Conference Champions – In the NCAA FBS Conference Championships do not Matter

Conference Champions have gone by the wayside.  Well anyway it seems like the Conference Championship games have.  The first year of the playoff the Big 12 was pretty much kept out with the reason that they did not have a championship game.  Of course they did not help their cause by using the term One True Champion.  The Big 12 which only has 10 teams played a true round robin schedule and every team played each other.  This is where the Big 12 got the idea for the one true champion.  The problem is they ended up with a tie.  TCU and Baylor which were both good teams that year  tied in their final standings.  Something that the Big 12 should have taken into account, but did not.  The College Football Playoff committee used that against them as reasoning to keep both teams out of the playoff.

This way of thinking all changed this year when the playoff committee put Ohio State in the playoff.  Not only did Ohio State not win their conference championship.  They lost to the team that did win the Big 10 championship.  I am not saying that the Playoff committee made a mistake.  But it is a little confusing that they would pick a team for the playoff that lost to a team they did not put in.

Did Ohio State have a bad game against Penn State?  Probably.  If they played again would Ohio State win?  Probably.  But the reality is that in football there are no do overs.  So the result is what it is.  This is what we have to go on to decide who is going to play in the College Football Playoff.

I started this post before the semi final games.  After watching the semi final games we have learned that the committee got it all wrong.  Ohio State and Washington were no match for Clemson and Penn State.  Washington can be forgiven they were a conference champion.  The Ohio State pick is all on the committee.  Of course it is unknown if Penn State would have done better against Clemson.  But it is clear that Ohio State really did not deserve to be there.

Expand the Playoff to 6 or 8 teams

So what can be done about this?  I would like to see the play off go to either 6 or 8 teams.  Either format would work very well.  I actually do not think that there is more than 4 teams in any given year that can win the championship.  The bigger problem is that in a subjective selection of the teams do they get the correct teams.  If you expand you decrease the likely hood of keeping that potential team out.

With a 6 team playoff.  Take the 5 conference champions and a wild card that is selected by the playoff committee.  The committee would also set the seeding of the teams like they do now.  There is a chance that a conference champion will get in that may not actually have a chance to win the championship.  If a conference has a down year and a 3 loss or more team gets in.  I am alright with this.  That is where the wild card team comes in.  If the playoff is expanded to 8 it would be pretty much the same.  With the 5 conference champions making it and then three wild card teams.

In the big picture this year it probably did not matter how many teams were to get in.  More than likely it would have ended up being Alabama and Clemson again anyway.

What do you think?  Should the playoff stay the same or change to some different format?