other. Coaches and fans were left to try to figure out what the most important criteria was — head-to-head victory or number of losses or margin of victory or strength of schedule or strength of record or …?

A week later, it would be something else.

The committee was trapped. These are 13 well-meaning and highly intelligent people trying to follow protocols and do an honest job, but trapped with an impossible — and pointless — task.

The show became a public relations problem for the committee. It undermined the credibility of a group that needed to be trusted.

And those were the good old days.

The playoff is now 12 teams strong, requiring even more work and more tough decisions from this year’s committee. It’s not just selecting the field but seeding the teams, including choosing who gets a bye, who gets home-field advantage, who gets matched up with whom.

Go ahead and try to pick between the 8 seed and the 9 seed, It’s always going to be razor thin, yet one team — the one that gets to host the game — will be given a massive advantage.

There was one impactful way that the College…

Source link : https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/why-a-weekly-college-football-playoff-rankings-show-is-dumb-002420209.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-06 00:24:20

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