We’ve probably all been in a situation where we see or know someone who has a point they’re trying to get across, but they go to absurd levels to continue driving that point home.
The CFB Playoff committee rankings, version 2.0 came out last night, and while it’s been said many times in this spot that the ranking shows are nothing but red meat for a starved hot take public, it’s clear that within those hot takes are mild truths the committee believes.
One of those seems to be that “just because you’re unbeaten or the defending champ, it doesn’t mean jack to us, and we will go to the level of grading you differently to make such a point.”
Ohio State was knocked down a notch to number three, which in the grand scheme of things really doesn’t matter. What matters is that after one year and now into year two of this experiment, you can start seeing this logic as a trend rather than an abnormality based on the situation.
Florida State was the unbeaten defending champ last year, never really getting into those top two spots because they were “just winning” rather than doing it by someone’s subjective definition of “winning impressively.”
While I don’t personally share the same logic, many college football fans and analysts probably agree with the logic of holding a defending champ to a higher standard than simply giving them credit for what they’re doing this year but not dismissing totally what they did last year.
I can hear you out on that.
What I cannot hear out is that OSU is being treated like FSU, and the situations are completely different. This seems to be overkill of a point the committee wants to emphasize when dispensing their own brand of industrial justice with these rankings.
The first flaw in that logic is that the other teams have the same type of barriers as a defending champ. Most of us have no idea what it’s like to win a championship in anything but your bowling (beer) league or your golf weekly men’s club. Certainly, not many of us have won a championship at the college level and thus don’t understand the difficulty of defending it.
FSU and OSU this year are getting everyone’s utopian shot, because wins against the defending champ are season-makers for lesser timbered folk.
That’s the way it is when you win it all. Everyone is hunting you, and everyone is reserving their version of the ace up their sleeve for your game.
Absent even that time tested and true logic, FSU and OSU are different in the sense that with FSU, there were a lot of major pieces missing from their title team and to be honest, they snuck out the back door on a few wins.
From the first game against Oklahoma State to a controversial penalty against Notre Dame that would have given the Irish a win if not called, from overtime against Clemson (in all fairness, with a backup quarterback) to narrow wins over mediocre-to-bad Boston College (3 points), Miami (4 points), and Florida (5 points), FSU made a living getting out of dodge exactly when they had to.
OSU has seen no such thing, so why the different standard? The only moments of remote peril for the Buckeyes was when Indiana was riled up and at home, trying to get in for a tie late in the game. Other than that, while the Bucks haven’t been taking teams out behind the shed for the most part, they’re winning without sweating them out.
On top of that, OSU might be just peaking now that they’ve named J.T. Barrett the starting quarterback. To be fair, they didn’t peak until around this time last year, either.
Alabama got by a pretty bland Tennessee team at home that had them on the ropes in the fourth quarter. Clemson has had their issues too in moments. OSU clearly is being waved in front of the fire to prove some sort of point, whatever the purpose of that is.
It goes without saying, but usually people only say that before they are about to repeat the rhetoric: every season is different, and every season should be judged differently.
What has become abundantly clear is that this committee either isn’t interested in the built-in difficulty of defending a title or is just personally okay with holding different teams to different standards in-season based on some idea of how “impressive” a team “should” look in their own minds.
OSU is getting a bit of a raw deal, but the comfort exists in that it shouldn’t end up mattering if business gets handled. Still, the ends don’t always justify the means.
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