CFAI Committee Proposal

I know at the outset this is going to be an unpopular college football post. That’s okay, I have no issues being the man alone on the island.

I detest the College Football Selection Committee. Immediately I concede that perhaps that’s what the NCAA wants – controversy that spills into debate, discussion, and most importantly exposure that flips into endless streams of revenue. I get that part, but we are a nation of anti-matter anyway. There is no topic out there where you get 100% of the population to agree. From politics to sports those divisions run deep. For or against the designated hitter? For or against the shootout in hockey? For or against artificial turf? No one agrees on anything, and sports are no exception.

Which brings me back to to the controversy of the Bowl Championship Series [BCS] in college football. Division I College Football is a unique animal because it has a long history of reliance on regional polling and bowl games. No one, myself included, wanted to eliminate the rich history and pomp and circumstance of the game. However, there had always been this oddity about the college game about rankings and the deficiency of it all when attempting to crown a national champion. There were more than one set of polls (there still are), and that manifested itself into something we as Americans hate – ties. We do not invest ourselves into entire seasons for a tie, and even worse than a tie the concept of a co-national champions. It wasn’t little league with everyone gets a participation trophy. This is big time Division I football – and everyone wins? No. That’s a hard no. Since 1960 there had been ten such situations where there was a co-national champion crowned. Three of the ten had three champions designated.

• 2003, LSU, USC.
• 1997, Michigan, Nebraska.
• 1991, Washington, Miami.
• 1978, Alabama, USC.
• 1974, USC, Oklahoma.
• 1970, Nebraska, Texas, Ohio State.
• 1966, Notre Dame, Michigan State.
• 1964, Arkansas, Alabama, Notre Dame.
• 1961, Alabama, Ohio State.
• 1960, Minnesota, Ole Miss.

Suffice to say change happens slowly. People complain, but it takes a seismic shift in the populous from complacency to action. For college football, and sports in general in the country, it was the shift from those okay with ties to those that weren’t (no doubt pushed by mainstream media and twenty-four hour sports talk evolution from the 60s, 70s, and 80s). It is how we arrive at the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in 1998. The concept of the BCS was simple enough and good intended, but as in a lot of things it eventually fell out of favor not because it didn’t work, but rather humans who hate technology didn’t understand it. A computer algorithm would combine various polls, formulas for strength of schedules and other factors, and come up with essentially a football playoff game between two teams.

Now this is where I part with those who didn’t like the BCS for various reasons, and those frankly that didn’t quite understand it (probably because they majored in broadcasting rather than mathematics). There had become a movement for a college football playoff. Something where the top teams compete on the field and that determines the champion. I was, am, on board with that. Having a computer pick the top to teams and having them play in a championship game is not a playoff. That being said I am much more comfortable with the computer making the selection because (shocker) human tend to be self-serving and prone to glossing over hard facts, hard numbers, they don’t like. The problem (if you could call it a problem) wasn’t that the BCS selection was wrong, but rather it was incomplete. When I heard that a playoff format was going to be instituted involving four teams instead of the two I thought it an excellent idea – up until the point I also discovered that a committee was going to make the selection not the BCS algorithms used previously. Oh no. We’re going backwards not forwards. We are returning control to human opinion, and that’s just wrong. It becomes another debate like for or against artificial turf. Back to controversy. Back to the talk shows, and back to blog posts like these. Again, I get maybe what the NCAA is after – no exposure is bad exposure, but from a fundamental aspect I find the notion of a committee a road fraught with potholes and potential disaster. I’m the individual that if you tell me my favorite team missed the College Football Playoff by 0.215681 while I’d be disappointed, but I’m fine with it. You tell me it’s because a committee selected them over my team I won’t be. I, and others, will always disagree because there’s that air of disagreement that permeates over everything.

The ProposalI know this will never become reality unless there’s another seismic shift with people like-minded as myself, but it is really quite simple. I don’t care if the NCAA decides to keep the playoffs at four teams, or increases to six or even eight (although I think eight brings up logistical issues, but that’s just me), but whatever the number – return control back to the algorithms. Return it back to what I call the College Football AI Committee of super computers. Let them chew on the cold; hard numbers. I don’t want to hear about “the eye test” and this or that team’s loss in September isn’t as important as their loss in November. It’s all nonsense. Justification for humans applying excuses to eyebrow raising decisions that at the end of the day are purely shenanigans. Losses in college football are like when figure skaters fall. If you fall your performance is over. However, in the context of college football let the algorithms decide the merits of September losses – not the human eye. They, the computers, are in a better position to crunch those numbers than any human. Then, at the end of the season, let those top four or six teams decide everything on the field, and you can safely shutdown your computer. Until that happens I take the College Football Selection Committee with a grain of salt.