BCS Reform: Leaving Computers to Pick Teams Would Be a Disaster

Tuesday, the champion of all things college football playoff, Dan Wetzel at Yahoo!, took some time to discuss the coming four-team playoff. As always in his quest to eradicate the BCS, Wetzel makes some great points: a playoff should be the best four teams and not just league champions, games are better played on campus and if games are off-campus, then they should be up put out to bids.

However, one of Wetzel's points goes against the main goal of selecting the best four teams in a playoff:

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As such, the sport would be best served if it created a single computer formula. People could decide how important strength of schedule (preferably giving extra credence to tough nonconference scheduling) or margin of victory or home-field/road-game criteria should be. 

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His logic is great. He talks about openness and transparency, the teams being aware of how to schedule and what they need to do in order to get elevate their rankings. He is also right that it could make for a wild finish.

Here's the problem with stumping for a purely RPI styled system: stats lie.

In college football, where you're dealing with 120-plus teams of varying talent levels, who don't play a large enough sample of teams, using a computer generated metric is not going to yield reliable results. Sure, they can adjust for strength of schedule, margin of victory, home or road game and the like. None of that is an effective means of determining anything but "who has the better resume."

Your resume does not, or should not, determine your worth as a football team. Basically, using computers to assess a team's resume removes the actual evaluation of a football team. There really is no reason to watch the games; just get a computer printout on Sunday morning and viola, best teams, regardless of what you actually see on tape.

Using computers alone to pick teams is the macro equivalent of just reading stats to assess a recruit's or NFL draft pick's worth. No evaluation, no eyeball test; just raw numbers and deciding "that's our guy." There is a reason no one does that; it does not work. It is a terrible plan regardless of how much it "normalizes" the rankings process.

Plenty must be changed to effectively select the team going to the four-team playoff event. Wetzel does mention a selection committee and the Legends Poll as a means to evaluate teams.

Personally, I like the idea of football guys making football decisions. Men who understand how to evaluate tape, the strengths and weaknesses of a team, and men who can decipher between a great offense and a great football team. Transparency is key, and we will get into some best practices as things come to fruition here at Your Best 11.