The final weekend of the college football regular season is upon us, and a spot in the national championship game is on the line in the SEC Championship Game. But Saturday's featured matchup between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs is pretty much the lone bright spot in an otherwise underwhelming slate of championship games.
Due to postseason bans for Ohio State and Penn State, the Big Ten Championship Game features the Wisconsin Badgers, a team that went 4-4 in conference play. Both participants in the ACC Championship Game, the Florida State Seminoles and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, suffered humbling losses last weekend in nonconference play. The Pac-12 Championship Game between the Stanford Cardinal and UCLA Bruins is a rematch staged a mere six days after their first battle.
BCS bowl bids are on the line in each game, but there's not a lot of excitement that resonates beyond the campuses involved in those games. That's partly because the Notre Dame Fighting Irish have already wrapped up a berth in the BCS Championship Game. But even in a four-team playoff scenario, the SEC Championship Game would still probably be the only conference title game of significance this weekend.
General fan disinterest in less-than-ideal matchups is one thing, but the bigger issue for conferences is that the conference championship games aren't consistently doing what they are designed to do. They aren't featuring the best teams due to division alignment and unbalanced scheduling.
A lot of noise was made in the offseason about the possibility that future college football playoff teams be required to win a conference championship to be eligible. But the 2012 season makes a strong statement that the conference championships should have nothing whatsoever to do with determining national championship contenders.
South Carolina Gamecocks coach Steve Spurrier has repeatedly beaten the drum regarding the problem of imbalanced conference scheduling. The Gamecocks beat the Bulldogs by 28 points on Oct. 6 and posted the same division record as Georgia (5-1) but lost a cross-division game against LSU to keep them out of the running for the SEC East title. Last season, South Carolina went 5-0 in division play, including another head-to-head win over Georgia, lost twice in cross-division play against the SEC West and finished behind Georgia. In both seasons, the Bulldogs had the good fortune of avoiding the top teams from the SEC West and were rewarded with a spot in the conference championship game.
Ranking the 14 SEC teams by strength of schedule for the 2012 regular season.
Spurrier was quoted by a South Carolina beat writer this week as saying that both Alabama and Georgia played weak conference schedules. Six SEC teams are ranked in the top 10 of the BCS standings, but Alabama and Georgia have played only two games apiece against the other five. We measure strength of schedule at Football Outsiders as the likelihood that an elite team would go undefeated against the whole schedule, and we can apply the same methodology to conference schedules. Spurrier's claim is on the money as far as our methodology is concerned.
The SEC isn't the only league with this problem. UCLA had the weakest conference strength of schedule in the Pac-12. Florida State had the third-weakest strength of schedule in the ACC. Wisconsin had the fourth-weakest strength of schedule in the Big Ten and still managed to win only half of its conference games.
It isn't a problem unique to 2012 either. Half of the conference championship games hosted by automatic qualifying conferences in the past five years featured at least one team with the weakest or second-weakest conference schedule.
The top teams in a given conference don't play against themselves, so their conference strength of schedule will always be a bit weaker than many of their conference foes. The Big 12 plays a round-robin schedule and does not host a conference championship game, and the two teams leading the league -- the Kansas State Wildcats and Oklahoma Sooners -- are also the two with the weakest Big 12 strength of schedule. Still, the round-robin schedule allows the eventual conference champion to prove its worthiness on the field against everyone else.
Round-robin scheduling is the most ideal method for determining a conference champion, but conference expansion precludes the SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 from doing so. Since conference contraction is probably off the table, what could be done to improve the championships in those leagues?
The selection of conference championship game participants could be modified in a couple of ways. If division games were the sole determining factor rather than full conference records, it would eliminate the scheduling imbalance problem. Alternatively, the best two teams in a conference regardless of division alignment could be selected to play for the championship. According to our F/+ ratings based on play-by-play and drive efficiency data, it is Florida, not Georgia, that is the best team in the SEC East and should be facing Alabama in the title game. The BCS computers agree, as do most other computer systems. The voters do not, and the head-to-head victory by Georgia over Florida trumps every other argument for many people.
There is lots of room for debate in the determination of conference championship game participants, but now is the time to work through the issues. When the four-team playoff arrives, will conferences that host a championship game be at a disadvantage or an advantage? Which four teams would be selected this season? Would Oregon and Florida be in line for a final four bid by not playing in a conference title game, or would Alabama and Georgia both be guaranteed a spot no matter the outcome this weekend?
Winning a conference championship game in a power conference is supposed to represent a triumph of playing the best against the best opponents, but in 2012, a handful of teams will have proved to have had more successful seasons against a tougher slate of opponents than most of the conference championship game winners. Notre Dame (12-0), Kansas State (10-1) and Florida (11-1) have all posted elite records against a tougher slate of opponents than the eventual champions of the SEC, Big Ten and ACC, and none needed a conference championship game to prove it.
Brian Fremeau covers college football for ESPN Insider. He is a staff writer for Football Outsiders, where his weekly column focuses on the Fremeau Efficiency Index, a drive-based, opponent-adjusted team-rating system he began developing in 2002. You can find his ESPN archives here and follow him on Twitter here.
when they decided on this 4-team playoff..I'm not buying into it. I'll continue to say the system ain't shyt unless you do the 5 major conf. champs + 3 at large (2 if ND or any non AQ is in the top 8-10)...thats the only fair system
sounds cool
