Something About the College Football Playoff Ranking From Someone Who Doesn't Watch College Football

Have you every read The Hollywood Reporter or Variety? Wait, let me be more specific: have you ever read a physical copy of either publication? Odds are I’m going to guess “no” is your answer, which makes sense since a) nobody under the age of 87 still reads actual physical print media (or so I’ve read on the Snapchats) and b) these two trade publications seem to only exist in Hollywood waiting rooms and or on flights back-and-forth between Los Angeles and New York. This allows studio executives something glossy to look at between sips of champagne and laughing while actually flying over the so-called flyover states.

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to read The Hollywood Reporter, especially during the interminable “Awards Season” you really can’t avoid page-after-page of slick PR the studios buy, congratulating their pictures (if Robert Evans’ audiobook taught me one thing its Hollywood types call them “pictures” not “movies”) for winning some obscure award or whatever accomplishment they dream up. It’s all a big bragging contest with, I’d assume, the intent of trying to influence Academy Awards voters down the line. Rating any type of art — movies in this particular case — and bestowing an award upon it is, after all totally subjective and in the eye of the beholder. Con Air, regrettably, didn’t win any Academy Awards, but I’d much rather watch it as opposed to The King’s Speech if it pops up on cable.

On the other end of the spectrum are sports, where subjectivity isn’t a factor like it is in art … most times. Sure we can play ‘What If’ scenarios with our friends about how Michael Jordan and LeBron James would fare against one another in their primes or if Johnny Unitas would still be an immortal player in the modern NFL or whatever, but the stuff that matters — winning championships — is almost always settled on the field/court/diamond/rink, etc.

Okay, that’s not always true. Olympic figure skating needs judges to award scores on performances, and apparently so does NCAA Football now that it’s adopted a four-team playoff as its method to crown a national champion in lieu of the dearly departed BCS.

Let me just get this out of the way as a full disclosure kind of statement. Admittedly I’m not a college football partisan. I grew up in New England, which a data study by the New York Times earlier this fall showed was one of the few areas in the country not fully consumed by Saturday afternoon football. Beyond that my alma mater, UConn, doesn’t have much football history at the top level and now it plays in the American Athletic Conference where our closest rival is Temple — a mere 200 miles away from the Storrs campus as the crow flies, meaning there isn’t an in-state or traditional rival I sit around waiting to play 364 days of the year. This is my way of saying I’m looking at this objectively as possible without a proverbial “dog in the fight.”

Beyond that I’d always advocated to follow the sports you yourself enjoy. In modern times everything is on television and it’s impossible to keep track and remain passionate about every single sporting event on the calendar. Without a hardened rooting interest or gambling stakes, college football is mostly off my radar.

For whatever the reason, however, I’ve drawn the Tuesday night assignment at The Big Lead — the same night ESPN unveils its weekly college football playoff rankings. Initially I looked at this in purely cynical terms. Why would anyone really care which teams rated in the Top Four for the playoff weeks away from the final decision? Realistically the only point these week-to-week rankings served was to give ESPN and all its college football platforms a ready-made, instant debate talking point for a week. As we know in sports/media 2014, all that really matters is triggering a reaction, right? What better way to get people talking than making an arbitrary list via a committee? And this isn’t even a pointless, pre-fabricated list that ESPN is so good at doing like when it ranks quarterbacks using the “elite” phrasing, this is a human-made list that will help decide the national champion in one of America’s most popular sports.

However Tuesday night when the committee released its penultimate rankings, which had undefeated Florida State fourth in the poll below TCU that was pretty surprising, even to me. Again to reiterate, my college football acumen is probably lower than a layman but for years all I’ve heard from afar is that only ~~the SEC~~ power five conferences matter. The powers running college football divined long ago that the national champion must play in either the ACC, Big Ten, Big XI, Pac-12, SEC or Notre Dame. That’s it. If you go undefeated somewhere else thanks for playing — here’s your participation trophy and a two-for-one coupon for a Papa John’s Frito pizza.

So in the irony of ironies, the committee that determines the four teams worthy enough to play in the title is screwing around with the only undefeated team in the country which just so happens to play in one of the anointed five conferences and is the defending national champion. This doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me, objectively. The point of team sports is to win games. Florida State has done so, regardless of how “impressive” it’s looked doing so. Apparently style points are now more important than conference recognition or whatever else is used to decide a champion in college football. Cool.

More so, I’ll hide behind my college football ignorance on the TCU/Baylor argument and leave that to the professionals, although Baylor did hire a PR firm earlier this week so my Hollywood analogy isn’t totally off-base, is it? (Maybe it is, sorry.)

There’s the other side of the argument, the more cynical one that the playoff committee is “trolling” and wants to create unrest heading into the final weekend of the season and or set up an Alabama/Florida State semifinal which would generate massive ratings for ESPN. Either one of these possibilities doesn’t exactly set the heart alight. Methinks, too, ESPN would get a hefty rating — whatever ratings are worth in 2014 — no matter who plays in the semifinals.

And honestly I wouldn’t think a committee populated with former stodgy collegiate administrators and a former U.S. Secretary of State would possess the foresight or sense of humor to mess around intentionally in this manner beyond the nebulous “trying to send a message” argument. Consider it instead the product of a weekly made-for-ESPN event that doesn’t mean a darn thing until the final poll on Sunday other than making people talk about it. This doesn’t develop into an actual controversy unless Florida State loses to Georgia Tech in the ACC Championship, but if somehow the committee drops a still-unbeaten Seminoles team which just defeated a Top 15 opponent in arguably the best league in the country, well, I’d guess (even as a layman) people might have strong opinions one way or another on that.

From afar, I’d have thought — logically — the switch away from the BCS to a four-team playoff would create less controversy, but adding the human element into the equation obviously negated that. My novice advice? Teams that want to play for a national title might want to hire someone in their athletic department tasked with creating gift baskets, or finding someone who reads The Hollywood Reporter during awards season.