In the span of an hour on Saturday, the Bowl Championship Series race was turned on its head as number-one Kansas State University and number-two University of Oregon both suffered their first defeats of the season.
COURTESY OF Uni-watch.com
Aftershock: The University of Oregon was knocked out of its number-two spot in the rankings after an overtime loss to Stanford last week.
The top level of college football will be instituting a four-team playoff two years from now to put an end to this kind of upheaval and the ambiguousness that follows, and for many it couldn’t come soon enough. Fans have been clamoring for a playoff system for years now; even before the upsets over the Wildcats and Ducks (just a week after previous number-one University of Alabama lost to Texas A&M), the overhaul of a process which seeks to determine the country’s best team by way of polls and computer rankings was considered long overdue.
But does a playoff really solve this predicament? Can a one-off bracket of any size definitively determine the best team in a sport during any given season?
American fans love playoffs. And leagues both professional and collegiate understand that common yearning for a “pure” knockout tournament, where only one team is left standing in the end. But there is a downside to that system as well, and we often see teams sneak past the gates on their way to a trophy—teams that, by any other metric, would never be declared that season’s champion.
Look no further than that other brand of football, the one played all around the globe. Most international soccer leagues follow a round-robin, home-and-away format in which every team in a division faces every other team twice. Once the season has concluded, the point totals are tabulated, and we’re left with a more concrete appraisal of the team that most successfully navigated the crests and troughs of the year to emerge atop a crowded heap of contenders.
The playoff system, on the other hand, especially in a single-elimination format, is marketed as a way to avoid assigning too much weight to regular season performance, forcing teams to back up their results during the year in games where there’s more on the line and the pressure is ratcheted up considerably. But what it’s really designed to do is increase the entertainment value of a product with a nine-figure bottom line, as every game increases in
significance when it could be the team’s last.
While there is no doubt that a Cinderella story can be inspiring, rare is the minnow that could roar over an entire season against tournament-level competition. Even when it is a powerhouse program rolling to victory in college football, one win offers a troublingly limited if not altogether illegitimate sample size to declare greatness.
Were the 9-7 New York Giants the best team in the NFL last season? Seems like an easy question to answer—the Lombardi
trophy certainly offers a compelling argument. Still, it was a victory that hinged on a single performance to crown a final champion. Other teams were much more consistent over the course of the season, only to fall at the most unfortunate of times near the finish lines of their campaigns.
Baseball, basketball and hockey seek to increase the fairness (along with the revenue) of their playoff systems by scheduling best-of-seven series to determine who advances from one round to the next. Each presents a larger sample size, but also tends to illustrate the vagaries of division strength during the year. In all of these sports that depend on a combination of division championships and wild-card eligibility to fill out the playoff schedule, they often unjustly exclude teams and advance others based on geography more than excellence.
It’s not an easy problem to remedy. If the goal is to pique interest in a sport, then a playoff certainly does that. But does a single loss determine the worthiness of a champion any more than the current system? Too often we have seen how playoffs manage to reward a team that wins at just the right time, rather than acknowledging the difficulty and tremendous accomplishment of sustaining a high level of play over the course of an entire season.