Barack Obama and College Football Playoffs

I just read an article about Barack Obama calling for an end to College Football's BCS.

If you don't care about football you probably don't want to read this. But I care about football. I enjoy watching college football. I root for the California Golden Bears, even though they cut down the Memorial Oak Grove. I don't root for them with quite as much enthusiasm. But I still enjoy the sport and have spent more time thinking about it than I'm willing to admit (or did I just admit it?).

I, like many others, think the whole "championship" determined by the BCS is even lamer than when the "champion" was just decided by a poll. At least when the champion was decided by a poll everyone knew it was just a poll. It was good cause to have an argument over which team was really best (which is the kind of thing sports fans love: "who was greater: the showtime Lakers or Russell's Celtics", "which was the best baseball team ever?"; "Who got hosed by the BCS worse: Auburn in 2004 or USC in 2003?").

Anyway: wouldn't it be great if college football scrapped the darn BCS and had a playoff?

Having spent too much time thinking about college football, but never having written down my ideas, I'm going to make some brief notes here. The details haven't been worked out, but I think it should be mathematically possible.

The general principle is that there is a regular season for league play, and then a playoff. Let's assume a 13-game season, which is what teams play if they go to a bowl (because the schools ain't going for it unless they can make a profit and they get paid to play, or more properly, the schools get paid to get the players to play for a pittance).

All teams play the regular season, and then all teams play in a playoff.
Teams are ranked and divded into classes, and each class has a playoff.
If we have an 8-game regular season and 5-game playoff, them teams would be broken into classes of 32. The top 32 teams would play in the Championship playoff; the next 32 teams would play in the Tier-2 playoff, and so on.

Playoffs would start with a standard elimination bracket, but then losers would play into a consolation bracket, so that all teams in each class end up being ranked based on their performance on the field in the playoff.

The simple version of this is a four-team bracket where the winners of the first round of games play each other and the losers play each other. This model could be extended to larger brackets. The simplest version of this would be that winning the in first round of the playoff means that you are ranked higher than all of the first round losers. More complicated systems could be developed that might take into account seeding and performance in later rounds (it is better to lose the first round playoff game and then win the next four or to win two, lose one, then win two more?), but keeping it simple means that the teams have to prove it on the field when it counts most.

Each season's results could be used to give each conference not only bragging rights, but seeding points for the tournament.

Currently the best teams start their season with some creampuff games with out-of-conference foes, or they pad in a mid-season "bye" with a weak opponent. This new system wouldn't allow that. Teams would start the season with their conference games, and ranking within the conference would be determined by those games. But then ranking in the tournament would be dependent partly on the record and partly on the conference's seeding points from the previous season's tournament.

I haven't worked out details here, so this is real pie-in-the-sky. You get points for your placement in the tournament. Say there are 112 schools in the tournament, then the winner of the tournament can get 112 points, the runner up 111, etc. (one could give higher weightings--I'm not sure it would matter). At the end of the season, all teams have finished out their tournament and been ranked according to their performance, and each conference can be ranked by simply adding up the ranking points of its teams (or, to deal with the fact that conferences are of different sizes, adding up the ranking points and then dividing by the number of teams).

That conference ranking number could then be used to generate a value for each win in a conference game, and then that value could be multiplied by the number of conference wins to determine tiers and seeding in the playoff.

Such a method would reward conferences that do well in the playoffs when teams are playing against non-conference opponents. If the teams of a conference beat other teams in the playoffs, then they'll get more ranking points, and may be placed above teams with more wins in a weaker conference. SEC fans always complain that their conference is so much better than others--top-to-bottom--that their teams get shafted: "no one can run the SEC schedule without losing a game," they moan; "other teams play in weak conferences and have an easy road to the BCS championship game." This would put an end to such whining. The proof would be played out on the field. If SEC teams did far better than others in the playoffs, then each SEC win would be worth significantly more, and SEC teams would play in the top tiers, including the championship tier. And if not, then that would be seen, too.

The beauty of this system is that all rankings, all seedings, etc., are based on performance on the field. Starting such a system would be a minor problem, but only minor: the system runs on historical ranking data: what do you do when there is no historical ranking data? But pretty much anything you chose to provide initial ranking data would be quickly washed away by the beginning of the second or third season. Assume you gave every conference equal ranking at the beginning of the first season. The system wouldn't differentiate between a undefeated team from the SEC and an undefeated from the Sun Belt, so both undefeateds would go into the championship tier. But if the SEC is as good as its proponents claim, then its team would rise to the top of the tier, garnering the most ranking points, while the Sun Belt team fell to the bottom, garnering the fewest. And this would be repeated in Tier-2, also: the 5-3 SEC teams would be with the 5-3 Sun Belt teams, which many would deem unfair, but if the SEC is really better, its teams would win, gaining more points, and the Sun Belt teams would lose. And at the bottom tier, the winless SEC team would dominate the winless Sun Belt team and gain more points. At the end of the playoffs the SEC teams in each tier would have more ranking points than the Sun Belt teams from the same tier. And this would mean that in the next year, SEC victories would be worth more than SUn Belt victories, and SEC teams would consequently be ranked higher. It's not even inconceivable that a conference to so dominate the playoffs that its teams would mostly be ranked in the championship tier, even if they didn't win many conference games. Well--maybe not--not if you're ranked only by victories, because then a winless SEC team would have 0 points. Maybe there would be some baseline for the conference so that if the SEC does well a winless SEC team might not play in the bottom bracket.

Anyway, I said that I think about football too much.
Go Bears!