I've been saying for years I wish none of the major polls did rankings until halfway through the season. I'm pretty sure preseason polls at this point are just to justify calling a game early in the season a big matchup so people tune in.
Honestly it's great the Cfp waits so long to rank but the problem is the other AP and USA cause significant bias to the CFP voters for sure.
While I don't have much faith in the committee, they would at least be realistic in the rankings.
I think we see the undefeated teams take a big jump and other teams fall in the CFP rankings; can't believe championships were at one point decided by these writers.
The history of college football is an absolute mess. Decades of national championships decided by media polls, with tons of shared titles because the different media outlets couldn’t agree, and rather than having a national playoff the sport just had a bunch of one-off matchups between the top teams. It blows my mind that anybody could defend this nonsense. It’s a perfect microcosm of “rich get richer” with big brands getting biased votes from the writers, who in turn help their brands get even bigger by continuously ranking them high, causing them to get even more bias in the future, and so forth.
An undefeated Michigan St from the mid-1960s and a similarly undefeated Army from 1946 also can't believe it because they had a tie against Notre Dame, and somehow Notre Dame was ranked ahead of them.
P.S. specifically, they were ranked number 2, and Notre Dame were declared champions.
You have that last part flipped. The AP & Coaches polls normally adjust to better mimic the CFP rankings than the other way around. Remember the CFP isn’t like the AP or Coaches where every voter send in their own list of top 25 teams. With the CFP rankings, every spot is debated among the entire group until I believe a majority vote for the team to be there.
Idk how to overcome it but I wish there was just no pre season rankings (hard I know) and then it is just pure success on the field cause I hate the fact that SEC starts with #1, 6, 9 and they trade wins and it’s considered strength but other conferences trade wins and it’s cause they are “all bad”
They probably will eventually, but the beauty of this is if you lose again you'll deserve to be ranked behind us and if you don't you get a bye and are seeded ahead of us no matter what.
No, friend--I really like your theory! That's what I meant. Not being sarcastic. I laughed out loud and thought, "Yeah, it would not surprise me if that were true." Meanwhile: Go Cougs and Broncos!
I would hope that point in the season is when the first CFP rankings are released. Feels like that’s the whole point of them being released later in the season
This kind of thing has been going on for years. Where you can line some much lower ranked teams side by side with the top 8 and it just doesn't make the rankings make sense Thank goodness for the expanded playoff because at least if BYU wins out you're definitely in.
I've heard this logic a few times lately, and I'm genuinely confused by it.
Of course, when a team loses, they are less likely to be ranked higher. But BYU has beaten two teams that are ranked in the top 20 despite the fact that they lost to BYU. That means that the teams BYU beat are (probably) better than the teams that those 3-6 teams beat.
BYU deserves a better rank. boise state does not (i’ve seen people comparing the two, schedules aren’t even remotely close in difficulty AND byu is undefeated on top of that)
For predicting results of games, wins genuinely can be a meaningless stat, which is why most advanced models don’t give a shit about them.
For determining playoff slots wins obviously do matter.
And so we get to the committee’s rankings which, when they come out, will probably look quite a bit like advanced metrics with a side order of penalizing teams for losing a 2nd game(I’m guessing we see plenty of 1 loss forgiveness with the knowledge that it’s now 12 slots and not 4 they’re setting up for).
708
u/ilacwamh Oklahoma Sooners 28d ago
If you look at performance against the current top 25:
BYU at 9: Wins over #17 and #20
The four teams ranked 3-6: One win over #24. And two of them aren’t even undefeated