Is the College Football Playoff working?

WASHINGTON — When the College Football Playoff was announced, we believed that our long national nightmare was finally over. At long last, a true champion would be deservedly crowned.

And yet, when the first set of CFP rankings was announced last Tuesday, they displayed many of the same biases we’ve grown to loathe in the BCS era — biases that threaten, once again, to keep deserving teams out of the competition.

The first set of rankings included three SEC teams in the all-important top four, with another team lurking just two spots behind. While many around the country agree that the SEC is the top conference in the game today, the disparity between it and the rest of the country flies in the face of the criteria spelled out by the selection committee.

On the College Football Playoff’s official website, the overview of the process is spelled out:

This season, college football enters a new four-team playoff era. The format is simple: the best four teams, two semifinals played in bowl games and a championship game played in a different city each year. It’s the biggest innovation in the sport in decades.

The format may be simple, and the innovation may seem big, but the first week of rankings showed what many have long feared — that the bias toward the most highly publicized and televised conference in the country still prevails.

More troubling is the fact that ESPN launched the SEC Network this season, giving it every reason to further promote the interests of the schools its new partnership covers. While the PAC-12 and Big 10 have their own independent networks, the SEC has the largest media giant in the sports world working for it across a bevy of channels.

As Jordan Burchette pointed out in a recent Rolling Stone article, ESPN holds the exclusive broadcast rights to the CFP, and also to the weekly unveiling of the rankings. In addition, the CFP website includes a list of eight college football headlines — all ESPN links — in the right-hand column of every page on its site. While not officially a component of their broadcast agreement, the website made the decision to use their news headlines in their feed, and uses ESPN-provided video content on their site, according to a communications official.

“If the playoff committee has decided singularly that they are going to get their content from ESPN, how lazy is the thinking that goes into thinking about the teams?” says Burchette. “It’s the kind of coziness that suggests a bubble of some kind.”

That bubble reinforces what Harvard Sports Analysis Collective writer Austin Tymins found in a recent study, which showed enduring bias toward and against certain conferences and teams in the polls. Specifically, SEC teams fared 1.50 spots better than equivalent PAC-12 teams and 1.43 spots better than equivalent Big 12 teams in the Associated Press poll.

While the College Football Playoff does not rely on the AP poll, as the BCS did, there is nevertheless an echo chamber of sentiment about the top programs in the country, reflected in these polls.

“ESPN is the conversation when you’re talking about college football,” says Burchette. “And I agree, I think [the SEC] is the best conference; I just don’t think it is by nearly the margin that everyone else apparently does.”

It’s how Mississippi State went from unranked to #1 after just eight weeks. The Bulldogs beat three teams that were ranked in the top 10 at the time, but LSU (then #8, now #19) and Texas A&M (then #6, now unranked) have both proven not to be as good as originally thought. Yet, the Bulldogs still reap the benefits. Meanwhile a team such as Baylor — which beat a TCU team now knocking on the door of the top five — isn’t rewarded for what turns out to be a much stronger win.

“This is where the SEC bias is most evident,” says Burchette. “Because all those teams started higher.”

That leads into the myth of universal access.

Every FBS team has equal access to the playoff based on its performance. No team will qualify automatically.

No team will qualify automatically, per a conference championship, but some SEC team will essentially qualify automatically.

Of course, it doesn’t help perceptions that the committee is chaired by Jeff Long, vice chancellor and director of athletics at the University of Arkansas, an SEC institution. For transparency’s sake, choosing an administrator from literally any other conference (or someone affiliated with none of them) would probably have been a better idea.

Bill Hancock is the executive director of the College Football Playoff. He was also the first director of the BCS. While the decision to hire Hancock certainly makes business sense due to his years of experience governing similar events, it again does not help the perception that the CFP will be the game-changer it presents itself to be.

The selection committee will choose the four teams for the playoff based on strength of schedule, head-to-head results, comparison of results against common opponents, championships won and other factors.

Just look at those first rankings, which included Ole Miss at number four. The Rebels had just lost a game in which they were completely controlled on the field, if not the scoreboard, at LSU. The Tigers missed a field goal in their first drive, fumbled heading into the end zone on their second and dropped a pair of gift interceptions, and still beat Ole Miss. And this was the same LSU team that should have lost at home to Wisconsin, did lose at home to Mississippi State, got throttled 41-7 at Auburn and survived a bad Florida team 30-27 on the road.

All of that, and the Rebels only dropped to number four, staying well above other one-loss teams with more impressive resumes, per the CFP’s own criteria. After Ole Miss’s heartbreaking home loss to Auburn last weekend — which by all sane accounts should be a “loser out” result — they will certainly drop out of the picture. But another SEC team is lying in the wait to take the Rebels’ place in the number-four spot.

If the other polls are to be believed, Alabama (7-1) could be the nation’s new number-four team come Tuesday night. Yes, the same Alabama that has beaten only one ranked team all season, then-#21 Texas A&M, which has been exposed as perhaps the most overrated team of the season. The Crimson Tide lost at home to Ole Miss, and its only other win of real quality came in the season’s opening week, 33-23 at home over West Virginia, the fourth-best team in the Big 12.

Yet, the Crimson Tide could be ahead of Oregon (8-1) of the PAC-12, who mauled conference rival Stanford 45-16 on Saturday and who has collected double-digit wins over both their ranked opponents, 46-27 over Michigan State at home and 42-30 at UCLA. Since their only loss, the Ducks’ offensive line has come back to relative health and they’ve won four straight, by an average of 21 points.

Alabama could very well be ahead of TCU of the Big 12, whose only loss was a 61-58 shootout at then-#5 Baylor. They’ll almost certainly be above Michigan State of the Big 10 (7-1), whose only loss was in Eugene, and who has played only one game closer than 14 points in their six wins since. And they’ll be ahead of Kansas State (7-1), also of the Big 12, whose only loss came in a game they should have won at home against Auburn, and who beat then 11th-ranked Oklahoma in Norman, something nobody is supposed to be able to do.

If Alabama is indeed ranked above all these teams, the committee will be telling us they believe the worst of the SEC is better than the rest of every other conference. The four SEC teams Alabama has beaten are 6-15 in their conference and have a grand total of one win (Arkansas’ 49-28 win over a brutally bad Texas Tech squad) against power-conference schools this year.

As many others have noted, much of this will sort itself out, to a degree. Mississippi State still plays Alabama and Ole Miss. Auburn still plays Alabama. TCU still plays Kansas State; KSU plays Baylor. But if Michigan State is going to drop six places for a loss to Oregon, and Baylor is going to drop eight for a loss to West Virginia, how can we punish Ole Miss only one spot for losing to a two-loss LSU?

“All of those teams started the season in advantaged positions that predisposed them to those positions,” explains Burchette of SEC teams such as Ole Miss last week and Alabama this week. “I think you can reasonably say the SEC enjoys the loftiest position it’s probably ever had as a conference.”

The rankings are fluid, and each week will give us new insights into how the committee is coming to its decisions. But unless there is a marked change from the inaugural entry’s perceived biases, the final result will likely end up with no fewer than two teams from the conference with which the corporate interests of the CFP are aligned. And that’s not a good look for college football.

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