They say you only get one chance to make a first impression, and it’s true. It’s why you ideally don’t wear sweatpants to pick up job applications even if you’re only going to pick them up to fill out at home. It’s why single women paint on makeup and dress to the nines for trips to the grocery store. It’s why, if you’re going out looking to meet women, your best bet is not wearing any New York Jets apparel.
First impressions are great for knee-jerk reactions, but you don’t really learn much about folks until you’ve been around them enough to learn what they’re really about. Everybody’s nice at church. Whether or not they keep that attitude when they leave and go out to eat right afterwards is another story.
For the CFB Playoff committee, we’re still getting to know them on the whole. The first impression was that they pander a little bit to a captive television audience, and love themselves some SEC but in the end, probably were capable of making the right calls.
Still, that was with limited knowledge. Looking a little “made for television” all season, it became hard to tell if they were football savants after ratings or ratings savants with a football job to do. Either way, we’ve learned more on our journey this year. I’m sure once we’re all comfortable in our relationship, they’ll change and we’ll have to “go on a break.”
The first thing we learned is that they aren’t averse to putting a conference champ in the playoff that doesn’t play in a championship game, but clearly, they’re not a fan of the Big 12’s process.
Oklahoma was knocked down after championship weekend mostly because they were idle. That last gasp chance to view teams clearly is a big deal to the playoff folks. It’s not entirely fair, and one wonders what would have happened if the Pac-12 champion had one loss. It looks like OU would have been squeezed out again.
While that last chance to show strength is certainly one hell of an opportunity for the teams playing, it’s a bit “unfair” even though that term sucks, to make the Big 12 champ play by different rules. On the flip side, a CC game only serves as another opportunity to get knocked out of the playoff race. Rarely is that point mentioned because we haven’t seen it play itself out in a large scale situation.
This is a trend that cannot be pleasing to the Big 12, though, two straight years seeing their champ fall in the rankings the final week for not playing in a championship game.
Another thing we’re starting to learn is that the committee is a little bit of an SEC fan club meeting. It fails to understand how and why the conference continues to have this locked-in collateral for winning seven BCS titles in a row, as if that somehow relates to what’s going on today.
If Alabama loses, this will mark three straight years … and two since this playoff thing has come out … that the SEC champ won’t win the title. Last year’s weekly rankings looked like they ran it by a panel of 50 born and bred southerners to make revisions before putting them out for view.
This year, Alabama seemed to be playing by a different set of rules. Yes, they belong in, but the conference by the committee’s own rankings has only two top 15 SEC teams, and the other one, Alabama lost to.
By comparison, the Big Ten has five and the ACC has three.
The Tide had zero wins over teams that ended up with less than three losses. They had zero wins over top 15 teams.
Meanwhile, Michigan State had four, Clemson had three … all of which were top 10 wins no less, and Oklahoma had three over top 17 teams.
Like I said, Alabama belongs in, but at some point, the committee should (read: won’t) come up with some sort of scenario where they admit that different teams/conferences are better/best in different years and not give teams a free pass based on some amalgam of team name (nonsensical) and “eye test,” which is forever the way of saying, “I don’t have any hard evidence, so I’ll say eye test because you can’t confirm or deny that I’m right.”
Not all of it is bad stuff, though. We’ve learned that they don’t damn you necessarily for injuries and would rather see you play first before making sweeping generalizations.
They won’t automatically drop you for losing games if it’s one you were competitive in that you probably were supposed to lose anyway, and take a dim view of not even attempting to put together a decent out of conference schedule.
Those are all things that need to be forwarded on in the years to come.
Year one provided a baseline, like, “I saw you across the bar and you looked good so I wanted to come see what you were about.” After 2015, we’ve been out a few times. Next year, it’ll be a weekend vacation. Maybe one day, they’ll be in that “meet the parents” area. Just in time to get to running so we can learn it all over again.
Follow TSS on Twitter @TheStudentSect
