By Matt Moscona
Since 1985, the year the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams, No. 1 seeds are 154-2 against No. 16 seeds.
In the NCAA Women’s Tournament, only once has a No. 16 seed defeated a top seed. Harvard upset Stanford in 1998, but the Crimson boasted the nation’s leading scorer and the Cardinal were down two starters to season-ending injuries.
The NBA Playoffs expanded in the 1984-85 season. Since then, the No. 8 seed has defeated the No. 1 seed just six times in 80 tries. Those are professionals.
Six Wild Card teams have won the Super Bowl since the format was introduced in 1970. That’s about one a decade.
Despite these one-sided results, talk shows aren’t filled with callers demanding the NCAA contract the basketball tournament. The NBA Playoffs continue expanding. Columnists don’t seem to mind an extra weekend of NFL games.
Yet, after one weekend of lopsided results in the First Round of the first ever 12-team College Football Playoff, the people wanting to blow up the format are more rabid than Taylor Swift fans.
To steal a line from Ms. Swift, “you need to calm down.”
College football is just finding its collective postseason sea legs after a century of a bogus system orchestrated by rich men in ugly jackets and self-important sportswriters voting on who they think should be the champion. This whole “decide it on the field” thing is still a new concept that will take some workshopping.
Stop for a moment and think how absurd it is that a team can win every game it plays and not even have a shot to play for a championship because a group of people in a hotel ballroom in suburban Dallas are arguing things like game control and defensive efficiency metrics.
Imagine telling the 2007 New York Giants they aren’t the Super Bowl champions because a group of people voted and determind the Patriots were better. That’s college football. At least, it has been. But, we’re getting closer to figuring it out.
A 16-team field would be ideal, but 12 is better than four. And four was better than two. And two was better than whatever in the world the “system” was that allowed President Richard Nixon to declare the national champion in 1969.
And spare me the nonsense about college football having the most meaningful regular season. Explain that to 13-0 Florida State which was omitted from contention because a group of people decided their entire reason for success was one player. I guess they forgot about Ohio State winning the 2014 title with a third-string quarterback.
If you’re still arguing against the Seminoles, close your eyes and imagine that was your team being left out of the mix.
College football thrives in spite of its inequitable scheduling and foolish postseason model, not because of it.
It will be at least one more year of the current format, but there are a few obvious tweaks that will help next season. First, it’s absurd that Boise State and Arizona State received byes while the No. 1 seed Oregon has the toughest path. Either seed the field according to the rankings or re-seed after the first round. I’d prefer both.
As a hypothetical exercise, I asked longtime sports betting expert Jimmy Ott to provide hypothetical point spreads for First Round games if the seeding had gone accoring to rankings. Here’s how the matchups would have looked:
No. 5 Notre Dame (-8.5) vs. No. 12 Clemson
No. 6 Ohio State (-14.5) vs. No. 11 Arizona State
No. 7 Tennessee (-4.5) vs. No. 10 SMU
No. 8 Indiana (-4) vs. No. 9 Boise State
Those matchups look far more appropriate for an opening round. Just like every other sport and league, there will be blowouts, but there will also be more competitive matchups setting the table for the quarterfinals.
If the chalk were to hold, and the field were re-seeded so that the highest seed faced the lowest, this is how the next round would look:
No. 1 Oregon vs. No. 8 Indiana
No. 2 Georgia v. No. 7 Tennessee
No. 3 Texas vs. No. 6 Ohio State
No. 4 Penn State vs. No. 5 Notre Dame
This isn’t a difficult exercise. Literally every other successful sports league has decades of test cases to show the criminally late college football powers that be how to execute a successful playoff format. Just do what we see work in every other sport.
You want to allow Boise St. and Arizona State into the field because they won a bad league? Fine. But rewarding them with a bye while saddling Oregon with the toughest draw is nonsensical.
College football’s version of UMBC over Virginia will come eventually. There will also be plenty more yawners, like there are in every format.
But at least we are allowing the players to decide it on the field.
Finally.
