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I always wrestle with whether or not to include “bids by conference” in our playoff bracketology posts. It risks portraying the playoff race as a competition between conferences, not a competition between teams. One of the worse recent college football tendencies is the one where people cheer for their rivals in the name of conference strength. It does make sense—it helps Iowa State if the Big 12 is good—but it’s lame. Iowa fans should hate Michigan more than they hate Alabama. I’m not sure how many did last winter when that particular push came to shove.
We often don’t realize we’re doing this, turning the sport of college football into a battle between leagues. I catch myself now and then writing things in weekly recaps like, “The ACC dodged another bullet last night, Miami coming back to escape Cal.” Other times, I don’t catch myself, and I wince later when I realize I framed college football as SEC vs. Big Ten instead of Texas vs. Georgia vs. Ohio State vs. Oregon.
Making matters worse, the number of playoff bids a conference receives is a poor way to measure the strength of that league. The Big 12 is a tougher conference than the ACC, even though the ACC is likelier to produce multiple playoff teams. Playoff bid count isn’t completely meaningless—the SEC is probably going to send the most teams to the playoff, and the SEC is the best conference in the country—but it’s a poor proxy for conference power, and drawing even more attention to the Big Ten being a “three-bid league” only contributes to the silly conference vs. conference rivalries.
Still, I usually do include the bullet. I say how many bids will probably go to the SEC, and how many will go to the Big Ten, and so on. I think it’s useful for statistically-minded college football fans to know that the SEC is projecting to send 4.0 teams to the playoff and that the Big Ten’s projecting to send 2.6. It shows where in a given conference a team needs to wind up. It’s easier for Tennessee to grab Alabama or Georgia’s projected playoff spot than it is for the Vols to take Notre Dame’s. If Penn State wants to feel comfortable about their at-large chances, they probably need to finish the Big Ten season ahead of Oregon or Ohio State. The race for at-large bids is open. Anyone can get them. But from the middle of the season onwards, they will change hands between conference foes more often than they change hands between teams from different leagues. Conference football is zero-sum, and movement in and out of the projected playoff field will reflect that.
Apologies for the long aside, but it seemed like it bore some mentioning given we’re about to talk conference cannibalism. We don’t think conferences should spend energy trying to avoid cannibalism. Conferences are not better than others if they see more teams go undefeated in conference play. Efforts to insulate the best teams against pitfalls are anti-competitive. They hurt college football. Conferences should build a schedule which gives them a fun conference season and a deserving champion.
That said.
It’s sometimes helpful to avoid conference cannibalism.
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Some degree of cannibalism is expected in college football. It’s always been there, and it was one of the issues which made the BCS unfair in practice. If the three best teams play one another in the regular season in a home-and-home-and-home, there’s a good chance all three of them will lose.
This kind of cannibalism is the kind conferences try to avoid, but it’s not bad for their collective playoff hopes. It’s what we’ll call the beneficial kind of cannibalism, especially now that there’s a twelve-team playoff. Even in the four-team era, it rarely hurt teams to lose to strong conference competition. Sometimes, an argument could even be made that what leagues called cannibalism was actually the proverbial rising tide, the one which lifted all ships. We’ve seen this most often with conference championship games: To this point, the College Football Playoff committee has been reluctant to drop teams in the rankings after they lose their conference title game as an underdog. The committee has done it when necessary, but the degree of the drop has rarely corresponded to how severe the loss would have been had it come early in the year.
Now that there’s space in the playoff for a lot of teams from certain leagues, the “lifts all ships” phenomenon should manifest more concretely than in the past. A lot’s been made of how Georgia’s SEC schedule includes all of Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, but in our model’s latest simulations, a Georgia who finishes the regular season 9–3 makes the playoff 91% of the time. A Miami team with the same record makes the playoff only 0.3% of the time. The basic way to think about games between top-ten teams is that they help the winner and don’t hurt the loser, especially if their final score is close.
This beneficial kind of cannibalism doesn’t usually change how many teams each conference is expected to send to the playoff. Conferences shouldn’t try to avoid it. The other kind does, and fortunately for fans, it’s impossible to avoid.
