For anyone who has followed the sport for more than a year or two, college football remains a theater of the absurd. College pigskin is an immensely entertaining and colorful part of our lives, blessedly spicing up everyday existence and blasting away the gray, the normal, the ordinary, the monotonous things that crowd our time and the demands placed upon it. Yet, while being loads of fun, college football also represents a bizarre realm in which really stupid things are said and done on an annual basis.
Right now, one of the big facepalm realities of college football is the fact that even a single soul is talking about the need for a conference championship game in the Big 12. Why is it so exasperating? Because the Big 12 has every team play each other in the regular season. (You don’t realize how tempting it was to type that previous sentence in all-CAPS. It’s worth screaming, but we try to be restrained around here.)
A conference title game is redundant in a 10-team Big 12 which plays a nine-game schedule. Yet, there remains such a profound drumbeat around the idea that the Big 12 was hurt by the lack of a conference title game last season… ignoring the fact that Big 12 has seen national-title aspirants (dating back to Nebraska in 1996) get ambushed in a conference championship tilt.
It makes one’s head hurt — college football stupidity is almost as bad as political stupidity, the kind Americans will have to endure in the next 15 months of presidential campaigning.
Well, if you thought the Big 12 debate was stupid, Missouri head coach Gary Pinkel offered a distraction — not a welcome one, but a distraction nevertheless.
On Monday, as part of ESPN’s “Car Wash” (TV appearances in ESPN studios by SEC coaches, annually done to promote the SEC while other power conferences hold their media-day events), Pinkel said this:
Gary Pinkel said no independents in @CFBPlayoff. “Give Notre Dame year to join a league. They don’t have independents in NFL"
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) July 20, 2015
Pinkel is a damn good football coach, someone who has dramatically improved the way he’ll be remembered based on his last two seasons of work at Missouri. One can acknowledge how well Pinkel has performed at his job, which is to coach football players. In terms of his larger recommendations for college football, Pinkel should keep a great distance from any kind of discussion table, based on these remarks.
First of all, while it’s perfectly reasonable to claim that college football should be more like the NFL in certain ways, a reflexive reference to the NFL as the standard for “the way things ought to be” is woefully misguided.
So, Gary, they don’t have independent teams in the NFL. Know what the NFL also lacks? An intelligent playoff system.
The NFL allows teams with losing records to make the playoffs. It allows 8-8 teams to host 12-4 teams in playoff games if the 8-8 team is a division winner and the 12-4 team isn’t. NFL football is one of the most dangerous sports human beings can possibly play, and yet the league doesn’t assign supreme value to every victory. That’s the height of foolishness, so the NFL should hardly be seen as a model example of how to arrange postseason football contests. The television and marketing realms are where the NFL soars relative to college football, but things such as divisions and conferences? College football, for all its flaws, is better.
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Give Pinkel this much, though: He does have something of a point when arguing for everyone to get into a conference, including Notre Dame. Pinkel wants a streamlined system in which everyone plays by the same rules. That’s an understandable and legitimate impulse — the messy nature of college football flows largely from the fact that teams in various conferences (and their attendant contexts) are rarely if ever playing by the same sets of rules and demands.
However, that should have been Pinkel’s point — not that Notre Dame has to join a conference.
It’s true that Notre Dame — having been picked to play in the 1992 Sugar Bowl and especially the 1995 Fiesta Bowl when it didn’t deserve either of those prestigious bowls on merit — has often benefited from college football’s (lack of a) postseason system in the past. The Irish shouldn’t have been picked for the 2006 Fiesta Bowl against Ohio State. Auburn and Oregon both had better BCS bowl cases that season. The Irish got the benefit of the doubt — and their economic clout — on many occasions in the past.
One can therefore say that if Notre Dame goes 12-0 and doesn’t have to play a conference title game, the Irish would make the College Football Playoff even if their schedule wasn’t particularly rigorous. It’s a fair point, the kind Pinkel is trying to make, but it’s also a debatable one.
Florida State went unbeaten last season. Under the BCS, the Seminoles would have finished No. 1 in the final BCS standings before the bowls. (Never, in the 16-year BCS era, did a sole unbeaten team from a Power 5 conference get voted below No. 1 heading into the bowls.) In the first year of the College Football Playoff, the Noles finished third, below two once-beaten teams (Alabama, Oregon). Since Marshall, unbeaten until late November, was never a serious threat to make the playoff, it can reasonably be argued that Notre Dame can’t game the system to the extent it could in the BCS and prior eras. The Irish might still be smart to schedule 12 cupcakes, but the certainty of a playoff (championship) ticket does not appear to be as great in this new College Football Playoff system.
One could immediately say that Notre Dame has too valuable a TV package with NBC to schedule nothing but cupcakes. That’s an important point to consider here. Yet, let’s play devil’s advocate for a bit: Perhaps Notre Dame could fill its schedule with all three service academies (national games but without the risk) and other select regional opponents that would move the national needle yet not offer top-of-the-line competition.
A diminished Michigan has, for instance, represented a sexy and nationally visible yet beatable opponent for Notre Dame at home in recent years. Now that Jim Harbaugh’s in Ann Arbor, the Irish couldn’t get that kind of “sweet spot” opponent in the form of Michigan, but they could look elsewhere for an example similar to the Wolverines under Brady Hoke in 2014. Very specific scheduling could give Notre Dame a reasonably attractive TV slate (for NBC) but limited risk in terms of going 12-0. Could that approach get the Irish into the playoff over 11-1 teams from power conferences?
It might, but the examples of 2014 Florida State and Marshall suggest otherwise. Moreover, the fact that non-conference champions (the SEC or Big Ten runners-up, for example) can get into the playoff represents another limitation on how much of a cream-puff schedule Notre Dame can craft. Beyond the playoff itself, it has to be acknowledged that the New Year’s Six does not limit conferences to two teams. The SEC put three teams in the initial NY6 bowl lineup, and is poised for more bonanzas in the future. Notre Dame might try to play the lower-risk card and schedule for wins more than strength of resume, but there are many valid reasons why that’s not as favorable a position in a post-BCS context.
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Ultimately, Gary Pinkel seems to be saying something more than just, “Everyone should play by the same rules.” That’s part of his argument, but it’s not the whole of it. He’s also asking a school to do something which, economically, would not be in its best interests. Notre Dame’s independent status allows it to retain a lot more revenue than it would in the ACC or anywhere else. It’s not particularly fair for Pinkel to insist that Notre Dame “get in line.”
Moreover, far beyond the realm of Notre Dame itself, there’s no need for a 10-team Big 12 with a nine-game schedule to play a conference title game. If Pinkel wants all leagues to play a conference title game, he has to look at a lot more moving parts in order to arrive at a responsible solution, something more than a knee-jerk reaction.
Furthermore — and this is the kicker, an exposition of the hypocrisy at work here — Gary Pinkel should want all conferences to play the same number of league games if he’s that focused on everyone playing by the same rules. Does Pinkel want the SEC to go to nine games, though, and follow the Big 12 and Pac-12?
NOPE. He voted against the idea two years ago.
Notre Dame has existed at the center of many college football controversies over time, but the College Football Playoff has already demonstrated that — for better or worse — it is different from the BCS and previous eras in the sport’s history. If Pinkel is that serious about wanting everyone to play by the same rules, he has to account for many more pieces to the puzzle than just one school in South Bend.
