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| Monday, December 10 Updated: December 11, 2:07 PM ET It's reasonable to think football needs its own bracket By Joe Lunardi Special to ESPN.com |
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With apologies to Britney Spears, "Oops, they did it again." Normally I save the topic of this column until early January, when the annual charade that is college football's bowl season is complete. Normally I don't like to weigh in on a topic everyone else is beating to death. Normally I restrict my "Beyond the Box Score" views to something statistical, bracketable or even hypothetical. Then came Sunday, the day in which credibility for the "other" college sport took what should be a fatal blow. I should have known it was coming, of course, but I was too busy watching a weekend tripleheader at Philly's venerable Palestra. The e-mail arrived with the following plea: Joe, Can you re-issue your article last year about why college basketball is so much better than college football? That was epic. If I recall, it was done in Top 10 fashion.
John Corrigan John, while few (if any) readers call my prose epic, I will agree the column you reference is once again timely (Bracket vs. BCS). Let's focus today's rant on item No. 2 of that Top 10 list: "If bracketologists ran college football, a playoff would be established in which every team with a reasonable chance to win the tournament is included. The argument that the last team left out of the bracket will complain is moot. The last team left out of the NCAA basketball bracket complains, too, but doesn't have a realistic claim to the championship. The lowest seed to win the NCAA title was a No. 8 (Villanova, 1985); at-large teams are typically included all the way down to the No. 12 or No. 13 seeds. This is a HUGE margin of error." The only four words that matter here: REASONABLE CHANCE TO WIN. To that end, let's take a closer look at college football's championship-determination process in comparison to other major sports:
All of which brings us back to college basketball, allegedly the game I get paid to analyze. We said so here last year, and I say it again: The NCAA men's basketball championship is not without flaws, but no team in the modern era with a REALISTIC CHANCE to win the national title is excluded. How do we know this? Using the committee's own seeding as a guide, we ran the numbers for the lowest rated NCAA at-large teams since the field expanded to 64 spots in 1985:
From this pool of 33 candidates -- which, remember, represent the lowest rated at-large teams in the NCAA field -- we have a collective tournament winning percentage of .283 (13-33). Remembering that it takes six victories to win a national championship, we note that NONE of these teams won more than twice in a single tourney. Credit Cleveland State (1986), George Washington (1993), Tulsa (1994), Arkansas (1996) and Oklahoma (1999) for tremendous tournament achievement(s), but don't tell me any was a REALISTIC national championship contender. So, the primary argument holds. If the weakest teams INCLUDED in the tournament field cannot win the national title, we must presume the next set of teams (ie: those EXCLUDED from the field) are even less capable of capturing a national championship. Beyond any reasonable measure, college basketball is incredibly INCLUSIVE in determining its national champion. I doubt many folks feel that way today about college football. Joe Lunardi is the resident "bracketologist" for ESPN.com. He can be reached at jlunardi@home.com. |
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