College football has a problem. Actually, there are many problems, but the one Alabama Crimson Tide fans are most attuned to is the selection of at-large Playoff teams. The CFB Selection Committee studied the issue and added new criteria for evaluating team schedules.
Problem solved, cannot be the grade given to the committee for its efforts. That assessment cannot be made in advance of another final, December ranking. We can acknowledge that the committee focused attention on the most serious team selection problems.
The Playoff Selection Committee work was reported this week.
"Changes for the upcoming season include enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule. The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents. An additional metric, record strength, has been added to the selection committee's analysis to go beyond a team's schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule. This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team."
Keys to College Football Playoff Selection Changes
- The previous Strength of Schedule calculation has been changed to give more weight to games against stronger opponents. How much more weight was not disclosed.
- The most promising change is a new metric that measures record strength. Again, details of the metric were not disclosed. The new metric was not labeled Strength of Record, possibly to avoid confusion about any similarity of the new metric to ESPN's SOR.
Rather than a wait-and-see attitude, some astute followers of college football have doubts. The most noteworthy of doubts comes from the fact that Nicole Auerbach and Michael DeCourcy pointed out, "There is no legitimate metric of college football schedule strength until there is more intersection among the major conferences."
In terms of fan responses, there appears to be near consensus from fans of Big Ten, ACC, and Big 12 teams. It is that the SEC is gaming the system again.