Spitting on the BCS' Grave

We interrupt the steady stream of basketball on Confessions of a Sportscaster to do something of a preview for college football.

This is my fourth season following the sport to a greater degree than I did growing up, mainly because I inherited my dad's disdain for big time college football's pathetic excuse for deciding a national champion. Where my dad was more apathetic though, I was bored and decided to advocate for a different system.

Some time back, I saw a book at I think Barnes and Noble called Death to the BCS, cowritten by Yahoo!'s Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan. These guys exposed the rampant fraud and corruption perpetrated by the now defunct postseason while eviscerating every argument its proponents made. It had an impact on me, and I continue to champion its cause in hopes that the current College Football Playoff will someday expand and stop the elitism against non-traditional "power" schools.

Since that isn't going to happen any time soon, or honestly, probably at all, I'm doing a fourth season of weekly following of the season and setting up a Wetzel/Peter/Passan-inspired playoff. Instead of the four team field officially used, I go with 16: the ten conference champions and six at-large teams. I also add a fun factor: the first three rounds are played on the campus of the higher seeded team because who wouldn't love to see postseason football at some of the most hallowed stadiums in America?

The question remains: how do we decide who makes the field (primarily the at-larges), and how do we seed them? If you follow Confessions of a Sportscaster and read these posts from last year, you probably already know, but here's a refresher for the 2015 season.

Obviously, records and such are important, but I created/adapted a few metrics to help the process along. The first and oldest of these is Non-Conference Schedule Strength, or NCSS. It's not perfect, but it helps paint a picture of each team's schedule. Obviously, the meat of a schedule is the conference slate, and has the most to do with winning a conference and getting into the postseason. Every team has differing "side dishes" as it were to fill out their 12 game gauntlet. I score each team week by week with a point total ranging from -1 on the low end to +3 on the high end depending on who their opponent is. From last year's post, here's a rundown on possible scores.

• -1 point for playing an FCS team at home (since God forbid someone like Michigan or Florida actually travel to one of these schools)
• 0 points for a bye week or playing an in-conference game (this will be the most common score for most teams on a weekly basis)
• 1 point for playing an FBS team from a non-"Power conference" at home or at a neutral site
• 2 points for playing an FBS team from a non- "Power conference" on the road or an FBS team for a "Power conference" at home or at a neutral site
• 3 points for playing an FBS team from a "Power conference" on the road
• NOTE: "Power conferences" are the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and Pac 12.

Year after year, I've discovered that the smaller conferences have tougher non-conference slates than the big schools because they constantly travel to the big schools. This isn't a huge deal in and of itself, but it goes against the argument made by the elitists who go on and on about how tough a schedule their big school faces. You also see every year that almost every team schedules one FCS school, usually at the beginning of the season unless you're one of the handful of cowards from the SEC who pads your win total with a cupcake in the second to last game of the year. (Looking at you, Nick Saban.)

A better metric I use is borrowed and adapted from the Illinois High School Association in playoff points. If you click the link provided, they explain how they seed their football playoffs. I use the "Combined Wins of Defeated Opponents" as First Degree Playoff Points, or PP1, as a primary factor. Any team can win nine or 10 games, but who did you beat to get there? That's where PP1 comes in. The 10 wins against really good teams are better than 10 wins against a bunch of .500 or worse teams, and that's what PP1 measures. I built on that last year though, adding Second Degree Playoff Points, or PP2. This goes a step further and takes the average of First Degree Playoff Points of each defeated team on a school's resume.

These scores then get combined with a pair of computer rankings that use margin of victory to help round things out and remove any personal bias I may have. The late David Rothman set up a ranking that was not used by the BCS because he factored in margin of victory (the BCS refused to include it out of some misguided notion of sportsmanship), and before his death put his formula in the public domain for anyone to use. A faculty member at UCLA uses this and publishes the results. I also take Jeff Sagarin's computer rankings, using the "Final" rating he comes up with instead of the BCS-based one that he was forced to use.

All of these are then loosely combined and looked at by a selection committee of one (though I am open to bringing in outside voices to help decide the field, contact me if you're interested). Last year I also took a step of transparency and posted my Non Conference Schedule Strength and Playoff Point metrics on Google Docs. I have done the same again this season: you can find my spreadsheet with NCSS and PP1/PP2 at this link. I will also post it on the front page of COAS for your convenience.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting two or three times a week with some looks at the college football world. Every week I will do a post on NCSS looking at every conference's schedule for the week and shaming every school that hosts an FCS school to pad their record (I can say that this year because NDSU doesn't have an upper level foe on their schedule this year... Go Bison.) After the games are done, I will calculate current Playoff Points and share the results, again ranking by conference. Once we get a little ways into the season and a bracket can be built without leaving out a single undefeated team, I will start doing weekly mock brackets leading up to the official reveal once all the conference champions are decided. Thursday, September 3rd is the official start of the season, kicking off with Alcorn State at Georgia Tech. I'll have a post on the first of September to look over the Week 1 schedules. Good luck to your teams this season!