The Problem with CFP Rankings

Everybody wanted a College Football Playoff, so we got a College Football Playoff, and it’s pretty dang cool. Unfortunately though, we got the College Football Playoff Rankings with it, which is a weekly exercise in pointlessness.

I’m not here to criticize the existence of them. Sports is a business. People watch the show, commercials get sold, yadda yadda yadda. Their existence isn’t pointless, it’s just meaningless to the actual playoff until the very last week, when the possibility of controversy becomes just as prevalent as it was in the old system.

First though, for the sake of context, we need to talk about the college football postseason’s ultimate villain; the BCS. This is the reason we got a playoff in the first place. The BCS was too controversial. A two team system was too vulnerable to screwing a team that deserved its shot at a title. This only actually happened a couple of times, and the BCS gave us the two best teams more times than not, but it happened enough times to warrant a change.

So we got a playoff, and it was a change for the better. A playoff was exciting, provided more fairness, and was all-around good for college football. Then we got a committee and everybody forgot how to not be morons.

One of the problems with the BCS was the human error in team evaluation. 66% of the BCS poll was made up by human rankings. So the CFP fixed this by making it 100% human-based? What? This was the first thing that made no sense. The second thing was allowing the committee to decide what was important and what was not. The new system designed to not screw teams took exactly one season to utterly screw a team and invalidate every week of rankings prior to the last one.

Of course I’m talking about TCU, which fell from three to six after a 55-3 win because the committee decided a conference championship and a game to determine it was of utmost importance. Nobody knew that though.

This is reason number one why the rankings have become relatively pointless and stupid. The committee has no set rules to follow for judging teams, so what we end up doing is examining team rankings created on the opinions of a small group of people and what they decide is important. It was a huge issue in the first year because these things came flying out of left field like the conference championship thing. With at least something of a precedent set now, we can know a little about what to expect, but we're still leaving the decision of what makes a team worthy of the playoff to a small group of people in a closed room.

Sidenote: A conference championship is a bad criteria to begin with, because it’s theoretically possible for the second best team in the country to not even play in a conference championship game.

Reason number two is the 2017 Miami Hurricanes. The 8-0 Canes were ranked seventh in week 11, despite having a better record than four teams ahead of them. That’s fine though. Miami hadn’t beaten anybody particularly good and has also looked downright bad throughout multiple games. But an unbeaten conference champion isn’t getting left out of the playoff. If the Canes were to go 13-0, they would be inside the top four when it mattered.

Miami makes the playoff if it wins out and it doesn’t if it loses. So, knowing that, what is the point of these week 11 rankings? Who cares if Miami is ranked seventh, fifth, or twelfth? It doesn’t mean a dang thing. Given the precedent set by the committee, we can all pretty much figure out each team’s playoff scenario and how it *should* play out given certain wins and losses. Where they’re ranked at any point prior to the end of the season means nothing, especially when the week that weighs most heavily on the rankings is apparently the very last one.

I don’t wish to get rid of rankings all together. I personally believe college football would lose some luster without them. I’m just advocating for a little more common sense to be used in both creating the rankings and putting value into them.