16 teams + no divisions + only 8 SEC games makes Atlanta a crapshoot.
Which two teams would you pick today?
Which two teams would you pick today?
Who will play in Atlanta?
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I think we watched the match up last night with Georgia and Texas. Tennessee and A & M would be the only other teams I could see getting in which makes the Georgia/Tennessee and Texas/Texas A&M games probably the most important games on anyone's remaining schedule.
Ole Miss and Vandy. Ole Miss is up 6 with :12 to go. Vandy has ball. It’s 4th and 17 from the OM 38 yard line. Diego Pavia takes the snap, feels pressure up the middle, and rolls out to his right, and launches a perfect pass over two OM defenders to find his receiver standing in the rear corner of the end zone. Vandy wins the SEC.
No divisions with 16 teams & completely unbalanced scheduling lessens the integrity of the SEC championship & makes zero sense
Integrity? It's about entertainment, and it will be very entraining.
There’s really no way to have scheduling integrity with 16 teams & an 8 game schedule. You could go back to divisions, but then you’d effectively have 2 separate conferences. I think the current setup is best. You’ll usually wind up with the 2 best teams in the championship game.
Looking at the schedules the winner of this game has a pretty good shot.
Crapshoot indeed.
With a 16 team league, you should have an absolute minimum of 10 conference games in order to have a single conference title game that is actually valid in determining a true champion.
That’s every team playing 2/3 of the remaining teams….which is still a lower percentage of games played against other league teams than we had when the SECCG was first created. In 1992 when the league expanded to 12 teams and created the SECCG, you had teams playing 73% of the other league teams…..and even in those days you had occasional controversy where a team would make it (or not) depending largely on their draw of teams from the opposite division. When it expanded to 14 teams, in 2012, it dropped from 73% to 62%. We’re now at 53% with 8 games and 16 teams. It’s a laughing stock. An 11-game conference schedule is what is required just for each team to play the same percentage of league teams as what was in place when the SECCG was first created.
That’s why I’m not going to expend any energy in determining who will play in Atlanta. The game is just a blatant cash grab at this point, and doesn’t actually mean anything in the current format. Pretty sure I’m not going to even watch it.
With a 16 team league, you should have an absolute minimum of 10 conference games in order to have a single conference title game that is actually valid in determining a true champion.
That’s every team playing 2/3 of the remaining teams….which is still a lower percentage of games played against other league teams than we had when the SECCG was first created. In 1992 when the league expanded to 12 teams and created the SECCG, you had teams playing 73% of the other league teams…..and even in those days you had occasional controversy where a team would make it (or not) depending largely on their draw of teams from the opposite division. When it expanded to 14 teams, in 2012, it dropped from 73% to 62%. We’re now at 53% with 8 games and 16 teams. It’s a laughing stock. An 11-game conference schedule is what is required just for each team to play the same percentage of league teams as what was in place when the SECCG was first created.
That’s why I’m not going to expend any energy in determining who will play in Atlanta. The game is just a blatant cash grab at this point, and doesn’t actually mean anything in the current format. Pretty sure I’m not going to even watch it.
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The winner gets a top 4 seed and a bye in the CFP.
I didn't vote because State wasn't an option. #WeBeliveThoughMathematicallyImpossible
10,000% agree. They need to get rid of them and add more playoff games. Nobody cares about a formal SEC or B1G champion, that's relics of the BCS era. They should just do like basketball and baseball and award the regular season championship based on records, and if a less than stellar team gets some good luck with an easier schedule and nabs a title, so be it. Spread the glamour around.
Conference championships are as irrelevant as conference tournaments in basketball and baseball. We should probably get rid of those too, although I'll admit there's some cinderella excitement in basketball. Those are different formats than football though because, as you said, the football games are just cash grabs. Heck we didn't even have them until 1992. Get rid of it, let's move past it. It's about the playoff now.
