Losses in the college football playoffs anger fans. Calm down everyone

When the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs featured only a seven-game series, most of which ended in discord, basketball fans weren’t heard complaining about the inclusion of the New Orleans Pelicans, Phoenix Suns or Miami Heat.

When the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers were eliminated from the NFL’s wild-card round last year, they weren’t bombarded with complaints that expanding the playoffs to 14 teams had ruined the product.

When runners from Peru and Uzbekistan failed to finish the Olympic marathon earlier this year, there were no calls for more Kenyans and Ethiopians to take their place.

Sometimes you wonder if people who follow college football know it’s a sport. And what we do in sports is set the parameters for how you determine a championship and include teams or individuals based on a set of qualifications predetermined to honor the results of a regular season – not a recruiting class, the brand name of a program or whatever. The bookmakers think about hypothetical matchups.

In other words, calm everyone down. As we watched the first game of a 12-team playoff Friday night, college football became a true major sport with a true postseason.

When it’s real, what you get is what you get – and sometimes it’s a one-sided competition.

Guess what? That was the case when the College Football Playoff consisted of four teams. That’s often the case now that there are 12 of them. And it certainly will be the case if it expands to 14, 16 or whatever number of teams you want to include.

So why does everyone seem so angry that Notre Dame was way better than Indiana, Penn State was way better than SMU, and Texas was way better than Clemson?

Big mistake: Indiana should never have been in the playoff field

By the way, these are all things we’ve known for weeks over the course of this season. Really, what did you expect?

If you complain about the way teams were selected and the resulting discrepancies in the first round, the blame shouldn’t lie with the selection committee. They simply did their job, exactly as the conference commissioners intended when they expanded the playoffs.

It included teams from five conferences, four time zones and ten states. It highlighted some of the sport’s most elite and storied brands while showing the country the value of supporting schools that don’t traditionally compete in national championships. And at the end of the day, the deeper we get into the playoffs, the games will likely get closer and the best team will emerge with the trophy.

But more than that, this is all really good for college football. Why isn’t that enough?

When college football leadership spends a weekend playing crass games and decides they did it all wrong, they don’t understand why they did it in the first place.

There have never been 12 college football teams capable of winning a title. Who cares?

This applies to every major sporting event, from the Kentucky Derby to Wimbledon to the World Cup. Not every participant really has a chance and many of them are beaten – badly. Why is it only a problem in college football?

If Lane Kiffin had her way, this would be a beauty pageant, not a competition. The Ole Miss coach spent part of his Friday night and Saturday afternoon sending social media shots to the selection committee because the games weren’t good while his team, which certainly had enough talent to compete, spent New Year’s Day in Jacksonville instead , Florida, will spend preparing for Duke in a game that no one really cares about.

But Kiffin’s team went 9-3, was the only SEC team to lose to Kentucky, and completely fell to a 7-5 Florida team on Nov. 23 when a playoff spot was within reach.

All things being equal, would you pick Ole Miss to beat Indiana, SMU and maybe a few others that made the field? That is probably the case, and a number of committee members probably agree with it. The same goes for Alabama, South Carolina and even Miami, which had arguably the best quarterback in the country and certainly could have scored some points against anyone playing a first-round game this weekend.

But that is not the committee’s job, and part of the confusion is a simple problem with technical language.

The CFP has always said that they evaluate the season and select the “best” teams, but that’s not entirely true. Their job is to use the criteria given to them by the conference commissioners and select the teams that best meet that standard.

Classic example: In the CFP’s second year, reigning national champion Ohio State was clearly the “best” team in the Big Ten and would have been able to play anyone in the field. But Ohio State’s only loss this season was a pretty poor performance against Michigan State. So what should the committee do? Do you pick the “better” team or the team that won the deciding game even if we could reasonably predict that Ohio State would beat them in the next five games?

Michigan State wasn’t even competitive in the semifinals that year, and Ohio State could have easily won the national title had it gotten there. But there was no room for the Buckeyes, so the committee honored the regular season — and that’s exactly what would happen in any other sport we play.

No sane person would deny that the SEC is the best conference with the most talent. But if you don’t perform in 25 percent of your games — including some really bad losses like Ole Miss’s toe-tapping against Kentucky or Alabama getting beaten by the worst Oklahoma team of the century — you don’t have much to complain about.

College football leadership always talks about the sport having a regular season. If you take a team like Ole Miss and not an Indiana that went 11-1 in the Big Ten without a tough loss, you’re not preserving the sanctity of the regular season. You spit on it.

The Indiana question is emblematic of what has happened to college football. A year ago, you would have looked at a Big Ten schedule that included Michigan, Washington, Ohio State and Nebraska and said it was as tough a run as almost any in the country. How could you explain the fact that the two teams that played for the national championship last year fell apart?

With an 18-team Big Ten, a 17-team ACC and a 16-team SEC, there will likely always be one or two teams that have a great record because they happened to avoid some of the better teams in their league.

And guess what? This team will almost always make it, because that’s how playoffs work.

If you can’t live with that – especially in a 12-team model that ensures the participation of all real competitors – then you may not love the sport as much as you think. In the CFP’s first decade, 19 of the 30 games were blowouts or inconsistencies. But if you build a narrative where any team beaten by a better team doesn’t deserve to be there, then we’ll just go back to the BCS.

It wouldn’t be good for the sport of college football, but it would certainly save mediocre and underperforming people like Ole Miss and Alabama from a bad case of FOMO.

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Losses in the college football playoffs anger fans. Calm down everyone

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