The other kind of cannibalism is the consequential kind. This is the kind we saw on Saturday in both the SEC and the Big Ten. Vanderbilt, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Washington all stuck a knife into their conference powers’ ego balloons. By pulling teams down towards the at-large bubble muck (or sinking their hopes entirely, as Minnesota did to USC), these four programs did real damage to the biggest single-season number their league offices care about—the number of playoff bids their conference will earn. Again, how many at-large spots a conference occupies is not the point of college football, just as being a three-bid league vs. a seven-bid league is a trivial distinction in college hoops. But in understanding the playoff, it’s helpful to be reminded of the semi-obvious situation at hand: Some cannibalism is simply a trading of playoff percentage points. Other cannibalism really does shake up the national picture. It’s not losing to good teams which hurts playoff contenders. Not anymore. It’s losing to medium teams.
To bring this back to conference strength for a moment: Movelor, our model’s rating system, ranks Arkansas the eleventh-best team in the SEC. It says Washington is the fifth-best in the Big Ten. In the ACC, it would have Washington second-best and Arkansas fifth-best. Even Vanderbilt shows up closer to the top of Movelor’s rankings than four ACC squads, including two who’ve spent time this year ranked in the AP poll. What passes for a bad opponent in the Big Ten or SEC wouldn’t look so bad in the ACC. The ACC could shelter its teams from Arkansas. The SEC can’t unless it wants to not play any conference games. (The Big 12 is a different beast. It’s not as good as the Big Ten or SEC, but it has a ton of depth, so Vanderbilt would still be one of its worst teams.)
Our model accounts for some degree of consequential conference cannibalism. There are plenty of simulations where Alabama loses to one of South Carolina, Missouri, Oklahoma, or Auburn, all teams ranked between 15th and 46th in the country by Movelor. Accordingly, our projections hold fairly steady over time when it comes to how many playoff teams each conference will send. But when there’s a lot of cannibalism at once, as there was this weekend, we’ll see a dip, as we saw coming out of this weekend. The SEC and Big Ten do a lot for their powers. This weekend, the non-powers bit back.
CFP Rankings
We’re going to talk rankings for a minute. We were going to do this yesterday but our weekly recaps have been way too long as is. We’re going to need a separate post going forward.
There was a lot of “Good luck to the AP voters!” going around college football media on Saturday night, following the mayhem. Deservedly so! How do you rank Alabama, who beat Georgia and lost to Vanderbilt?
The AP’s answer is to say “erm” a lot and put Alabama into a place that “feels right,” which is evidently seventh right now. The reasonable answer is that you either rank how good they are (Movelor, SP+, and FPI all say they’re the third-best team in the country) or you rank how good their résumé is. Or, you do some predetermined combination of both. This is more or less what the CFP rankings do. The committee cares about both how good a team is and how accomplished it is, and in most situations, the committee is fairly consistent year over year in what matters and what doesn’t. This is why our model can predict CFP rankings with a decent degree of accuracy. Objectively predicting the AP poll is harder. The AP poll is a lot more about narrative.
The problem, of course, is that the CFP rankings aren’t out yet, and the bigger reason that’s a problem is that it’s hard to rank résumés this early in the year. Michigan has played Texas, USC, and Washington. Ohio State has played Iowa, Michigan State, and Marshall. Comparing different schedules is always hard, but it’s especially hard at this stage of the season. It’s wise that the CFP committee doesn’t convene for a few more weeks.
