Aberzombie1892 said:
EvilTroyAndAbed said:
Aberzombie1892 said:
EvilTroyAndAbed said:
Harrison Bergeron said:
Could someone please explain how Tennessee got into the playoffs?
I tried to watch it, but just too painful for the college football fan.
Because they were 10-2 and ranked third in the SEC, which got three teams in. Who would you have replaced them with?
I think these team specific topics are just troll jobs.
If they keep this format, I suspect the home teams will win for years to come, and every year, people will question why the four visiting teams were ever in the playoffs.
That may be true, but college football isn't college basketball when it comes to relative parties between better teams - so it shouldn't be approached in a similar manner. To be clear, there are not enough cross conference games between leagues to get a good idea of how relatively strong football teams are - which leads to the use of advanced stats to fill in gaps - and that, coupled with the impact of the blue chip ratio phenomenon and the limited amount of teams that have even won an AP title in the last 40 years, means that slight tweaks to the system would be unlikely to have any meaningful impact on the final outcome.
Using SMU as an example, they had no meaningful shot at winning the national title. The same is true for Indiana, Boise State, etc. It's fine because we have all agreed to give out participation trophies.
The same was true of Tennessee, too. But no one ever mentions them in that conversation.
That was a team with one good win, and it was only considered good because everyone just assumed that Alabama was actually really good.
But Ohio State would likely have done the same thing to this Alabama team.
If we're going to talk about teams that have no legitimate chance at winning a national title, that conversation needs to extend to the SEC, which was way, way down this year.
I tried to tell everyone that early in the season. You could tell watching the games that there weren't actually that many good teams in that league this year. But the denial was too strong from the usual suspects.