2013 NCAA Football Season: New Year, New Formulas, Same Old Playoff Griping

For much of this calendar year I haven't been able to do a lot of writing for COAS (NBA Tournament of Champions aside), and I feel bad about it sometimes, but unfortunately other things take priority. However, as we approach football season and one final year of a piece of crap system, I'm back at calculating how the FBS should really run its postseason.

Last year's run was a pretty fun one, and I kind of enjoyed really following a season for the first time to really try to get a better idea of who to put in a 16 team playoff. It may not have been perfect, but I'm sure people enjoyed it more than the 42-13 drubbing Notre Dame received at the hands of Alabama (you know, unless you're a Bama die hard or Notre Dame hater; I don't fall in either category). The handful of upsets in the tournament made for a little drama, while still not invalidating the regular season.

So with a full season under my belt, I wanted to take things up a notch in terms of formulas, just to give myself a little more information to work with when it comes time to decide at-large teams and seed the field. (Also, it allows me to judge poor scheduling habits that will hopefully start working their way out of the system next year when we actually do get a playoff.) Returning from last year is my Non-Conference Schedule Strength metric, which I use to try to measure how well a team schedules its out of conference slate. For each week, teams receive a score based on how well they schedule. The formula basically goes like this:

• -1 point for facing an FCS team (last year, I penalized UTSA with a -2 a couple times for holding onto old D-II matchups)
• 0 points for a bye week or conference game
• 1 point for hosting an FBS team not in a "BCS Conference" (As much as I harp on equality, almost every year your champion will come out of a power conference barring some crazy voodoo magic happening, hence the favoritism)
• 2 points for going on the road to face an FBS team not in a "BCS Conference"* OR hosting an FBS team in a "BCS Conference"
• 3 points for going on the road AND facing a team in a "BCS Conference"*

Note: The "BCS Conferences" are defined as the ACC, American Athletic, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC.

Obviously independents are going to have a much higher NCSS than everyone else, but this provides a pretty good indicator of how well they're scheduling overall. (This is also why I didn't include an independent average in my weekly rankings.) Inherently it also benefits the "non-BCS conferences" since they tend to go on the road to face more big time opponents, though really it's an indicator that for all the talk from BCS conferences about how "Oh, our schedules are the toughest, you guys don't play anybody!" is something of a lie since their non-conference schedules weren't really up to par.

I need to go beyond that though. Last year a lot of decisions on at-large teams were pretty subjective based on quality of losses, so I found a much more objective system that, while not perfect, should help alleviate some of those problems. The IHSA uses "Playoff Points" in the construction of its football playoffs, and it's an easy enough system to translate over that I'm going to use it here. Basically, at the end of the season, the total number of wins by teams you beat counts as your "Playoff Points". I'm not counting wins against FCS teams in this system, but everything else will. If a team plays in a mediocre conference, this score might get inflated a little bit, but beating a really good team will help balance this out.

Finally, I'm also going to condemn a major scheduling disparity by including what I call the "Road-Home Disparity Index". What I noticed really looking at schedules last year is that most, if not all, FBS teams play an unbalanced schedule in terms of home and road games, with a ton of games coming at home. This is great for you gate receipts and all, but for the sake of competition, this is not ideal. For its upcoming season, my alma mater North Central College has a 10 game slate (they're D-III) consisting of 5 home games and 5 road games. Granted, 4 of the 5 are in-conference, but the athletic administration did a good job of making sure that the non-conference schedule balances it out. Going back as far as 2008, 2011 is the only time North Central played an unbalanced schedule (and also faced an NAIA team at home... shame, though it hasn't happened since thankfully.)

For this formula, I'm going to tally up the number of home, road and neutral site games played during the regular season (conference championships don't count since those are merit-based). From there, I'm going to subtract the number of home games from the number of road games and halve the difference. I won't count neutral site games against either team that plays out of fairness to both. For example, taking Alabama's 2012 schedule would give 7 home games, 4 road games, and 1 neutral site game. Taking the 4 road games and subtracting their 7 home dates gives us -3, which results in a final RHDI of -1.5. I would guess most teams will be in the -1 to -1.5 range. I will probably look more favorably on teams closer to zero, though this, like the other formulas, will not be an end-all, be-all factor in awarding bids or seeds.

Hopefully this regular season will have just as many interesting storylines as last year's did, and hopefully we can see some great matchups set up for another fun playoff! It works at the lower levels; why can't it work at the highest level of college football? I'll start crunching numbers on a weekly basis beginning later this week, since Thursday marks the beginning of this season.