As usual, it’s the number 4 spot that causes all the debate. In terms of the total quality of a team’s body of work, Penn State deserved to have it. A number of teams deserved it more than Oklahoma, sitting at number 16. However, there are more variables in play for the playoff committee than just the total body of work, so if the decision was between Oklahoma and Oregon, they chose correctly.
Top 25 (Explanation; Full Ranking)
LSU (+1)
Ohio State (-1)
Clemson (nc)
Penn State (nc)
Cincinnati (nc)
Michigan (nc)
Minnesota (nc)
Baylor (nc)
Auburn (+1)
Notre Dame (-1)
Florida (+1)
SMU (-1)
Iowa (nc)
Alabama (+1)
Georgia (-1)
Oklahoma (nc)
Wisconsin (nc)
Memphis (nc)
Navy (+1)
Appalachian State (+1)
Utah (-2)
Boise State (nc)
Air Force (nc)
Oklahoma State (nc)
Oregon (+2)
The problem of ranking bodies of work versus taking into consideration other variables, like holding a power 5 conference championship, underscores the need for reform in the NCAA football system. Ideally, the best system would divide college football into a two tiered, 8 conference system whose mechanics mirrored the Champion’s League in European soccer.
We can use last year and this year’s seasons to illustrate how this might work. First, we would need to divide college football into 8 geographically/culturally/historically relevant conferences of 16 teams. There are 130 teams, so we will have to bid a gentle adieu to the bottom two teams from the 2018 season, Connecticut and Central Michigan.
This would result in something like the following. This first step highlights the problem of reforming college football - the conferences themselves. The unevenness in size, quality, and composition of the conferences is in many ways the source of most current issues. Given their money and power, breaking them up would be impossible, but also necessary.
Next, hold an 8 team playoff with the champion of each conference, which would look something like this at the end of the 2018 season:
Playoff aside, we then use the results from conference play to determine the movement between the two tiers of each conference. So, for the Greater Appalachia conference, Wake Forest and Pitt, at the bottom of tier 1, would bounce down to tier 2 for the 2019 season. Indiana and Ohio, at the top of tier 2, then bounce up to the tier 1 for the 2019 season. This allow programs to cycle in and out over time to mirror the changes in team quality that inevitably occur. No one is permanently relegated to a second tier “conference” nor is anyone permanently in the top tier regardless of their quality. This helps both promote competition and keep the quality of the competition more balanced.
This reshuffling would result in conferences that look like the following for the 2019 season:
This would result in a playoff at the end of this season that would look something like the following, including both the 4 in the current CFP, alongside Oregon, Georgia, Utah, and Michigan.
For the teams not in the playoff, the current bowl system could continue unaffected. Furthermore, with 8 teams in each tier, the remaining games of each season could remain dedicated to cross conference rivalries. The change is itself simple and sensible, though it would require remaking college football from the bottom up, eliminating the current conferences entirely, to make it happen.
*playoff images made using challonge.com