When the Big 12 sent word in June that it would not release a preseason poll this year in conjunction with its media days, it didn’t seem like a huge deal. The Big 12, after all, is just copying what the Big Ten did last year, and everyone who follows college football knows that a projection of how good teams will be from year-to-year is mostly guess work given the amount of roster turnover across the sport.
On the surface, it’s a sensible trend.
Back in the day, preseason polls were considered crucial in generating interest and getting the public back up to speed on college football after an eight-month hiatus. But now, given the intense year-round coverage of the sport, expansion of the College Football Playoff and the automatic bids that go to conference champions, you can make a solid case that preseason polls have outlived their usefulness and simply exist as fodder for the content machine.
Many fans will say, “Good riddance.”
But the Big 12’s decision is also part of a different trend, which we’ve seen across all the power conferences this summer and is actively harming college football: Distrust of the postseason system they built.
The brass-knuckle truth about why the Big 12’s coaches and athletics directors voted to eliminate their preseason poll is that that last year, their conference champion Arizona State was picked last by the media. Meanwhile, preseason favorite Utah struggled to a 5-7 record.
Inside the Big 12, there’s a belief that the upside-down nature of last year’s conference title race – which, admittedly, the voters got very, very, very wrong – created a perception that the league wasn’t very good. As a result, Arizona State did not get enough respect from the CFP committee and, more problematically, Brigham Young got even less.
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Though Alabama’s exclusion (and the SEC’s subsequent hissy fit) has driven almost all the offseason dialogue over last year’s CFP selection process, there’s an argument to be made that BYU had more of a gripe.
Without doing a full autopsy, the Cougars were 10-2 with a pair of losses by a combined nine points and a head-to-head win over SMU, the team that got the final at-large spot. We can debate whether that made BYU more playoff-worthy than Alabama, but it’s more than fair to say BYU didn’t get nearly as much consideration as it should have – either by the committee or the media, which ranked the Cougars 17th.
Did the Big 12 get the short end of the stick last year because Arizona State was ranked 16th in a preseason poll and BYU was 13th? I’m skeptical.
But people in the Big 12 believe that. Just like people in the SEC now believe that they’re not getting credit from the committee for their strength of schedule. And just like people in the Big Ten now believe that they need four automatic bids in the proposed 16-team iteration of the CFP because they believe it’s harder to play nine conference games than the SEC’s eight.
See where this is heading?
At the SEC’s spring meetings this year, we actually had an athletics director – Florida’s Scott Stricklin – suggest in an interview with Yahoo! Sports that a committee might not be the right vehicle for choosing the postseason field.
“I question whether it’s appropriate for college football,” said Stricklin, who – wait for it – served on the committee from 2018-21.
Explaining his position further, Stricklin claimed that football was different from other college sports because there’s a longer season in basketball or volleyball, so the committees that put together those postseason tournaments have more available data to consider.
But Stricklin has this completely backwards. The relative lack of data available in a 12-game college football, and thus the need for human interpretation, is the very reason why a committee is the best way to choose the CFP.
Pretty much everyone in the sport agreed with that notion more than a dozen years ago when the CFP was formed and the commissioners flatly rejected using statistical models or computer rankings to pick the teams.
In fact, the opaque use of computers in the Bowl Championship Series formula was one of the big complaints of the pre-College Football Playoff era. Nobody wanted decimal points on someone’s hard drive deciding a national championship. The entire idea behind a committee was that actual people were best suited to look at a season and judge which teams were most qualified.
Has it been perfect? Of course not.
But there is simply no way to boil a college football season down to one number or even one point of emphasis when every conference schedules differently and there are even significant disparities within a conference now that they all have 16-plus teams.
As long as that scheduling model exists, the only way to effectively run the sport is for the conferences to empower a set of impartial human eyes to make decisions and then accept their work regardless of which league it favors in a given year.
College football has brazenly moved away from that ethos this summer. The SEC’s strength-of-schedule propaganda campaign has felt unnecessary and desperate, arguably one of the most embarrassing moments for the league in the last two decades. The Big Ten trying to strong-arm its colleague conferences into four automatic playoff bids cuts against the very idea of competition and threatens to make college football’s postseason look more like WrestleMania. And now the Big 12 thinks its issue is a perception problem, not a football problem, so they’re going to get rid of a preseason poll – as if the committee ever cared about that in the first place.
Expanding the CFP from four to 12 was a no-brainer. But moving the arguments for or against teams into the margins has come with an unintended consequence. Nobody believes in the system they built, so instead they’ll attempt to game it.