College Football Chase Final

 

My schedule prevented me from providing the final MVP Chase in the wee hours of the morning before the Selection Committee made their selections for the 12-team playoffs. For the most part, however, I was able to avoid news about the Selection results when I got a chance to finalize my Playoff Chase tabulations in the afternoon after the announcement. Even as I write this part of the newsletter, I don't know all the teams the Committee selected.

The playoff chase was based on four categories: number of wins, strength of wins, strength of losses, and number of points/possessions away from going undefeated. In short, you had to win a lot, beat good teams, avoid losing to bad teams, and avoid getting blown out.

Here are my initial results, ranking all 30 teams with three losses or fewer and accounting for the five conference champions. ("CC" means Conference Champion, "AL" means at-large).

 

The results were… incorrect. Specifically, Army doesn't belong in the playoffs because the Black Knights were uncompetitive in their one loss and had a weak schedule otherwise. Although my formula took blowout losses and strength of schedule into account, Army's 11-1 record would still get them into the playoffs. 

So, my system was wrong. I removed the number of wins into consideration while retaining the other three categories. Here are my adjusted results. After I made the adjustments, I then looked at who the Committee chose. Their ranking is in the last column.

Considering that the committee was compelled to rank or seed the top four conference champions, their selections aren't far off from my results. The only significant difference is that the Committee chose Tennessee over Miami FL. I can't say they were wrong. While my numbers had Miami, there would have been an uproar if the SEC had just two teams in the playoffs while the ACC had three. And one thing I did not factor into my rankings was the strength of the conferences. I may tinker with that next year. 

Every year, the last four or five spots are going to be debated. The Committee this year set a positive precedent in refusing to select any 3-loss team (except conference champ Clemson). Frankly, no such team "deserved" it as all the contenders (especially in the SEC) had bad losses. I predict that in the future, any three-loss team that gets selected (and not a conference champ) will have losses in close games against very good teams; the candidates this year didn't meet that standard.

James Leroy Wilson writes The MVP Chase (subscribe). Thank you for your subscriptions and support! You may contact James for writing, editing, research, and other work: jamesleroywilson-at-gmail.com.