Ok this is something I've been pretty worked up about since the debate in the final weeks of the season on ESPN about who should get into the playoff...
How can the powers that be know if a 10-2 team is worse than an 11-1 team when those teams didn't face each other during the regular season, nor did they have any common foes...nor in many cases did their foes have any common foes...how can anyone sit here and say (until bowl season) that one conference champion is better than another...
The common thread here, scheduling, the Power 5 teams do not schedule enough quality games against each other to know that one conference champion that finishes 10-2 is better or worse (more or less deserving) than an 11-1 conference champion that also had a late season win against an FCS school that somehow counts...
In essence, it does no good for a conference to have three, four, five elite teams in a given year to beat up on each other, if they aren't scheduling marquee Non-conference games (more than 1 per team per year). A team that finishes 10-2 in the B1G could quite possibly be better than an 11-1 SEC team, but no one knows because the SEC team didn't play anyone in the B1G or have any common opponents...how is this not a problem when you only have four playoff teams and you leave out a conference champion? How can you discount the difficulty of winning a conference championship when a conference is DEEP, rather than simply dominated by one elite team (ah hem Big12/ACC)?
How can the powers that be know if a 10-2 team is worse than an 11-1 team when those teams didn't face each other during the regular season, nor did they have any common foes...nor in many cases did their foes have any common foes...how can anyone sit here and say (until bowl season) that one conference champion is better than another...
The common thread here, scheduling, the Power 5 teams do not schedule enough quality games against each other to know that one conference champion that finishes 10-2 is better or worse (more or less deserving) than an 11-1 conference champion that also had a late season win against an FCS school that somehow counts...
In essence, it does no good for a conference to have three, four, five elite teams in a given year to beat up on each other, if they aren't scheduling marquee Non-conference games (more than 1 per team per year). A team that finishes 10-2 in the B1G could quite possibly be better than an 11-1 SEC team, but no one knows because the SEC team didn't play anyone in the B1G or have any common opponents...how is this not a problem when you only have four playoff teams and you leave out a conference champion? How can you discount the difficulty of winning a conference championship when a conference is DEEP, rather than simply dominated by one elite team (ah hem Big12/ACC)?
