The first 2016 CFB Playoff rankings came out Tuesday night, and with it, the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth about who is where and what goes on in the either sober or completely drunken minds of the committee unveiling them, depending on your side.
But annually, we do this dance, freaking out about these rankings weekly. So everyone needs the annual reminder that will be true about this time next year, as well:
It’s all entertainment.
Unveiling the rankings weekly is nothing but a television ratings grab. If you think there’s merit to knowing how the committee is thinking and why, that’s fine, but call this what it is: entertainment aimed at garnering attention and talking points.
If it were really about the committee and the thought process, have them all individually rank their ballots and give explanations. This is nothing about that. It’s a ratings grab intended to generate conversation.
This year’s “indignity” was entirely predictable, you just didn’t know who the teams involved would be. The committee ranked Texas A&M of the SEC in the top four, and the casualty of opinion happens to be Washington.
The Aggies are doing well for themselves, but let’s be honest here … they’ve beaten one ranked team and got steamrolled by Alabama, three spots higher.
The committee was dealt a tough hand if you’re looking to create controversy and make it look authentic, which this doesn’t. There are four unbeaten teams from Power 5 conferences and only four. Obviously, there’s no suspense in any of it, unless you want to kvetch about whether or not Michigan or Clemson should be #2 or #3, which would mean nothing since they’d play one another on a neutral field either way.
There are three main points here:
1. If Washington wins out, they’re in the top four, regardless of what TAMU does. The committee has that “get out of jail free” card of taking into account the conference championship which has some arbitrary measure of weight that we’ll never know and probably is a moving target annually. Putting TAMU in the top four is nothing but a conversation driver.
2. TAMU is in the SEC, so it helps the ratings even more. There’s nothing like a little conspiracy theory to get everyone humming on social media and calling into radio shows. This is ESPN’s wheelhouse. They invented it. Do something controversial on their own network, promote it through all of their platforms, shows, and personalities as lead news, watch everyone flock to respond.
Interest goes up. Page views go up. Advertising goes up. Their employees’ personality profiles go up. All because ESPN basically made its own news and promoted it.
3. TAMU versus Alabama would be a rematch of a blowout. The committee won’t allow that to happen. There was literally no other SEC team they could have put in and made it seem even plausible. Ohio State might have generated a little more talk, but OSU fans feeling slighted would generate even more. Insert little green men and a smoking guy, and you’ve got yourself a college football X-File. There’s no way they’d actually make TAMU number four even if the playoff started today, which, as a reminder, it doesn’t … so this is just entertainment aimed at getting idiots like the person writing this column to spray their opinions out.
4. The ratings show does a disservice to teams and coaches. Now, Washington gets the joy of being peppered with questions about their conference strength (maybe someone will throw a bunch of fellow conference teams under the bus! Imagine the quotes! – sports media, probably). They get to ask if they’re being overlooked. If they feel the need to win impressively so they can jump a team they’d jump anyway if they win out.
There will be the standard, “we just worry about the games we can control,” but it has to be mildly irritating to see entertainment drive a cadre of silly questions about something still over a month away.
So if you’re angry after week one of this charade, don’t be. College football figures itself out, and the committee always has the trump card of weighting the conference title however they want to ensure the right teams get in. There are no injustices other than that this gets treated with such seriousness.
