Baylor’s official football schedule for 2016 was revealed yesterday, and it included the usual lineup of lightweights in non-conference play: Northwestern State, Rice and SMU. The slate drew the expected – and deserved – condemnation from the peanut gallery for the Bears’ cowardice.
Don’t allow this trash into the playoffs next year unless they kill everyone https://t.co/NFVN35mFKl
— Bud Elliott (@TomahawkNation) November 24, 2015
Baylor’s non-conference schedule of Northwestern State, SMU and Rice just may not impress CFP folks all that much. Just a guess.
— Kirk Bohls (@kbohls) November 24, 2015
Two years into the College Football Playoff era, though, we’re now judging teams’ out-of-conference games on postseason positioning, a dimension beyond the stones required to play other top teams from around the country. In that sense, we should probably ask a different question.
Is Baylor’s scheduling strategy working?
To answer that question, we should acknowledge that there are two different ways to look at the rankings produced every week by the playoff’s blue-ribbon panel of judges.
One approach would be to take the top four teams every week as a clear cut above the other 120-plus teams on the FBS level. Using this frame of reference, these four teams all share some kind of special profile that separated them from the masses – good losses, wins over top 25 teams, strength of schedule, etc.
This produces magical thinking along the lines of the oft-parroted “a team with a weak schedule must go undefeated to make the playoff.”
Alternatively, you can evaluate the rankings as a spectrum of quality. Four simply acts as the cut-off point for picking the participants in the postseason tournament, but there is nothing special about the gap between the fourth- and fifth-ranked teams.
Examining Baylor’s bonafides under these two different microscopes leads to fundamentally different evaluations of the Bears’ putrid scheduling.
In the first season under the playoff system last year, Baylor finished No. 5, right below the cut-off line. If you subscribe to the former point of view about rankings, you could look at that as a message from the committee that the Bears hurt their case by beating up a bunch of weaklings before going into Big 12 play. After all, one-loss teams that finished ahead of Baylor had all played at least one Power 5 opponent outside of their leagues last season. (Granted, there’s also the matter of how the Big 12’s lack of a conference championship game affected Baylor’s resume.)
On the other hand, framing Baylor’s position the latter way would suggest that non-conference scheduling isn’t a big deal. Yes, Baylor finished behind four teams last year that tested themselves outside of league play. Yet, dozens of other teams did that and finished behind the Bears.
The fact of the matter is that relative to the BCS system, the selection committee may not penalize teams as harshly for losing. However, judging by every set of rankings so far in the last two years, we’re seeing that the committee members still put a hell of a lot of weight on not losing. (At this point, I highly recommend reading up on the work that Dave Bartoo of CFBMatrix.com has done in challenging commonly held ideas about strength of schedule.)
Ultimately, therefore, scheduling involves an inherent risk trade-off for playoff aspirants between minimizing the number of losses your team takes and putting your best foot forward in terms of competition. For teams in the Power 5 conferences, evidence still indicates that the downside of losing far outweighs the benefits of a better strength of schedule.
Baylor may relinquish some control over its fate by taking the easy way out, but the Bears were a bounce or two away in other teams’ games from working their way into the top four a year ago. Once again, at No. 7, the Bears currently sit within striking distance of the playoff field this year. The upsets that the Bears needed last year didn’t happen, but how often do you think that will be the case?
If the Bears consistently put themselves in the position they’re in now, the playoff bids will start coming soon enough, schedule be damned. If getting into the playoff is their primary goal, that makes the choice between playing pushovers or quality opponents not much of a choice at all.
