Dear Oregon Ducks and head coach Dan Lanning,
This is the College Football Playoff selection committee. Congratulations on a wonderful season and a hard-won conference championship in your first year as a Big Ten member. We are highly impressed with your 13-0 record, especially in a season where so many teams faltered along the way. And when we consider that you had to fly to the Eastern or Central time zone four times, finishing off a perfect season with a 45-37 win over fellow playoff participant Penn State Saturday night, it is truly one of the great accomplishments of the last several years.
In fact, we as a committee are so enamored with what you’ve done, Oregon, that we are going to award you the playoff’s No. 1 seed. Again, many congrats.
But here’s the thing, Coach Lanning.
In every other sport that decides championships in a tournament format, the best teams or individuals get seeded in the order they are ranked to ensure that the bracket is balanced and fair. It doesn’t always work out perfectly, but this is considered standard practice to give the highest-seeded teams the easiest theoretical path possible toward a championship. After all, that’s what they’ve earned by virtue of their regular-season accomplishments.
If you thought that was how it was going to go in college football, though, the joke’s on you, Oregon. We don’t do things like other sports – at least not until we’re publicly shamed to a sufficient extent or dragged into court by antitrust lawyers.
But never mind that. Here’s the reality of your situation. Despite all the great things you’ve done, you are not getting the easiest path as a reward for being the top team in the country. Far from it, in fact. What the committee has cooked up for you is a quarterfinal against either Ohio State, which might be the sport’s most-talented and expensive roster, or a Tennessee team that is currently ranked No. 8 nationally in offense and No. 4 on defense.
In fact, if we were putting together the bracket strictly by our committee rankings, you’d never see either of these teams unless it was in the championship game. Instead, you’d be playing the winner of Boise State-Indiana in the quarterfinals. Oops!
Oh, but that’s not all. If you’re fortunate enough to survive that quarterfinal matchup on a neutral field – remember, you only beat Ohio State 32-31 at home a couple of months ago – you’re not going to get the winner of a favorable matchup between No. 4 Penn State and No. 5 Notre Dame in the semifinals. Rather, you’re very likely just going to get a No. 3-ranked Texas team that will be heavily favored to cruise over Clemson at home and then Arizona State in the quarterfinals.
In other words, even though the Longhorns didn’t beat a top-25 team all season and went 0-2 against Georgia, we are giving them an easier path to the semifinals than the one we’re giving you. And that’s kind of a theme in how we arranged this bracket.
Georgia, the No. 2 seed, gets the winner of Indiana-Notre Dame. Penn State, the team you just beat for the Big Ten title, gets SMU and then Boise State. If we are being real about it, Oregon, your first playoff game is probably going to have the smallest point spread of any quarterfinal.
We wish we could say as a committee that we gave you this burden because we think you’re a good enough team to handle it. But that wouldn’t be the truth. It’s because we are constrained by a nonsensical system that the conference commissioners came up with before they all decided to blow up their sport from coast-to-coast.
When the 12-team playoff was conceived, the idea was that conference championships should be rewarded with a first-round bye, and so the four highest-ranked title game winners would slot in as Nos. 1 through 4. But that was back when the conferences – although not perfectly even in strength – were similar enough that recognizing championships made sense.
What happened subsequently, though, is that Oklahoma and Texas left the Big 12 for the SEC. Then USC and UCLA left the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. Then the Pac-12 imploded, and we ended up with a bunch of 16-team leagues where it was impossible to have any scheduling balance, even within leagues. But because conference commissioners are inherently selfish and look out only for their best interests, not those of the sport at large, they could not agree on any adjustments to the 12-team format.
As a result, we were forced to give Boise State the No. 3 seed despite ranking them No. 9 and to give Arizona State the No. 4 seed despite ranking them No. 12. We were also too lazy to make any significant adjustments to seeding based on the results of the conference championship games and boxed ourselves in to some unfortunate imbroglios because ESPN forces us to go on television every week, give fake rankings with incomplete data and then try to explain them to the public.
So, at the end of the day, we recognize that the bracket is a nonsensical mess that puts you at a severe disadvantage. Here’s how our chairman, Michigan athletics director Warde Manuel, explains it.
“We rank the teams one through 25. That’s what we’ve been asked to do,” he said on ESPN. “We don’t discuss if we put this team at No. 1 and we move this team to No. 8 or 9 and they’re going to be playing each other and we need to go back and reconsider how we feel about them in the top 25. We’ve been asked as a committee to rank the best teams one through 25.
‘Then the seeding and what the commissioners set up is how to seed those teams come into play, and we only can go off what they want us to do as we seed the teams in the tournament. It turns out that is a very good game in terms of 8/9 and playing 1, but from the start, that’s what it was going to be, and we don’t know who those teams are until we get through the top 25.”
In other words, Oregon, we can only offer you a bunch of rhetorical gobbledygook that explains why our process stinks so badly. Oh well! That’s college sports for you. The Ducks aren’t the only ones who quack in this business.
We recognize that if this were a better system that made more sense, your season would have earned a much greater reward than having to face Ohio State or Tennessee. That’s not just not our problem, though.
It’s yours.
So enjoy the playoff. And congrats again on drawing the short straw.
Sincerely,
The College Football Playoff selection committee
