College Football Playoff structure allows 7-5 Duke to remain in the hunt for a bid, while better teams are out.
Conference expansion makes you wonder whether automatic bids should be part of CFP.
Committee catches a lot of heat, but it’s not responsible for playoff structure.
Tell me what’s wrong with this picture.
Unranked Duke, at 7-5, remains alive for the College Football Playoff, while 10-2 Vanderbilt is out.
Try explaining that to someone who doesn’t closely follow this sport.
Heck, try explaining that to someone who follows the sport but watched Duke lose to UConn, plus four other teams.
We could be headed toward a truly stupid CFP bracket, and I’m not blaming the committee.
The committee just ranks the teams. The committee didn’t create this system, a system wherein — and I want to reiterate this — a 7-5 Duke team is alive, and 10-2 Vanderbilt is out.
Five-loss Duke can still qualify for playoff. Yes, really.
The committee, by rule, is required to select five conference champions as automatic qualifiers.
If unranked Duke upsets No. 17 Virginia this weekend, it would be eligible for one of those auto bids.
Yes, Duke might need help to secure an auto bid — No. 25 James Madison probably needs to lose in the Sun Belt Championship — but, I repeat once more: Five-loss Duke is alive, and two-loss Vanderbilt is out.
Dumb.
Duke is alive. No. 13 Texas, which just upset previously undefeated Texas A&M, is out.
Dumb.
Duke could win the ACC and qualify with five losses, and the Big 12’s No. 11 Brigham Young probably would miss the playoff if it finishes 11-2, with both losses coming to No. 4 Texas Tech.
Dumb.
The playoff’s size is not the problem. And I could live with the committee’s rankings. The top 12 teams in these latest rankings would create a bang-up bracket. SEC boss Greg Sankey would squabble about Texas and Vanderbilt being omitted, but once the moaning stopped, the bracket would look pretty stout.
Imagine No. 12 Miami at No. 5 Oregon in Round 1. You in for that? I’d be in.
Trouble is, we’re not going to get that, because the ACC’s standings and tiebreaker application has Duke headed to the conference championship game instead of 10-2 Miami.
Duke is one of five teams tied for second in the ACC standings. The Blue Devils own the worst overall record of the tied teams, but the league’s tiebreaker rules have Duke headed to Charlotte.
So, a Duke team that lost to Illinois by 26 points could be playoff bound, while a Miami team that beat Notre Dame is vulnerable of getting sent to an also-ran bowl.
Dumb.
We’re not there yet. Virginia could save some sanity for this bracket by beating and eliminating Duke, winning the ACC, and snatching one of those auto bids.
Are automatic bids the enemy of a top-notch bracket?
I’ve previously shown support for this 12-team playoff model, but this screwy scenario of Duke being alive for the playoff in the first week of December, while undeniably better teams are out of the mix, makes me question whether any automatic bids are worth retaining, as the playoff’s future size and shape go under evaluation.
Or, should all bids just be awarded via at-large selection?
Why should we have auto bids, when conference champions aren’t necessarily even the best team in their own league? They might just happen to be the team that drew the easiest conference schedule, or they caught a good break from the tiebreaker rules.
When conferences were smaller, we could say with a straight face conference championship games generally produced the conference’s best team as champion.
Not anymore.
Conference expansion and the elimination of divisions disrupted the utopia of conferences crowning worthy champs.
The ACC swelled to 17 teams and nixed divisions in favor of a united standings. Duke’s win against California pushed it a step closer to winning the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Think about that for a moment.
Each ACC team played only eight conference games. Put differently, Duke could win a 17-team conference and become eligible for a playoff auto bid after facing less than half the teams in the conference.
That’s dumb.
Perhaps, the playoff would be better served with no more conference championship games. No more automatic bids.
Expand the regular season by one week, giving the committee one additional data point for every team in the first week of December. This wouldn’t lengthen the season. You’d just be swapping in a 13th regular-season game in place of conference championship weekend.
Then, rank the 12-best teams, and congratulate Duke on its bid to the Gator Bowl.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
