I’ll fully admit, when the CFB Playoff concept was rolled out, the thought of allowing non-conference champs into the thing seemed abhorrent.
After all, and recite it with me if you know the words, “how can you be the best team in the can’t even win your conference.”
Three years into it, we may be on the cusp of finding out.
After Saturday night’s chaos that saw Clemson, Michigan, and Washington … all of the top 5 … lose, the non-conference champ truthers might just have their day sometime in 2016.
It wasn’t ever supposed to be easy, but it wasn’t ever supposed to be this hard, either. The CFB Playoff committee isn’t paid, mind you. But they’ll be working to sort out this mess all the same. The cliche “college football always figures itself out” mantra versus utter chaos almost always is true, but that dichotomy is destined to be tested this year.
Of the three that lost, Clemson is arguably in the best spot. They own the tiebreaker win over the next best team in the conference if they win out, and could somewhat rectify their lone loss by defeating the ACC Coastal champ, who regrettably for them won’t probably be Pitt, who defeated them Saturday.
Couple that with the relative strength the committee seems to view the ACC with versus, say, the Pac-12, and you’ve got yourself a pretty workable situation if you’re the Tigers. It’s sort of odd to say that after their crushing and fateful defeat.
Washington is probably in the next most palatable position. If they win out, which will include a win over rival and current unbeaten Pac-12 team Washington State, they’ll play for the conference title. In theory, they could play Southern Cal again on a neutral field and make up for their lone loss.
That, coupled with winning the conference, might be enough to get them in.
Where things get Sasquatch-level hairy is in the Midwest, where Iowa’s win over Michigan sent shockwaves of jubilation to Happy Valley and ironically, sadness in Columbus. And Ann Arbor, but we all know that.
The rub is that if Ohio State wins out, which would include a home win over Michigan, and Penn State wins out, which would include a road win over moribund Rutgers and a home win against struggling Michigan State, they’d win the vaunted Big Ten East via tiebreaker and play in the Big Ten title game against the winner of West, also sure to be an unpalatable playoff team.
At that point, the committee would have to weigh placing in not only a team that potentially didn’t win its conference, but one that didn’t even win its own division. Especially if one-loss West Virginia loses again in the Big 12. Can’t forget that conference, of course.
In the above and most chaotic scenario, OSU would have wins over Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Penn State, riding the wave of an imbalanced schedule against the Big Ten West, would have that win over OSU … but a 39-point loss to Michigan, and no wins over the upper crust of the Big Ten West, Wisconsin or Nebraska.
They also would have a loss to Pitt, who seems to be quite integral to this nutty end of the season all of the sudden.
What would the committee do? Both Michigan and Ohio State are going to be ranked higher than PSU if they win out. How much arbitrary weight really does the committee put on winning a conference title? We may be about to find out.
Probably the easier route for the committee to go would be to just have a few more losses by teams like WVU and Washington and just be forced to own the non-conference champ path.
But the non division champ? That’s a whole new ball of wax 2016 may make us confront.
To be sure, the wailing and gnashing of teeth has just begun.
