Last week I was mad at the committee. They aren’t consistent in how they ranked teams and what criteria they use. Jeff Long also mentioned the super-subjective “controlling the game” stat in his post-rankings interview, which a lot of people found very foolish.
What the CFP Selection Committee Taught Us: NCAA Week 13
This week, I’m livid. Part of it is the continuing contradictions. This week, Jeff Long stated that part of Mississippi State’s high ranking is due to the fact that they were impressive in their loss against Alabama. “Impressive” is a relative term, I guess, where Mississippi State only managed to cut it to that final five-point margin with 15 seconds left. It was clear earlier this year, though, that the committee did not give Notre Dame any respect for their impressive loss to then-#2 Florida State. After all, they trailed by four and had the ball in the red zone with a chance at the winning score when time expired. That didn’t save the Irish from debuting at #10 in the committee’s rankings. Also, the committee is directly contradicting themselves with how they are treating the Baylor/TCU pair and the Boise State/Colorado State pair (but that’s a discussion for another time).
The real reason I am angry, though, are the other reasons Jeff Long gave for Mississippi State’s high ranking. When pressed about the fact that they only have one win over a currently-ranked team (#15 Auburn), Long responded that while that is true, the committee acknowledges the rankings that some of Mississippi State’s other opponents (LSU and Texas A&M) had at the time they played.
Now, we all know that early-season game-time rankings are the most dishonest stat in all of sports. We have learned a ton over the course of the season. Why should anyone be given credit for our mistaken assumptions back in Week 5? Almost the entirety of Texas A&M’s high ranking back then was due to a blowout win over #9 South Carolina in Week 1. We all know now that South Carolina didn’t deserve that ranking in the slightest. It was a wrong preseason assumption that in turn wrongly inflated Texas A&M’s ranking. We had hoped that the committee would be above falling for such fallacies.
In fact, it’s explicit in the CFP selection committee’s protocols that they are not allowed to use such rankings. The protocols state, “While it is understood that committee members will take into consideration all kinds of data including polls, committee members will be required to discredit polls wherein initial rankings are established before competition has occurred.”
Which leads us to wonder what rankings, precisely, had LSU and Texas A&M so high when they played Mississippi State? To what rankings could Jeff Long have been referring? The obvious rankings that come to mind to most fans, immediately, would be the AP and Coaches’ Polls. But those polls use rankings before competition has occurred. So the committee is not allowed to refer to those. Ever.
This leads us to the real crux of the issue. Namely, that the biggest mistake the CFP has made so far was putting Jeff Long on the air to try to explain the rankings to us. The committee’s rankings are not indefensible. They are fairly in line with what most people think. They are certainly not so far outside the box so as to be untenable.
The problem is when Long tries to explain them to us. He makes the whole committee look foolish. He contradicts himself from week to week and sometimes even within the same sentence. And now he has clearly proven that he doesn’t even know the protocols he’s supposed to be following.
Everyone gets mad about rankings every week. The CFP committee should learn that and just release their rankings without all this fanfare. There will always be debate as to whether the committee got the right four teams. That’s the nature of college football. The one thing the CFP committee needs to avoid, though, is creating a feeling that the committee has definitively picked the wrong teams. And right now, they are well on the way to creating that feeling.
Editor’s Note: In his post-rankings teleconference, Long realized this issue and attempted to clarify by stating that the committee only uses their own game-time rankings and no game-time rankings from before October 28th, when the CFP rankings debuted. This still doesn’t solve the issue that game-time rankings are foolish because we now know much more than we knew then. Moreover, this doesn’t even help in regards to his statement about Mississippi State’s quality wins because Mississippi State played both LSU and Texas A&M before October 28th.
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