College conference conundrum strikes
The Ohio State University football coach Urban Meyer and former running back Ezekiel Elliott are celebrating their eighth national championship. They won the first title in the new playoff system for college football. While the new system has had remarkable success, the way conferences chose the champions has been a highlighted flaw.
The college football season is starting to wind down, and as we approach postseason play, the College Football Playoff Committee has determined the four teams that will compete for the national championship.
This system has already been shown to be a better way to determine the national champion than the computerized scheme of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).
Since its beginning in 2014, there has been a debate each season about the teams selected and those who were not. However this season has brought the attention to the value of being a conference champion.
Pennsylvania State University (PSU) might have won the Big Ten Championship and beaten Ohio State University (OSU), but they should not be in a situation to compete for a national title to begin with.
Many PSU fans may complain about how the committee needs to be fixed, or how the committee system is unfair. However this is not the system that needs to be fixed. The system in how the teams who play for the conference title are determined is what needs to be fixed.
The outdated conference rules are what brought PSU to the conference title game. The Big Ten and college football should follow what the pros do: by overall record and not conference record.
The current structure allows for a team to lose to a mediocre or weak team out of conference. Then as long as they go undefeated in their conference, that team would find themselves in the title game.
The Nittany Lions lost two games, one division game and one to an Atlantic Coastal Conference team. Ohio State only lost to Penn State on a fluke play, giving the Nittany Lions a head-to-head advantage in conference record, which let them compete in the championship game in Indianapolis.
Changing this system would ensure that only the best overall teams would make the conference championship game, instead of only relying on the conference games.
This change would remove a variable for the equation, when it comes to deciding which teams should make the playoffs and how to look at the conference champions. There would no longer be a question about how strong these champions are.
With this change only the strongest teams would compete for the championship, and only the strongest team would earn the right to be called conference champs.
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