Bye bye college playoff bye
This year College Football altered the playoff format, opting for twelve teams instead of four. This twelve-team field required four teams to receive byes for the bracket to mathematically function. Then all four teams with a bye lost, allowing for the conjecture and the opinion that have always been features in the world of college football to rear their not so ugly heads once again.
The argument for a playoff, or an expanded playoff, has almost always been that this is the mechanism to assure a true and proper champion that is not up for debate. And yet college football has always thrived off the speculation embedded in debate. Under the traditional bowl system, fans and pundits alike could argue over what would happen were the winner of the Rose Bowl to play the winner of the Sugar Bowl. The BCS System offered an answer, but the answer was found wanting. Fans and pundits could banter about whether a third contender might be more worthy than the two delivered by magical formulas and the human eye test. So the four-team playoff field arrived, but what about the fifth team, and what about the excitement of an expanded field? At the crux of all these changes is wanting a worthy champion and the chaos too, and resolving that tension is more than a piece of cake.
With a twelve-team field, the powers that be decided to award four of the conference champions with byes: Oregon, Boise State, Arizona State, and Georgia. And Joel Klatt was one of the first to articulate how the seedings were clearly at odds with the rankings. For example, Arizona State was seeded number four while being ranked number twelve, and Boise State was seeded number three while being ranked number nine. Meanwhile, Oregon was seeded and ranked number one but found itself doomed to a rematch with the sixth-ranked team in the nation, Ohio State.
What does any of this mean? Who knows? It’s one year but let the speculation spin as to what would have happened if the rules either allowed for the byes to be dealt out to nonconference champions (a la Notre Dame, Texas, Ohio State) or for reseeding after the first set of games.
Those in favor of reseeding and reseeding only would have seen the following quarterfinal matchups: Texas versus Boise State, Penn State versus Arizona State, Notre Dame versus Georgia, and Ohio State versus Oregon. Big difference, right? Not really, but that’s because the real wedge preventing the byes from doing what byes are supposed to do is requiring the four teams receiving them to win their conference championships. What if the byes could have been handed out to any deserving team?
For example, what if Oregon, Georgia, Notre Dame, and Penn State had all received byes? Potentially after reseeding the first round, the quarterfinals could have seen the following matchups: Arizona State versus Oregon, Boise State versus Georgia, Ohio State versus Notre Dame, and Texas versus Penn State. (Rewarding the bye to Texas as opposed to Penn State would have resulted in the same quarterfinal matchup upon reseeding.) That would have been something more akin to both a March Madness bracket without byes and an NFL Playoff Bracket with byes.
As Klatt was so quick to observe, Oregon, especially, and possibly Georgia were both punished to an extent for winning their conferences, which required Oregon to defeat Ohio State and Penn State back in the fall and for Georgia to beat Texas twice by Christmas. The way in which these nonsensical seeding measures have functioned to date may have resulted in Ohio State’s redemptive win over Oregon, but it lacked the whimsy of the first Thursday or Friday in March.
With better seeding, the first round could have featured the following highwire acts: Boise State versus Indiana, Arizona State versus Tennessee, Clemson versus Ohio State, and SMU versus Texas. Those games would have likely been more exciting than what we were given, and they would have meant something more than the typical exhibitions of Bowl season even if that something was likely a false sense of momentum.
In that hypothetical Playoff, the semifinals likely would feature the following games: Texas/Penn State versus Oregon and Ohio State/Notre Dame versus Georgia. And the likely championship game would be Penn State/Oregon versus Ohio State/Notre Dame. In other words, the later rounds would not have looked all that different whether that fourth hypothetical bye were dealt to Notre Dame, Penn State, Texas, or even Ohio State (and not even all that different from what actually took place). The real significance would have been felt in the quality of the first round, which would have played out with the excitement of an NFL Wildcard round instead of the hollow ring of an estranged bowl season full of blowouts and second guessing.
But the power (or lack thereof) isn’t in the bye so much as the seeding, as the true purpose of a playoff isn’t really about the champion at the end so much as the fool’s gold excitement of the early rounds.
The regular season with the least amount of meaning in sport is currently baseball. Teams play 162 games to earn byes, and then the power of the bye is undone by a kink in the pitching rotation. The NBA upholds the merits of its 82-game schedule with a postseason based off winning a series as opposed to the knockout rounds of single elimination favored at the college ranks (the difference is akin to having to win a set in tennis versus a single game or point). The popularity of March Madness brackets might suggest people are in love with whimsy and chaos and lottery balls, but the predictability of the later rounds in an NFL Playoff along with Super Bowl ratings suggests that’s not necessarily the case. Whimsy is fine, but so is might.
NFL teams coming off a bye are undefeated in the last two postseasons, and teams coming off byes hold a record of 68–25 over the last twenty-five postseasons, and in fifteen of those twenty-five seasons a team whose route in the Playoffs included a bye has won the Super Bowl. And this has pretty much always been the case in professional football even as the playoff format has been tweaked time and time again. From the 1971 postseason through the 1978 postseason, byes were not part of the format, but division winners held a record of 12–4 against wildcard teams. That’s about the power of seeding and having a closed circuit in place to create a balanced schedule, a circuit that the megaconferences in college football largely negate.
On the surface, the 0–4 performance of the teams with byes in this extended format of the college playoff looks chaotic, but the chaos wasn’t a Cinderella storming the field. It was indecisiveness on the powers that be, wanting the regular season to matter, wanting the Conference Championship Games to matter, wanting Notre Dame to matter, wanting Bowls to matter, wanting rankings to matter, wanting seedings to matter, wanting everything to matter in equal proportion to how it once mattered.
If that sounds like a problem, then it’s likely a familiar one felt by anyone who’s applied for college over the last however many decades. What college football seems to be fighting most is the tension between what happens on the field and the application process, which almost never balances perfectly between vaunted metrics, stated criteria, the eye test, and gut feelings. Everyone in the field needs to believe they have a chance, but the end results need to be deserving.
The solution founded largely on undaunted momentum and an urge to always be bigger is to seek out the rule changes and circuitry to be more like the high-powered never say bust NFL. That’s the predictable model. That’s echoes of the college experience as resume building. That’s college football without all the college clutter — from Paul Bunyan’s Axe to the Old Oaken Bucket or Brass Spittoon or whatever, from the undecided major to the leaves blowing across the campus in autumn. That’s saying bye to something and never looking back because perfection in all its forms was always somewhere else. Isn’t that what’s always stood in opposition to the stone and brick work and mortar brackets aligning the campus quads, portal or no portal? That, and, well, the money too. But wherever the football seems to travel it takes the college dilemma with it.
