College Football Rankings Issues

With all the hate that the CFP committee is getting for perceived SEC biases, I wanted to point out that the same was said for the BCS ranking system. And yet, the AP poll, Coaches Poll, BCS, and CFP rankings for week 13 have nearly identical top 15 teams with just a flip between a couple spots. As with any ranking system, there will be flaws because we are talking about groups of 18-22 year olds playing football in various environmental conditions week in and week out against each other. The rarity of a team having consistent execution week in and week out has been proven year in and year out.

Therefore, ranking teams that all have inconsistent performances is impossible to perfect. Whether we opt for a computer-based objectified ranking system that takes statistics and wins/losses and generates rankings that have no subjective component or we do the opposite and take a committee of humans to watch all football games and make subjective opinions on each team and their deserved rankings.

The fact of the matter is, regardless which ranking system we opt to use in the future, there will be large groups of people voicing opposition because they do not agree with the ranking system. The SEC has been dominant against other conferences or when compared to other conferences over the last 20 years or so. 12 of last 15 National Champions are SEC teams. 9 of those 12 champions beat a contender from another conference. 2 of the 3 times the SEC did not win the national title, they had the team that placed runner-up. At the beginning of this season, NFL rosters contained 339 former SEC players compared to the next best conference, B10, with 253. 5 of the top 10 individual college programs with the most talent in NFL were SEC teams, next best being ACC/BIG10 both with 2 teams (Miami, Florida St/Ohio State, Penn State). ( LINK)

These two metrics, National Championships and NFL player production, illustrate that the SEC is objectively the best conference by continually producing the most talent across the board.

Lets also look at interconference records since 1998:
Against ACC:
Pac12 29-11 (72.5%)
Big10 54-39 (58.06%)
SEC 123-89 (58.01%)
BIG12 33-34 (49.25%)

Against Big12:
SEC 54-41 (56.84%)
ACC 34-33 (50.74%)
Big10 41-49 (45.55%)
Pac12 46-61 (42.99%)

Against Big10:
SEC 55-40 (57.89%)
BIG12 49-41 (54.44%)
Pac12 73-62 (54.07%)
ACC 39-54 (41.93%)

Against Pac12:
SEC 24-18 (57.14%)
Big12 61-46 (57.00%)
Big10 62-73 (45.92%)
ACC 11-29 (27.5%)

Against SEC:
Big12 41-54 (43.15%)
Pac12 18-24 (42.85%)
Big10 40-55 (42.10%)
ACC 89-123 (41.98%)
( LINK)

No single active conference has a winning record against the SEC since 1998. Only one conference has a significantly better winning percentage against another conference than the SEC (PAC12 against ACC). This demonstrates the dominance of the SEC against other conferences over the last ~25 years.

I don't see an SEC bias, I see the SEC is truly the better conference with better teams. This leads to some SEC teams to lose more games but still be better teams than their similarly ranked counter parts in other conferences with less losses (LSU v USC or Alabama v Clemson in week 13 rankings). Maybe the BCS was not as biased or flawed as people thought, maybe there has never been a bias and its just that the SEC is legitimately be the better conference for the last 15-25 years straight.

I am excited for the expansion of the CFP to 12 teams. At 12 teams, however, there will still be complaints about which team deserves that 12th spot. There will never be unilateral agreement on the top 25 rankings regardless of what ranking system or method is utilized. But hopefully once the Rose Bowl allows us to go to the expanded playoff, people will remain content with this system for longer than 8-9 years.