I voted Vandy. I don't think it will happen, but it would be funny if they made it to Atlanta before Ole Miss.
Okay? The winner of the Big 12 and ACC games get the same treatment, and in neither case is that going to be a legit Top 4 team. The 4 auto-bids going to league champs has been a farce from the beginning, this just adds even more fuel to the fire of how crappy of a setup it is.
And the B1G has potentially the same problem as the SEC, just slightly less in magnitude because they have a 9-game schedule. The dumbest part is that in many cases you are actually at an advantage of making the CFP if you don’t even play in the conference championship, if you have a borderline resume. That’s just an unbelievably bad precedent.
I say just go to where we’re headed anyway. Have everyone schedule one nonconference game and then do the 11-game SEC schedule. TV networks know that’s the low hanging fruit to continue the revenue increase train, but its just a game of chicken between the major conferences as to making it happen. Nobody wants to be the first to wave bye bye to the cupcake games that don’t add any value, because of that same old BCS -era thinking you mentioned where everyone wants to still try and go undefeated.
Power metrics that go way beyond W-L record have been accepted across the board in every other college sport….it boggles the mind that college football has been so slow to get on board with the same methodology.
It’s a problem if a conference has to use a tiebreaker to determine who plays for the conference championship game because you have 3 undefeated teams. Not saying I think it will happen but the possibility is there.
Big 10
Oregon, Penn St, Indiana are all still undefeated and don’t play each other in the regular season.
After further looking at the B1G, it’s a complete disaster as well.
6 teams with no losses or 1 conference loss. Indiana is one of them. They are undefeated and only play 1 of the other 5 teams. Illinois is another, has one loss, and they play only 2 of the other 5 teams. The other 4 teams (Oregon, Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Penn State) each play 3 of the other 5 teams.
An Illinois vs. Indiana B1G title game is very possible, while 3 other Top 10 teams get left at home. And one of those 2 would get a bye into the Top 4. Just comical. And what’s worse, the loser of the game could lose their slot to the CFP to one of those other 3 teams above, all because they had an extra L hung on the old resume. The whole concept is illogical.
I'm not stating an opinion on the format. I'm saying Atlanta does matter in the current format.
Agree with your assessment on what would be relevant completely. That would be what they would do if the goal were to crown a true champion through conference competition, but we all know that isn't the goal at all. It's a cash generator. Even expanding the playoff is a little suspect to me. Already, with 12 teams, you really only have 3 or 4 in the end who have a legitimate shot at winning it. 4 was too many several times, and now it's 12? Only way that works is if you have some NFL like rules to promote parity. As it is, it's like Pontotoc County trying to compete with New York City for tax revenue.
Its all brand new this year. Hard for them to just come out and cancel all the championship games when they were one of the biggest parts to the playoff prior to the expansion.
I would imagine in due time you'll see this all get figured out. Either by adding a 3rd/4th place game... or even now with the likelyhood of both teams involved both already in the playoffs... eliminating it due to the fact that these teams will now get an extra home game that will generate money.... and the SEC getting a portion of the gate or some cut of the pie.
I would imagine in due time you'll see this all get figured out. Either by adding a 3rd/4th place game... or even now with the likelyhood of both teams involved both already in the playoffs... eliminating it due to the fact that these teams will now get an extra home game that will generate money.... and the SEC getting a portion of the gate or some cut of the pie.
It does determine the SEC team that gets a bye. What does it take to get cancelled?
The loser getting knocked out of the 12 team playoff costing the conference money? Prob possible but not likely to ever happen.
Having a scheduling issue allow 3 undefeated teams after 12 games and a tiebreaker has to be used to determine participants and another undefeated team gets left out of Atlanta because of ignorant format?
There is zero chance the conference championship games are eliminated. A 3rd place game makes no sense at all, but the SEC and Big 10 will add one if they can. And they can. It's just a question of when. But within 5 years for sure. Oh, and they'll take that extra playoff home game too.
