The SEC's cries after the reveal of last season's CFP field was only the beginning of the objective vs. subjective debate. As hated as the old BCS rankings were, could a computer formula be the answer? It's working in another college sport.
We are a little more than a month away from the weekly outrage ritual where the College Football Selection committee puts out rankings that don’t matter and explains them poorly before ultimately selecting a 12-team field that will spawn an entire offseason of grievance for the teams and conferences on the wrong side of the line.
We’ve seen it most acutely this year within the SEC, which collectively accused the committee of failing to honor the strength of the conference by choosing SMU and Indiana over three-loss Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina. The angst has been so profound that Florida athletics director Scott Stricklin — who served on the CFP committee from 2018-21 — told Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger in May that he questioned whether the very notion of a committee was “appropriate for college football.”
For better or worse, committees are part of college sports culture. There’s a Committee on Infractions, competition committees, a Division I Council and of course blue-ribbon panels that choose the at-large participants for NCAA championship tournaments in basketball, baseball and a variety of other sports.
But if the football powers that be ever wanted to overhaul the CFP selection process and implement a mathematical formula for choosing the teams, there’s already a model for it that exists in college sports. And in general, the participants wouldn’t want it any other way.
“You like the fact that everyone knows the rules going in,” Providence men’s hockey coach Nate Leaman told Yahoo Sports. “It’s cut and dry. Everyone knows where everyone stands throughout the whole year. You know whether you’re in or you’re out.”
Since the early 1990s, college hockey has used a completely objective system to choose at-large teams for the NCAA tournament with rankings that are publicly available and updated every night there are games.
Though the formula has evolved over the years and is still evolving — more on that in a moment — the gist of it was to take the three factors the committee was supposed to consider and measure every team in the country by comparing them with every other team.
All the selection committee does after the conference tournaments is plug in the six automatic bid winners and then take the 10 highest-rated teams from the formula to plug into the bracket. Sometimes there are necessary small seeding tweaks to deal with geography issues, but the committee has zero discretion when it comes to team selection.
No mess, no controversy, no complaints.
“It certainly takes a lot of the pressure off,” Tim Troville, the Division I men’s ice hockey committee chairman and associate athletics director at Harvard told Yahoo Sports. “We like to be really open and transparent. Mathematically you’re in, or mathematically you’re out. It’s been really good for hockey.”
Could something like that work for college football, which is still undecided on a playoff model for 2026 and beyond? Let’s go back a little in history.
The genesis of hockey’s move to an objective selection process started in 1983 when Bowling Green was controversially snubbed in favor of Minnesota-Duluth. Bowling Green’s coach, Jerry York, was chairman of the committee but had to recuse himself from the discussions and was so incensed about the process that he resigned in protest.
Momentum among coaches for a different system began to build as more controversial decisions accumulated. The committee eventually began collaborating with a Bowling Green graduate who gained recognition for college hockey power ratings that were published in The Hockey News. He began feeding formatted data to the committee based on their desired criteria, and fans on the internet were able to reverse-engineer the numbers and come up with the “PairWise” rankings that precisely mimicked what the committee used.
It ultimately became the official nomenclature of the NCAA — until this week when it was replaced by NCAA Power Index (NPI), which goes into effect this season.
Troville said the NPI is a response to issues that had accumulated over the years with the PairWise, and the committee believes the new formula will greater reward strength of schedule. Most of the tweaks, however, are marginal like a slight decrease in the numerical value of an overtime win.
Before every season, the committee will be able make certain adjustments to the NPI if it sees statistical anomalies emerging. But the important point is that “everyone will be playing under the same assumptions on how to get into the NCAA tournament,” Troville said.
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Based on the outrage we’ve already seeing through one year of the 12-team CFP model where the SEC felt it got shorted, don’t be surprised if there are more calls for college football to develop a similar system.
The question is what would replace the committee, which is an amusing question for a lot of administrators who remember how much fans hated the old BCS system, which combined a variety of computer rankings and human polls into a somewhat opaque formula.
“As generational change happens, it’s easy to forget we had the computer rankings and people got left out and [the sentiment was] we need humans,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “The pendulum swung away from use of data to the selection committee. You’ve seen a little bit of a swing back, and some place in the middle to me between subjective and objective in the current environment would make the most sense. But that’s without a lot of definition. I could have a conversation about both, but you have to dig in to think about the impact.”
The conference commissioners have nudged the committee to put more emphasis on strength of schedule and added a new metric for “record strength” to the basket of data they’re looking at in the meetings. But it’s still a subjective system where the committee is asked to identify the “best” teams.
While it was generally clear-cut in the four-team playoff, things can get murky when you’re trying to separate two- and three-loss teams as we saw last year.
A hockey-like ranking based purely on numbers and analytics would cut out that middle ground and give teams an idea of exactly where they stand every week and what they need to do without any of the backroom voodoo that creates suspicion or consternation.
But would it really be better for the sport?
“I had a Notre Dame team that went to the [BCS] based on the computer, and then obviously been in the playoffs when it was a committee,” LSU coach Brian Kelly said. “What we’re trying to strive for here is to bring in a little bit more of the art and the science working together. I don’t think it should be all science.”
Though the PairWise system in hockey hasn’t been entirely without controversy, it’s an accepted part of the sport and coaches make their non-conference schedules knowing exactly what will give them a mathematical boost.
“It measures the strength of a league objectively,” said Leaman, whose 2015 team at Providence won the national title. “We play a lot of non-conference games and how your league does as a whole impacts everyone’s numbers. If your league is having a good year, it boosts everyone through the algorithm. In football, there’s always the debate, is it the SEC or the Big Ten? The strength of the league would be able to show a little bit more in our [system].”
Perhaps the best part is that fans (and coaching staffs) can play with the numbers online and know exactly how certain wins and losses will impact their team’s chances of getting in. For bubble teams, that means a lot of clicking the refresh button toward the end of the season and at the conference tournaments.
While that means the NCAA tournament selection show isn’t particularly filled with suspense, the drama becomes a slow burn throughout the season. And at the end, if you don’t make the cut, there’s really nobody to blame.
“You know where you stand, and I think that’s probably a really good thing because it’s completely merit-based,” Troville said. “I think it would be more challenging if you didn’t know that and you did everything you thought you had to do to get in, won your games and then the committee from a subjective nature chose other teams that they thought would perform better than your team. I think that’s hard for a team to understand. To me, from our membership in hockey, they want to know what they have to do to make the NCAA tournament and then have the play on the ice dictate that. And I think that’s a real positive model.”
Category: General Sports
