The college football Playoff Committee has a tough task ahead of them, and the early losses in the season are going to cause problems that you and I can see coming from a mile away. Weighing wins and losses is very hard because you have to know how good the team was when you lost to them, if they got any better, if they got any worse, and you have to consider losses that happened earlier in the season. It is going to be a long time before the brackets are actually chosen, and that is why I think the committee will get it wrong. They will forgive Clemson, but they will bash some other team who lose close to the selection show.
How do we avoid these problems?
They have to take notes
Everyone on the CFP committee should have to take notes that are checked by a babysitter so that they can remember what happened from week to week. They have to remember that the teams that lost this weekend actually lost. We tend to forget, and we only blame the teams that lose close to the end of the season. If Alabama loses the SEC title game to a team with a loss, they will go to the CFP. However, they should not if there are teams better than them that lost earlier in the season. It is pretty easy to figure this out if you remember how all the wins and losses come about.
What if Syracuse improves?
Clemson's loss to Syracuse will look much better if the Orange get better and better as the season goes.
There are a lot of people who might forget about it, and they will not pay attention to Syracuse. The Orange could turn out to be really good, and it would make sense that the Tigers lost to them. However, you do not know if you are not paying attention. That is why this could be a problem for the committee. I know just as well as you do that many of them are not actually paying careful attention.
It is harder than this column
I can give my opinion in this column without doing very strict mathematical formulas to determine who should be in the playoff. What I say does actually impact the lives of real people. The CFP committee has power over the lives of kids who play college football, and they have to do the math to figure out if Clemson's loss to Syracuse was worse than the Oklahoma loss to Iowa State.
From the outside looking in, Oklahoma looked worse, but I did not check every stat. That is what the CFP committee is paid for. They have to take it really seriously, and they have to try to give everyone their due. It is all about the kids on the field, after all.