I wouldnt say there is 0 chance.
If any of these conference think an championship games lessens the odds of one of their teams making the playoffs or winning the playoffs they'll pull the plug. Got to think now its going to take 16 or 17 games to win the entire thing.
Those championship games use to be a clear cut way to determine on the field who should get into the playoffs. Now that those games will hardly effect the playoffs at all.... something might be re-visited with it... the length of the season is already raising eyebrows.
The extra home playoff games are already coming, so they wont factor into anything like that.
0.00% chance. SEC & Big 10 are going to take 4 auto bids each so everyone in the championship & 3rd place games will be guaranteed a playoff spot. The games will amount to glorified exhibitions, but they’ll generate a ton of revenue.
It only matters if you care about FBS football in general, or the current format. To me, the 12 team CFP and the power conference scheduling / expansion / champion selection criteria are all just additional things that have been botched about as badly as they possibly could just for the sake of the almighty dollar. So, just makes it that much easier to ignore the whole enchilada and not invest much thinking into who will come out as beneficiaries in this totally broken product.
I'll just disagree with that.
Once teams and fans of teams have to start paying to travel to said location. Then paid for a playoff ticket and expenses for round 1. Then round 2. Then the final 4. Then the championship... in other words that conference championship game isnt going to be as hot of a ticket when all the fans know they can wait next week and watch their team in the playoffs..... can only sheer a sheep so many times.
I expect a change in the championship game/week of play in the coming years.
They don't care much about actual attendance. It's all about TV viewers. And you're vastly underestimating the TV money 2 top 15 games with all 4 teams from the same conference, and little competition for viewers can generate. They'll be like 2 additional playoff games with the SEC getting all the revenue with no split between the other conference involved or revenue sharing with all the other conferences. They just are not going to let that opportunity to make money go.
Exactly. But the key point is that the powers that be (SEC, B1G) have devised a system that rewards winners of a totally invalid game the highest possible reward that can be granted to a team after the season. So if the stakes are that high, shouldn’t that game actually have some integrity?
And what’s more, they’ve set this up for nonsensical reasons that really don’t maximize revenue potential. Everyone’s terrified of some doomsday scenario where their conference is really good from top to bottom, so even the best teams all have 2-3 losses, and thus they only get 1 or 2 teams into the CFP. B1G specifically is very guilty of this. They know a 10 or 11 game schedule produces much more revenue in the TV deal, but they fear the added losses for the top teams without the assurances of other conferences matching their format. The SEC has a different problem….they already know they are the strongest league and can certainly survive more L’s for the top teams. That was proven last year when not one, but TWO 1-loss teams finished ahead of 13-0 FSU. But they don’t have assurances from ESPN to increase the revenue proportionally for moving to a 9+ game conference schedule.
So, its this complex version of the Monte Hall problem playing out in real life. Both leagues are too afraid of the unknown boogeyman that MIGHT hurt them ever so often or for a short period of time, so they stick with the solution that guarantees maximum revenue is not achieved EVERY year. Its wild.
Agree.
again i disagree.
The college football season is about to drag out farther than it ever has. Its going to drag into the teeth of basketball season. They will have to look into ways of shortening the season as this as already been voiced as a major concern. Championship week was huge, because it was the last game of the season for many teams and last chance to get into the playoffs. Thatas what made the week popular and so intense, now its just another week because there is another 6-8 weeks of football.
The season will eventually be shortened, and taking out that week, you can get to the final 4 on new years by playing round 1 during championship week and round 2 the first week or bowls... then you can resume the current format and times.. and the season stays the same length roughly
Currently a team is playing 12 game regular season. They get to their championship game and lose thats 13. Then they'll have to win 4 more games. College football teams playing 17 games and well into the conference basketball schedule wont fly for much longer.
Something will be changed with it in the next few years. What changes who knows, but the possibility of it being removed all together is far from 0.00% IMO
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