Quote:
Originally Posted by Weitz
This is silly. Conferences are irrelevant. Winning the sun belt, or MAC, or mountain west doesn’t mean anything. It’s like winning the AHL and think you should play the Stanley cup winner.
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And yet, in the NCAA basketball tournament, winning your conference gets you an automatic berth. Regardless of which conference you won. Why treat many of the very same conferences differently for football?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Weitz
The playoff system isn’t perfect but can you argue in any year since it’s been introduced the best team hasn’t won? I don’t think so.
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Well, you are asking to prove a counterfactual, but as I recall Alabama got in the playoff (and ultimately won the championship in a rematch against LSU) even though it didn’t win its own conference.
Was Alabama truly the best team? Who knows? They didn’t beat LSU the first time but did the second, so maybe it was just a draw?
All that can honestly be said is that the presupposed best teams got in and, of those 4, the best one may have won. And, of course, it just so happens that the “best” teams at the end of the season are often (but not always, true) the “best” teams at the beginning of the season even before any games have been played.
The current system isn’t perfect because the big conferences and ESPN do not want to make it perfect. I’m not saying that Alabama and Clemson aren’t good teams, but no one really knows how good they really are when other very good teams are excluded from the chance of even playing them.
And so the whole system becomes a self-fulfilling loop, where the same teams get the same slots and the same benefit of the doubt.