College Football Playoff: Should the Committee Pick the “Best” or the “Most Deserving” Teams?

While the College Football Playoff is an improvement over the old BCS system it, unsurprisingly, has not done away with controversy or debate regarding the identities of the top teams in the country. The College Football Playoff Selection Committee released their first ranking today, and the predictable result was a lot of back and forth on television and online regarding what the committee got right and what it got wrong. The problem is not the fact of the arguing — quite nakedly, engendering “debate” is the sole purpose of releasing ineffectual rankings rather than waiting to release the ones that matter — it’s that the arguments usually involve people talking past each other.

There’s nothing wrong with this opinion; indeed, it’s probably even in some circumstances correct: some people do think that a team being undefeated means it’s good enough to beat any team that isn’t. But that’s probably a minority view, and if someone is ranking the undefeated team over the one or two loss team it’s probably not because they necessarily think the undefeated team would beat the other team it’s that, being undefeated, they deserve being in the playoff more than a team with a loss.

Most people don’t always express their arguments in these terms — “best team” versus “most deserving” — but that’s essentially all it comes down to. This tension is why the playoff, despite being an improvement over the BCS, is not a panacea, either. I wrote about all of this for Grantland right after the end of the BCS era, and, two years into the College Footbal Playoff experiment, I continue to stand by every word:

The larger issue is figuring out how we should determine a sport’s “champion.” The wildly unpopular BCS was one method, while the new College Football Playoff will be another, but I’m referring to something more fundamental: What criteria should we use to determine who gets the title?

One answer is that the champion should be the season’s “best team,” possibly defined as the best overall team or the team we think would be favored to beat every other team on a neutral field. Another answer is the “most deserving team,” loosely defined as the team that produced the best overall season. These two things are not always the same. It’s perfectly possible for the best team — i.e., the most formidable — to lose a close game or even two on a bad kick or a fluke play, while another team runs the table by winning close games.

In theory, the now obsolete BCS was designed to create a championship game by blending these two approaches: The coaches’ poll would reward the teams that had put together the best seasons, while the computers would crunch numbers to objectively measure the strongest teams. In practice, however, the BCS was incoherent and flawed. If the computers spit out data the voters didn’t like, the computers were changed, and the coaches’ poll has long been riddled with inexplicable results.

And so, the BCS is dead. In the last few years, many fans and pundits allowed the word “playoff” to take on something of a talismanic quality. Replacing the BCS with a playoff system would surely cure the evils of the BCS, they thought, and quite possibly “save the sport” by “settling things on the field.”

Here’s the problem: A playoff does not even attempt to crown either the best or most deserving team. The very purpose of a playoff or tournament is the exact opposite: No matter a team’s talent or apparent destiny, everything can be undone on a single day by a single bounce of the ball. (Admittedly, that’s actually the allure of a playoff, hence why they call it March Madness.) Yet we’ve become so accustomed to playoffs that it’s difficult for us to think of any other way of selecting a champion. (Playoff-think is such a dominant paradigm that Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight proposed mitigating some of the arbitrary tendencies of the NFL playoffs by giving points to teams that had better seasons than their opponents before the games even start.)

The primary advantage of a playoff is certainty, and after years of endless BCS debate — which followed decades of debate under the earlier bowl systems — certainty has real allure. But in most sports that have playoffs, like the NFL or the NBA, the criteria for getting to the playoffs is basically objective. Most playoff spots are decided based on win/loss records, with certain mechanical tiebreakers in place and known in advance. It’s not that the playoff crowns the best or most deserving team — just ask the 10-6 New York Giants that knocked off the undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. It’s that the loser has nothing to complain about: Everyone knows the rules.

Yet the new College Football Playoff lacks the very thing that makes playoffs in other sports so palatable, namely a semblance of objective certainty. While the defective BCS formula should have been interred long ago, it has been replaced by a Council of Platonic Guardians. The College Football Playoff selection committee will meet confidentially, then announce the identities of the playoff participants by edict. That’s not exactly what I’d call “settling it on the field.”

Most fans realize the new system is flawed, but figure it’ll be an improvement over the BCS since we’ll be talking about no. 4 versus no. 5 rather than no. 2 versus no. 3. Maybe so. But that logic works even better for no. 8 versus no. 9, and better still for no. 16 versus no. 17. And while an eight- or 16-team college football tournament sounds genuinely amazing, it’s naive to think that wouldn’t have a real effect on how the regular season actually works. It also makes me wonder what happened to trying to crown the best or most deserving team as champion, rather than the team that happened to win a single-elimination tournament.

I’m not at all sad to see the BCS go, but I’m not sure any playoff, let alone this particular playoff, will solve much in a world of conference realignment and more than 100 FBS teams scattered across the country.