7-Step Drop: Line Between Good and Great Is Playoff Committee's Biggest Problem
Much has been written and many quotes have been given over the years about the fickle and often cruel nature of college football. It should not be all that surprising, given the sport’s reliance on a group of mostly 18- to 24-year-olds executing a task play after play for more than three hours every Saturday.
The presence of so many highly unpredictable variables means that the sport often will be decided at the margins. A backside block here, a backup taking snaps there and so on and so on. To expect anything less would be unwise, especially since those groups of 18- to 24-year-olds that form a pool of 100 or so at every school get only 20 (official) hours to practice their trades.
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The end result, as we saw in Week 7, is often chaos and unpredictable outcomes. That was very much apparent at The Big House, where the difference between agony and ecstasy in college football was as small as 40 yards and 10 seconds.
It's why we we play the game. To channel the late, great Yogi Berra, 2015 has proven to be a year where it truly isn't over until it's over. No team is safe, no matter how big of a favorite one might be over the other or how big of a lead it might have (see Indiana-Rutgers).
And while it may make for entertaining games and thrilling finishes, it does nothing to help sort out the task at hand for the College Football Playoff Selection Committee. There does not appear to be a truly elite team that has emerged so far in the regular season, and outside of perhaps Baylor, nobody has truly run through its schedule without breaking a sweat.
The end result is that there are a lot of potential candidates for those final four spots, and the committee will have to determine which bad results were due to those 18- to 24-year-olds simply playing bad on a Saturday evening and which good results were due to that same group punching above its weight. The line between great and good has seemingly never been thinner than it is this year.
Look no further than two teams that turned in some of the most surprising results of Week 7: Stanford and Michigan State.
The Cardinal blew the brakes off a solid UCLA team (ranked in the Top 10 just a few weeks ago) on Thursday night to complete their transformation from puzzling national dark horses to full-on playoff contenders. The offense that looked flummoxed against Northwestern in the opener is suddenly fun and wide-open. Running back Christian McCaffrey isn’t the typical bell cow many associate with the program, but he’s turned into a home run threat every play and a legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate.
How should the committee sort out where the Cardinal fall in the rankings they will release next month? It’s hard to get that image of the team playing Northwestern out of your head, but it’s also not hard to argue that they have played the best football in the country after that game.
“People panic all the time. Whenever something doesn't happen, people panic. Coaches and players can't panic,” David Shaw said Thursday. “We have won a lot of football games here playing the right way, playing smart football, playing good football, and it's hard for the outside world to understand it. Sometimes you don't play well.”
Stanford didn’t play well at all against Northwestern. Since then, it has been a different story. The committee's task is identifying when teams play their best and also figuring out when to overlook the times they don't play well at all. Throw out the high result and the low one, and you might just get a sense of how good a team actually is.
The Cardinal appear to be pretty good by that measure and have a nice path to the playoff if they win the deep Pac-12 and beat the similarly constructed Notre Dame to end the year. Add in a potential win over Utah in the conference title game, and the team will certainly have a resume that stacks up against any.
Michigan State won’t have quite the same quality of wins, but it has proved to be pretty good and, crucially in this day and age, pretty lucky, too. The preseason hype around the Spartans has no doubt skewed everybody’s opinion, leading us to think it is a legitimate threat to Ohio State in the Big Ten, but it simply hasn’t played up to that level.
The only really comfortable win of the year came against Air Force, and the Spartans have sneaked by both Rutgers and Purdue with late-game defensive stands. They were not the better team for 59:50 against rival Michigan but still made maybe the play of the season in order to snatch a victory away from their in-state rivals.
They say it’s better to be lucky than good; that just might be the case with the Spartans.
When it comes to the committee, though, it’s hard to slot Michigan State anywhere near the playoff by simply being lucky.
We have just over two weeks until the committee meets for real and we get our first sense of its thinking when it comes to who’s good and who’s just OK. That line is thinner than ever in 2015, though, which makes for a difficult job in sorting it all out.
Good luck, committee members, and no pressure.
Stats of the Week
— Houston QB Greg Ward Jr. has tied the AAC’s single-season record for rushing touchdowns (14) in just six games. He’s also second in the league in passing efficiency.
— Rutgers trailed 52-27 with five minutes left in the third quarter against Indiana and scored 28 unanswered points. The comeback from 25 points down matches the largest in school history.
— In just seven games, TCU receiver Josh Doctson has broken the school record for receiving yards in a season (1,067). In just six games, Baylor receiver Corey Coleman has broken the school record for receiving touchdowns (16). The Biletnikoff Award will likely go to one of those two Big 12 wideouts.
— Mike Leach and Mark Dantonio both picked up their 100th career victories. The Michigan State coach never led until the final play of the game in his win, while Leach notched back-to-back Pac-12 wins for the first time in two years.
— Kansas State’s shutout at the hands of Oklahoma was the first time they’ve been blanked at home since 1991. The Sooners allowed just 110 yards to the Wildcats.
— Wisconsin’s past three opponents (Iowa, Nebraska and Purdue) have run just 20 plays on the Badgers’ side of the field.
— Iowa has two roads wins over ranked opponents for the first time since 2002.
— Alabama’s defensive backs had more yards against Texas A&M than the Tide’s receivers. The secondary also outscored the Aggies offense on Saturday thanks to their school-record three pick-sixes.
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Pre-Snap Reads
Georgia Southern at Appalachian State
It says plenty about the Week 8 slate that this Sun Belt tilt is one of the best games of the weekend, but make no mistake about it: The stakes are high for this contest, which will likely determine the conference. Georgia Southern still hasn’t lost a Sun Belt game this season, so don’t be surprised if they keep that streak going another year by getting a big road win behind running back Matt Breida.
Texas Tech at Oklahoma
If you like offense, be sure to tune in for this one, as neither team will be able to turn this into a defensive struggle. The Sooners appear to have regained momentum after that disastrous loss to Texas, and Baker Mayfield will no doubt have a little extra juice going as he faces his former team. It’s in Norman, so Oklahoma will be the pick, but the Red Raiders won’t go quietly.
Texas A&M at Ole Miss
This is the only matchup between Top 25 teams? One would think the Rebels are ready to bounce back after that loss to Memphis, but there shouldn’t be much confidence in that, especially with Robert Nkemdiche looking questionable after suffering a concussion last week. If Kyle Allen and Kyler Murray don’t throw more than two interceptions, the Aggies should respond to the disaster at Kyle Field last week and remain in the hunt in the SEC West.
Bryan Fischer is a national college football columnist for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter at @BryanDFischer.
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