Every Game Counts. Except When They Don’t

The College Football Playoff maintains that “every game counts”.

No. Really. They do. It’s even on the FAQ section of their website:

“The playoff was created to preserve the excitement and significance of college football’s unique regular season where every game counts.”

See? They said it, so it must be true, right?

Although the results of the latest ranking spectacle on ESPN makes the case yet again, that it doesn’t matter for some programs.

If you play for a program outside of the ACC, SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12, it doesn’t matter.

If you play for a program that isn’t called Notre Dame, it doesn’t matter.

If you are a Group of Five program, it definitely does not matter because there is legitimately nothing that you can do to improve your lot in life. None.

Look at Cincinnati. Started at number 7 in the first playoff rankings. Has not been able to play because of COVID issues (a recurring theme this year, obviously) but still undefeated. They have fallen two spots to number 9 because they have been idle.

Look at Coastal Carolina, this year’s FBS feel good story. They started ranked at number 20 and have been fortunate enough to play the last three weeks. They were undefeated when the rankings came out, are still undefeated, including two wins over BYU and Louisiana (also ranked), and have just made it up to number 12.

Coastal sits behind Iowa State, who is ranked number 6. Iowa State lost to Louisiana. At home.

“But wait! Doesn’t the College Football Playoff provide equal access to every team in the FBS?”

Well, yes, they do say that:

Universal Access
No team qualifies automatically, so every Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) team has equal access to the CFP based on its performance during the season.

But let us be real: Every team does not have equal access.

Look, the game was given away when the selection committee was first formed. The core of the committee is one athletic director from each of the Power 5 leagues. 38 percent of the committee is already going to be affiliated with the Power 5 off of the rip. The rest of the committee is filled out with other Ads, former coaches, media members, and other folks.

The current committee consists of the five Power 5 ADs, a former media member who is also faculty at a Power 5 school, a former coach who was also served as Interim Athletic Director for a Power 5 school last year, and two former NFL players who played at Power 5 schools.

Inherent bias all over the place.

Look, we all have our own biases, and the committee is designed so you have to recuse yourself if you have an affiliation of a certain level with an institution if that school is brought up. Which is supposed to mitigate some of the inherent bias.

But it doesn’t do anything to address default assumptions. And there is no transparency about the criteria that the committee is supposed to use to evaluate teams.

There is the appearance of preselection at work. That coming into the season, Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State were going to be three of the four teams in the playoff unless they managed to trip over their own dicks or melted down in glorious fashion. The fact that Ohio State was immediately thrust into the top 4 at 4-0, and has not dropped when being idle themselves (unlike Cincinnati), it is only making the preselection bias more overt.

There is defined ceiling that a Group of 5 team can reach. That ceiling is the number 8 ranking. That is the highest position a Group of 5 team has crested to in the six years we have been under this setup. UCF ascended to number 8 in 2018 after winning 25 straight games (they plateaued at 12 in 2017 after they ran the table in the regular season. They also won their bowl game).

Every game can’t matter if you go undefeated and find yourself on the outside looking in.

Every game can’t matter if you’re winning them all on the field and yet still losing to teams off the field that have managed to lose on the field.

To pretend that everyone has the same amount of access is laughable. And yeah, while this has been going on for years (see the whole BCS era for a different kind of boondoggle), detecting and deciphering inequality is something that we have come to be better at this year.

COVID is laying a lot of things bare. The preposterousness of the entire FBS College Football Playoff is just another one of those things.

Sorry. I shouldn’t say playoff. Nicole Auerbach of the Athletic ($) is right. It’s an invitational.