Tuesday night, the College Football Playoff Selection Committee will declare which four teams would make the playoff if the regular season were to end today. A week from now, the committee will decree what four teams will make the playoff for real. As with all progressive-style “elite” or “expert” bodies, no one really knows what the 12-member committee will do until it does it—not even the committee.
Just three years ago, such consequential determinations weren’t made by a wholly subjective body of a dozen people, applying fluid criteria. Instead, they were made by a fixed formula—the BCS Standings—that combined the subjective opinions of 167 poll voters with the objective results of six computer rankings. There was no particular reason why college football’s powers-that-be had to reduce the number of people (or computers) involved in the postseason selection process by a factor of 14, even as they doubled the size of the playoff field (from two teams to four), or move from a process rooted in some degree of objectivity to a wholly subjective one. But they did.
So, while we await the committee’s decrees, how would the BCS Standings likely have ranked the teams this week?
Approximating the BCS Standings requires using the coaches poll, the A.P. poll (the best stand-in for the Harris poll, which was created by and for the BCS and no longer exists), and four former BCS computer rankings: Anderson & Hester (which I co-created), Billingsley, Colley, and Wolfe. The two other BCS computer rankings, Sagarin and Massey, no longer publish the versions of their rankings that met the BCS’s requirement of not incorporating margin of victory, so we can’t know what their rankings would have yielded.
(The BCS dropped the high and the low computer rankings each week and kept the middle four. Since the two computer rankings dropped in a given week might have included none, one, or two of the four BCS computer rankings to which we now have access, the most sensible way to approximate the computer portion of the BCS Standings would seem to be to tally these four computer rankings with the high and low rankings dropped, tally them a second time without dropping any of the four, and then average those two tallies.)
Putting all of this together, here’s an estimate of how the top-12 in the BCS Standings would have looked this week, with each team’s point-value listed (the committee doesn’t provide point values, so fans don’t have a sense of the spacing between the teams):
Approximate BCS Standings:
1. (12-0) Alabama, 1.000
2. (11-1) Ohio State, .955
3. (11-1) Clemson, .915
4. (11-1) Washington, .858
5. (10-2) Michigan, .823
6. (10-2) Wisconsin, .814
7. (10-2) Penn State, .725
8. (9-2) Oklahoma, .706
9. (10-2) Colorado, .694
10. (9-3) USC, .610
11. (9-3) Florida State, .573
12. (12-0) Western Michigan, .549
So, under the BCS Standings, fans could be reasonably certain that if Alabama, Clemson, and Washington were to win their respective conference championship games this weekend, they would join Ohio State (which isn’t playing in the Big Ten championship game) in the playoff. In that scenario, Alabama and Washington would likely be matched up as the #1 and #4 seeds, while Ohio State would play Clemson.
If the rules were that the four invitations would go to the top-3 in the BCS Standings plus the highest-ranked remaining conference champion (a sensible way to combine the dual goals of taking the best teams and giving due weight to conference championships), the same four teams would be on track for invitations with wins this weekend. If either Clemson or Washington were to lose, the Big Ten champion (the Wisconsin-Penn State winner) would be the most likely beneficiary. (Undefeated Alabama, being so far ahead of the field, could sustain a loss.)
If both Clemson and Washington were to lose, the likely beneficiary under such a process (along with the Wisconsin-Penn State winner) would be Michigan, Colorado, or possibly Oklahoma. The Wolverines lost by the narrowest of margins at Ohio State on Saturday, in double-overtime in perhaps the best game of the year. If Clemson and Washington were both to lose, the Wolverines would get an invitation (under these rules) if they could hold off the Big Ten champion to claim the #3 spot in the standings. If not, the fourth spot in the playoff, being reserved for a conference champion, would presumably go either to Colorado—which in this scenario would be fresh off a win over Washington—or Oklahoma, which plays Oklahoma State this weekend.
In short, under the BCS Standings, fans could foresee these scenarios and root accordingly. But under the current committee-based process, fans can only wait for the meeting-room door to open, for the smoke to clear, and for the irreversible opinions of eleven men and one woman to be announced.
