After the national championship this January, we posted the college football playground rankings, which we described as follows:
Playground rankings, if you aren’t familiar (I don’t know why you would be, I think we’ve only done this once before and it was for Major League Baseball), are the sort of rankings one would use if one were looking for the power players on the playground. The kids who the other kids look at and know, deep down, carry more weight than they do (basically, if Texas A&M wanted to play four square and Alabama wanted to play tag, everyone on the playground would know tag was about to be played, and Alabama was going to win that game of tag, even though tag isn’t really a game you can win). Not “alphas,” exactly (that word’s gotten pretty weird in recent years). Just ones who, when the eye contact is made, know they hold the trump card. Recency matters. Head-to-head matters. Peaks matter. I suppose another way to describe this is just who the best programs are in the current moment. But “playground rankings” is ambiguous enough to give us more leeway.
The rankings went 1) Alabama, 2) LSU but even that’s fading as we get further from 2019, 3) Clemson, 4) Ohio State, 5) Georgia, 6) Oklahoma, 7) Notre Dame, and then nobody was eighth because it gets convoluted after that (this is explained in the post just read the post if you’re getting bothered right now).
Anyway, conference realignment is happening, and it’s going to shake up the playground rankings, because a factor we didn’t include up above that does definitely matter is how much weight a program holds in conference realignment. This is about as close as we’re going to get to a real playground, in that schools are literally deciding with whom they will play. It matters.
But it’s not the end-all-be-all. Especially in Texas’s case. Yes, Texas has demonstrated its psychological edge over A&M, but if TCU takes the Longhorns and sends them home from Ft. Worth utterly embarrassed, it’s not going to matter if TCU’s headed back to mid-majordom after this year. If they have enough confidence and self-worth (this is A&M’s problem, as we discussed last weekend), that is. If they don’t—if they go crying to the AAC or Mountain West or wherever they end up—they won’t have the playground rankings edge. They need to go laughing. They need to go down laughing maniacally, having gone 8-2 against the Horns since the two rejoined each other’s league. Just one example—Iowa State is one to watch, Kansas is a weird one to watch because they might just not care about football which would be a powerful stance for a power conference school to take—but you get the point. Mind games. Margin of victory. The way one carries oneself.
Anyway, conference realignment is being considered as we keep an eye on the playground rankings. Rest assured. It’s being considered.
i’m here for the playground fights.