But since those rankings are better than the AP’s, and since our model does predict where teams would be ranked right now based on CFP committee precedent, let’s look at where our model thinks the CFP committee would have things. Here’s the list:
1. Ohio State
2. Texas
3. Indiana
4. Miami
5. BYU
6. Penn State
7. Georgia
8. Alabama
9. Mississippi
10. Iowa State
11. Oregon
12. Pitt
13. Texas A&M
14. Tennessee
15. Notre Dame
16. SMU
17. Oklahoma
18. Kansas State
19. Illinois
20. Nebraska
21. Texas Tech
22. Missouri
23. Clemson
24. LSU
25. Army
Wild list, eh? Again, it’s smart of the committee to not rank teams this early in the season. There’s no way the committee would rank Indiana third, and by ranking the Hoosiers lower than that this week, committee members might anchor themselves to an opinion which would lead to undeserved punishment of Indiana down the line. Still, it’s useful to look at why teams sit where they sit. A few examples, each involving a noteworthy difference from what you might expect:
Ohio State has played one more power conference game than Texas, and they’ve impressed in all their competitions. They narrowly edge the Longhorns, and this is fair. It’s silly that Texas is still getting so much credit for beating Michigan from an AP poll which now ranks Michigan 24th in the country.
Indiana and BYU are both undefeated power conference teams, something which always matters a lot to the committee. Each has also played three power conference teams. BYU has especially impressive wins (blew out Kansas State, won at SMU), but along with Miami and Penn State, both these teams have won against what passes for a lot of Power Four competition, and each has at least once blown out somebody the committee naturally offers some respect.
Georgia’s loss isn’t particularly damaging. It came on the road against Alabama. Alabama’s loss is more damaging, and the Tide have been comparably impressive in their wins. (Georgia blew out Clemson, remember.) The committee would probably flip these two in reality, but our model doesn’t worry much about head-to-head. It should—we’re happy to admit our model’s shortcomings—but head-to-head only very occasionally affects playoff probabilities.
Pitt’s another with three power conference wins. They didn’t win those by a lot of points, so they aren’t as high in these rankings as Indiana and BYU, but as an undefeated ACC team, Pitt enjoys kind treatment from the committee in our model’s expectations. It isn’t enough for the Panthers to edge Oregon (who only beat Idaho by ten points, something which would generally be a major red flag but has been forgotten by AP voters), but it keeps them where you’d expect an undefeated ACC team to be.
After Pitt, we get into a slew of one-loss power conference teams and the first of the Group of Five undefeateds, Army. To pick three teams with significant AP/expected–CFP gaps:
Clemson was still blown out by Georgia, and the committee traditionally does not like teams who get blown out. The Tigers also haven’t beaten anybody with a winning record yet. They’re good, and their résumé will accordingly get better, but they haven’t had many opportunities to show a lot just yet, and one of those opportunities went horribly. Clemson’s ranked highly in the AP poll because AP voters (accurately) think they’re pretty good. Miami’s ranked highly because they have a good résumé and AP voters (erroneously) think they’re really good. Have we ever mentioned how the AP poll is inconsistent?
Utah’s best wins this season have come by an average of seven points against teams who are a combined 0–6 in Big 12 play. Again, they’re probably better than their (lack of) ranking here suggests, but résumé is the biggest factor in the CFP rankings, as it should be.
Michigan remains ranked by AP voters, presumably because they beat USC. USC is unranked, even by the AP poll, and that game happened in the Big House. In a set of rankings with a consistent rubric (i.e., our model’s approximation of the CFP rankings), Michigan would be the fifth-highest ranked two-loss team. Not bad! But ranking them ahead of Arkansas, Louisville, Kentucky, or Washington is characteristically odd behavior by AP voters. Michigan is not ranked by the AP because they are good. Michigan is not ranked by the AP because their résumé is good. Michigan is ranked by the AP because they were ranked really highly nine months ago.
We’ll try to add an extra post next weekend sharing our model’s CFP rankings expectations. This seems valuable. We’re still working on a better permanent solution to the AP poll, but for the time being, we can at least show you what the committee would probably be saying, if the committee were to be consistent to itself. (As we’ve said many times before: Preseason, the AP poll is great. In-season, it very quickly loses the plot.)
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What we did have for you yesterday and this morning:
- Our Week 6 recap.
- Our model’s latest CFP Bracketology.
- Our model’s playoff probabilities.
- NIT Stu’s college football vibe check.
- Movelor’s Week 7 picks.
Bark.
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