Maybe they call it the NPA..Non Professional Alliance.....sounds much better than the UPA..Un Professional Alliance

This supports my argument against the sport of college football as a whole right now. It's not a real sport with what I'd call real, fair competition. It's a sport with the drama of Reality TV for entertainment in the politicking over what team should be given the National Title shot. The people running it don't care because the cash register keeps ringing, and the American public keeps watching what is an obviously flawed system.

For OUr team, the only goal that matters is winning the MAC East, with the hope win in Detroit because after that, whatever bowl game we play in, regardless of how great of a season was had, is completely, 100% meaningless. The same can be said for all but about 20-25 teams in the country that are "D1" or "FBS". Conversely, a team that wins on the court, such as OU in 2012, or VCU, that isn't in a "power" conference, still has a chance by WINNING ON THE COURT or FIELD. That's what competition and sports is supposed to be about. That's why college football, as currently constituted, is barely more than a popularity contest.

Actually, TCU going from #3 to #6 makes perfect sense if you listened to the Committee Chairman each week. First of all, according to the Chairman, #3 through #6 were VERY close last week. The FINAL resumes weren't in until Saturday night. Florida State beating the #11 team in the country improved their resume to the point that they passed TCU. Ohio State's annihilation of the #13 team in the country improved their resume to the point that they also passed TCU. Baylor's win over the #9 team in the country (a team TCU had also beaten) moved their resume up to being basically equal with TCU's resume. As the Committee Chairman said it would do if resumes were equal, the Committee then invoked head-to-head and moved Baylor ahead of TCU. OSU was already ahead of Baylor going into the last week. OSU's SOS was better than both Baylor and TCU, and OSU's non-conference SOS was much better than Baylor and TCU. The Chairman also stated OSU had beaten 9 bowl-eligible teams (several more than either Baylor or TCU), many of them on the road. Most pundits I have heard think the Committee got it right (except for that idiot, Mark May).

Assume for a minute that the Committee had not put out rankings each week and simply picked the four playoff teams at the end of the season (as the basketball committee does). I don't think there would have been nearly as much controversy had people not seen the rankings the week before. The main thing that caused the controversy was putting TCU ahead of Florida State the week before. But even while doing that, the Chairman said it was very, very close.

Edit: Just checked RealTime RPI. Their top 4 are Florida State, Alabama, Oregon, and Ohio State. Ohio State's SOS is 50, Baylor's is 113, TCU's 92. (Florida State - 57, Alabama - 33, Oregon - 73.)

I'm not why you'd use RPI to rank much of anything. Or why you would just cherry-pick the non-conference schedule. It's about how you perform against your entire schedule (Big 12 was much stonger than Big 10). The Big 12 schools played 9 games in their conference like everyone else. Just a quick look of Sagarin schedule strength:

TCU -42
Ohio St. - 52
Baylor - 56

Clearly, mathematically it doesn't. The non-schedule was only 25% of Baylor or TCU's schedule. So what is more important is the strength of your conference schedule. It's also how you perform against that schedule. Ohio St. lost to Va Tech while beating Navy, Kent St. and UC. TCU hammered Minnesota, SMU and Samford.

I'm simply using the numbers that were shown/cited on TV. According to those numbers OSU had a better overall SOS than either Baylor or TCU. If you choose not to believe those numbers and simply want to express an opinion, have at it.

Now you're just being silly. I know what Sagarin is. But they are obviously not the numbers that were used on the selection/ranking show. So you can use Sagarin and I'll use the actual numbers that were shown/cited on TV.

I don't follow the computer polls all that closely, but I saw where Ohio State beat #8 Michigan State on the road by double digits in November and then beat formerly #13, now #18, Wisconsin 59-0 at a neutral site.

Did TCU have any road or neutral site wins against the current top 10 or top 20?

I know Baylor had a mid-season home win against #6 TCU and a late home win against #11 Kansas State.

I would imagine the split champion issue hurt the Big 12 as well.


Besides the split champion issue, however, it seems to me that TCU doesn't even have a legitimate argument here unless you like a mass of mediocre wins over a couple of very strong wins - or I guess unless you like to compare losses. Notre Dame (for a week).

As for Baylor v. Ohio State, I would suppose it comes down to:

Baylor - 1 dramatic win against #6 at home and one comfortable win against #11 at home

v.

Ohio state - 1 comfortable win against #8 on the road and 1 blowout win against #18 at a neutral site.

As for losses between Ohio State and Baylor, not a lot of difference between WVU and VT.

The same MSU team who lost to Oregon by 19 and the same Wisconsin team who lost to LSU who had 4 losses in the SEC and lost to auburn by 35. No win in the big 10 can be considered good. that conference was a joke this year. If that's not enough let's look at games played ageists similar competition. TCU beat Minnesota by 23. Where OSU only won by 7.

I'm not a defender of the conference, but a record 10 Big Ten teams are in bowls this year; so for them, awful works.

Who would you have in the Football Four?

Ex-freakin'-zactly!!!! (Here quoting the Joel Grey song in Cabaret!)

+1 You nailed it. I don't think there was anything slightly objective about this decision. The stats being cited are more a pretext than a reason. I believe that this is more corrupt than the basketball selection committee. Now, I know JSF, will say that they are clean as the driven snow, and that I have no evidence for that assertion. However, when you announce your top four teams one week, and all of those top four win, three by very large margins, and then you drop #3 out of the top 4, and add the former #5 into the top 4, it doesn't pass the smell test. As someone else had said here, if the tables had been reversed and the B12 had a championship game and the B1G did not, and TCU clobber Oklahoma in the championship game and #3 OSU clobbered a weak Michigan team in the final regular season game, you would never -- with this present committee -- see OSU dropped out of the top four and TCU bumped up. This is all about the money, and it makes a mockery of amateur athletics. I think this golden goose is about to shot itself in the foot.

Here's another curveball hypothetical:

What if the two Big 12 teams in question were Texas and Oklahoma? I'm interested to see how much it would have changed things.