The Ten Percent Experience

It continues to amaze me how there are people that consider a playoff in College Football div. 1-A would somehow diminish the value of the regular season. Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel insists that this is the real reason behind the recent decision of BCS commissioners to torpedo a plus-one post-season format.

I've written in prior posts how this is a red herring - that limiting championship eligibility to only two teams (and for the most part decided by vote at that) actually devalues the regular seasons for many teams, year after year. I described a "Championship Eligibility ratio" - the ratio of the number of teams eligible for their league's national championship to the total number of teams in the league - as a useful metric for considering the "value" of a given league's regular season. Have a ratio too high, like in the NBA, and the regular season for its teams is watered down. But have a ratio too low, like in the BCS, and several deserving teams year after year never get a shot, equally diminishing the value of their regular seasons.

Here's another metric. In college football, teams only play 12 regular season games. That's a total of 12 opponents. That means that each team in division 1-A football plays only about ten percent of the total divisional competition during the regular season. Is that really a large enough representation to definitively select, through arbitrary selection, only two teams for championship eligibility? Does anyone really think that? 10%?

Put another way: every division 1-A college football team during every regular season barely scratches the surface of the available competition pool. At seasons' end, there are 11 conference champions, and several other teams with cases to be made that their 10% experience matches up with anyone else's.

The point to a playoff is to recognize that the 10% experience is inherently limited. Those with the best 10% experiences become representatives in a playoff. A fully-played tournament is a time-efficient means for translating individual 10% experiences into a full 100% champion, without having to play all 119 teams against eachother. The best representatives for the regular season play instead.

Catch that? The best representatives for the regular season get to play for the national championship. If a team performs poorly for the regular season, they don't get to the playoff. It's that simple. The regular season matters, with or without a playoff post-season. It's a red herring. The only way it isn't a red herring is if too many teams are invited to the post-season.

So don't have a 64-team brawl! An 8-team tournament playoff represents only about seven percent of all the division's teams. Isn't that elite enough?