College football playoff round one snooze fest exposes who got robbed of playoff spot

Round one duds from College Football Playoff shows need for reformation

The long-awaited first round of the twelve-team college football playoff, so built up and anticipated by fans around the country, landed with a thud this past weekend. Even the most diehard fans were looking to change the channel by late in the games on both Friday and Saturday, as Notre Dame smacked Indiana and Ohio State blew out Tennessee.

It doesn't look too promising gong forward, either. Though we'll see Georgia and Oregon get their first action of the playoff— and both of those games promise to be exciting— we in all likelihood will see Texas and Penn State waltz right by their opponents; Arizona State and Boise State, respectively.

Football, at the end of the day, is a game about matchups, and the poor positional matchups between Indiana/Clemson vs. Notre Dame/Texas were obvious to those who followed those teams closely over the course of the season. But sometimes, you can just be completely outmatched talent-wise— and that's what we saw in Penn State against SMU.

Ohio State-Tennessee was a bit anomalous on that front, as the talent gap there isn't as massive as the Nittany Lions and Mustangs. What I think we saw there was a team that should have been a no-brainer top-3 squad taking out some pent-up frustration on a Volunteers squad that was shaken from the get-go.

Whatever the case may be, the discourse that has erupted around this weekend has mostly had one flavor: something needs to change. Whether it's the number of teams, the guaranteed byes, the way teams are seeded... something has to give, here.

The chief thing I'd like to see happen is more of a shift to the way college basketball or college baseball ends up ranking their teams; there's a committee, but what ends up getting heavily weighted is advanced statistical profiles. That would help avoid some of the errors that we've seen by the committee, which has been much-maligned this year.

According to Bill Connelly's SP+ system, Ole Miss and Alabama both rank ahead of Texas and Georgia as the no. 3 and no. 4 teams in the country. Miami and South Carolina would also round out the field in place of SMU, ASU, Boise, and Clemson— only the Ponies rank in the top 20 via Connelly's numbers.

That's a field I would have taken over what we got this year. It's not just SP+, though: Kelley Ford's proprietary KFord ratings show a similar top 12. Though they're in a different order, he similarly has Ole Miss, Alabama, South Carolina, and Miami displacing SMU, ASU, Boise, and Clemson in raw ratings.

For those who complain about this reducing the importance of actual wins— a point for which there is certainly a case to be made— Ford also constructs a "most deserving" ranking, which takes into account not only the binary outcome of win vs. loss, but an objective measure of how a team performed in their games. Here's how that ranking looks:

Though ASU (and BYU, surprisingly) both make the field here, you also see appearances by South Carolina and Alabama, which I personally would have liked to see.

It's just common sense at this point that some kind of statistical profile, like the one above, needs to be utilized in this selection process. There's simply been too many issues in recent years; changing the size of the field won't really help that.