Yeah, part of it being the ‘4 best teams’ versus the ‘4 most deserving’ teams. I’ve always gone for the most deserving, since results to me are way more important than some eye test or other methods that seem to invite more biases being involved.
And margin of victory and game control are factors, but less important than did you win and who did you play.
Your last four words are all it takes to leave TCU out IMHO
This comes down to three questions
- How many games did you lose?
- Who did you play?
The big gap between the first two and the other one is intentional
The real debate is really over how much each of these things should matter. The wins-and-losses-uber-alles crowd act like the who-did-you-play crowd don’t care about wins and losses at all, and the latter act like the former don’t care about schedule strength at all.
In order to have a rational discussion about this we first need to get everyone to agree that we’re not discussing
whether these things should matter, we’re discussing
how much.
For my part, I think that how much each of those things should matter should depend on your standard of value, and that’s a personal thing and there is no right answer.
BUT
The simple truth is, by going to a playoff system, the powers that be have chosen to give us a champion that, at least among the participants, isn’t just based on who’s best, it’s based on who’s best
right now. Ohio State 2014 was the best example of that I’ve ever seen. Game 11 they struggle against Indiana at home. Game 14 they win the Nati by several scores.
One final thing: Some of you might have noticed that my baby, DSA, is neither more nor less than a complete analysis of every margin of victory of every FBS game; and I just implied above that MoV is a distant third among these considerations. Well spotted. And it’s true. DSA should only come into it to compare teams after you have taken into consideration 1) W/L record and 2) SoS
in that order. It is something that adds context and a unique perspective to the discussion. It isn’t more than that, but it most certainly is not less.