Oddsmakers have a job, and sports-governing committees have another. But the line between interested prognosticators and neutral arbiters has blurred to the point of being nearly invisible in our gambling-saturated culture, to the point where the NCAA’s College Football Playoff Committee is comfortable unilaterally overriding win-loss records in favor of its prediction of who would win in hypothetical future matchups.
This is the logic of gambling cannibalizing competition on the field.
Rich is one of many arguing that the oddsmakers’ preference for the Southeastern Conference (SEC) justifies this decision:
If the committee has left out a better team in Florida State, then you would expect the Seminoles to have a very good chance to beat Georgia in the Orange Bowl. The Bulldogs are currently 12-point or 13-point favorites.
Vegas can set whatever numbers it wants. The fact is that Florida State is undefeated, and Texas and Alabama are not. A team’s performance in the past vs. what’s expected of it in the future are fundamentally different things. Manipulating rankings in order to create more attractive matchups certainly makes sense for TV ratings (see the WWE), but it’s fundamentally anti-competitive and unsportsmanlike.
What was done to Florida State is unlike any previous chicanery in college football, a sport famous for chicanery, and justifying it with the injury to FSU’s starting QB Jordan Travis is absurd. It’s unprecedented to remove an undefeated power-five team in favor of two with losses, but teams with backup quarterbacks winning the national title is very, very precedented. It was Alabama itself which suffered defeat at the hands of third-string QB Cardale Jones and the dominant Ohio State team of 2014. And as ESPN’s David Hale points out, 44 percent of the national titles in the CFB Playoff era have been won with a team playing a quarterback who wasn’t their first-week starter.
Some relevant background: College football has an unofficial but very established hierarchy of programs based on factors both present-day (recruiting strength, TV draw, etc.) and historical (past titles, breadth of fan bases), and Michigan, Alabama, and Texas are in the elite class. Florida State is in the second tier. Washington is also looked down upon, but thanks to repeated victories against Vegas’ darling Oregon, Washington earned enough cachet in the wagering world to be allowed in.
Now, because it would be so obviously fallacious to argue against Florida State on the grounds that it’s not a popular enough program, we instead get the rationalization that oddsmakers prefer Alabama. Sin City’s augurers get to set the future — not one in which this Alabama team is favored against Florida State, but one in which they can never play each other.
Florida State is stuck in an exhibition game against the vanquished former champs Georgia. Again, Florida State has won all its games.
Winning. It seems like such a concrete concept, but the committee has decreed that it can be superseded by other factors. But practically every great team has had to prove prognosticators wrong — letting the prognosticators force undefeated teams out of the competition to give preferential treatment to other teams is perverse. Fans and sporting committees should maintain that competition happens on the field; it’s not a mass of statistical data to be pored over by our betters the bettors.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether the committee evaluates teams as “best” or “most deserving,” how much of this is subjective, and so on. Amid all this, odds are somehow treated as “objective” over and against results on the field, which are actually the objective facts in sports, from which all the statistics and odds come. What we know is what has actually happened. Prediction is what’s fundamentally uncertain, yet it’s predictive models being touted as the “objective” way to evaluate teams.
In ranking teams, subjectivity comes into play when you have to determine whom to include and exclude when the results on the field haven’t differentiated them. Different records is the most fundamental differentiation that exists. After records, you use head-to-head results (if you have it, like we do with Texas and Alabama) or less-and-less objective metrics such as strength of schedule, quality wins/losses, and so on. But in this topsy-turvy logic of the committee, those subjective metrics trump win-loss record. As oddsmaking has superseded results on the field, wins have somehow become secondary.
This phony objectivity is constantly smuggling in subjective measures. Florida State plays in the ACC, the perennial second son of the South next to the powerful SEC, and this counts against the Seminoles. What about the ACC’s winning record against the SEC this year? Or the SEC’s losing record against other peer conferences? How about FSU beating two different SEC teams this year? None of those factor in.
We’ve reached the point where Paul Finebaum, the world’s most prominent SEC homer — and boy, is that saying something — can say with a straight face that Alabama’s loss to such a highly ranked Texas team (at home by double digits) is part of why it deserves the 4-spot over Florida State. Florida State has no losses to compare with Alabama’s because it has no losses.
Now, if you want to go straight to cynicism and argue that it’s all just about TV ratings and money, and people like me are bedwetters for bringing up sportsmanship and fairness — well, guilty as charged. Part of why our culture is where it is is that people are too embarrassed to point out when something is shameful and ought not be. You can practically see it in Kirk Herbstreit’s eyes, that he’s ashamed he has to defend this decision, but defend it he must, because otherwise he’s not living in “the real world.”
Aren’t we allowed to want sports to be a refuge from the cynical “realities” that this fallen world forces on us? Can’t we appeal to the higher value of what’s right? No? Okay, well, there’s always next year.