College Football Playoff 2018

BigRedBuster said:
After seeing some media's tweets over the weekend, I'm agreeing with John Bishop.  They want to go back to the era when they got to choose the champion.
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I don't know what tweets you were seeing but I thought Maisel's column made a lot of sense.  I don't think expansion is necessary and we should stick with the 4 team format for at least 5 more years to evaluate it.  I believe almost every year either the 1 or 2 team will win it therefore expansion to 8 will only add an additional game that must be played to prove that the top 1 or 2 ranked teams are actually the best teams.  If so, then the possibility that the 5-8 ranked teams would win the championship is very unlikely and expansion is not needed.  It's also possible that the 3 and 4 ranked teams win it more frequently then expected in which case expansion might make sense.  So far I think that has happened once when tOSU won the NC.

From the article

The reasons to expand the playoff are mostly political. Some leagues are sore at being left out. The experts argue over which team should be No. 4, and expansion this season, for example, would have made the argument over Oklahoma vs. Georgia vs. Ohio State moot. Everyone would have gotten a trophy.
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If the playoffs expand to 8 then there will be arguments to expand it to 16 to appease a group of teams that didn't get one of the 8 trophies.

The committee eliminates the need to settle things on the field.

Not to mention that extending the season, even if it's just for eight teams, is a tough sell in an era when player safety and player compensation are being scrutinized more closely than ever.
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One of Maisel's arguments against expansion is that it would just create another round of blowouts.  One way to mitigate that would be to have the committee select the 8 best teams.  That wouldn't make the current expansionist happy since occasionally their conference champion still wouldn't always get one of the 8 trophies.  So it would have to be P5 champs and the 3 best remaining teams that would have to be selected.  If the politicians get their way and expansion to 8 happens I'm sure the SEC would prefer to keep the current 4 team format and the compromise will be that the remaining 3 will be by selection committee.  One unintended consequence of expansion will be that 1 or 2 of the 3 are from the SEC quite frequently and the UCFs and Boise St's still may not be included.

 
4skers89 said:
It's also possible that the 3 and 4 ranked teams win it more frequently then expected in which case expansion might make sense.  So far I think that has happened once when tOSU won the NC.
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Bama was the 4 seed last year. And Georgia was the 3 seed.

In fact, the #1 seed is still yet to win the playoff.

 
As far as the title game goes, it was definitely Clemson's night but I feel like Saban f'd it up quite a bit in the first half. When it was 13-14, he starts to abandon the run (for absolutely no reason) and tries to have Tua take big shots downfield.

It was like self-sabotage. I've noticed that Alabama goes run-heavy after they're up two scores. So it's possible that both Saban and the whole team were so far out of their element towards the end of the second quarter that they all started to panic. But they shouldn't have, and in my opinion would probably not have lost if they had just stuck with their power run game.

If those two teams play 10 times, they probably each win 5 a piece. But just so I'm clear, it felt amazing watching Saban getting blown out and looking confused.    :)

 
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So it's all over and we didn't really see a competitive game this playoff season.  The team that played the weakest schedule, ahead of the playoff, walked away looking the best by far...

The final AP poll makes it seem like Alabama played the toughest schedule of the playoff field (against #6, #7, and #16 ahead of the playoff), especially if you don't consider how bad Louisville, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Ole Miss were in 2018.

I have a difficult time believing Texas A&M beat the nation's sixth-best college football team.  I suppose they played #1 pretty tough, too, losing by just two at home.  Syracuse lost by twice as many points (away) to the national champs this season.

 
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