College Football Rankings already?

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A bunch of things that I want to talk to you about, but let's just start with the news that happened, I guess overnight into today. And that's ESPN getting all of the college football playoff games $7.8 billion on a six-year extension. I guess that's what through 31 to carry them six years. Are you surprised that it didn't get split up at least among two? I thought three or four networks would have a stake in this.

I was a little surprised at that. Did you see any reporting that anybody other than ESPN was in the mix here? No, but but they still had I think they had they might have still had exclusive rights.

I'm not sure. I believe that it was first right of refusal and I believe there is a big debate right now as to the value of those first round games. And if you want to go there as well, that's where one of the things that I'm really working on is looking at the move from six plus six to five plus seven and what those would be. And I can tell you right now that it is better first round games to have five plus seven.

Sure. Because I mean, basically a first round game, even in a five plus seven model is going to be the Fiesta Bowl where Oregon was a 19 point favorite against Liberty, except that game would be in Austin Stadium. And I think they won the game by like 20 some 30 almost. Right. And so and that game is probably going to get stuck on the Thursday or Friday because remember, the first round is a Thursday, Friday, Saturday unrolling of those first round on campus games.

I'm excited they're on campus. But what is the value of all these games? And I just wonder if there there was not going to be quite that high end, high ceiling demand. And I wonder if it was ESPN just bidding against itself.

I truly do not know. I don't have that kind of clearance in terms of media rights negotiations. I think it would be healthier for the sport of college football if ESPN was not the sole distributor of all things college football playoff. I think that there would be not oversight, but almost accountability by introducing a new set of voices. And instead, we continue to move forward, you know, with our with with our new expanded future. And it will continue to be Tuesday night's dramatic unveiling. And instead, we're talking about the 11 spot, I guess, instead of instead of the five spot. But say, gosh, we've been having these debates forever. And people keep saying, well, you know, we'll we'll we'll at least stop the arguing over who should be four or five or two. We went from two or three. Who should be two?

Who should be three? Like, we'll just we're just moving the line. We're just we're going to have an argument over six or seven. We had the argument. We had arguments over four versus five, none greater than this year. We had and we'll have arguments 12 versus 13. And eventually we'll have it 16 versus 17. And I contend that we'll probably have it 24 versus 25 at some point. So here is one thing that I have found interesting because I'm telling you, I'm I'm really trying to not just like, oh, God, I need to be able to enter into this new playoff era, understanding what the not the just the yelling is about, because that's lazy.

I want to understand this enough to talk about value. And I do take a little bit from the NFL playoff scenarios that we get at the end of the NFL regular season where we have these interesting moments where if this team wins this game, all of a sudden, you know, they could be thrust into this position. If they lose, they could be out. Right.

Those those big inflection points. I contend and I expect that we will go to five point five plus seven. I can tell that it does put a very, very, very strong emphasis on winning your conference championship, because if you don't win your conference championship and you are not the highest ranked non champion, then you are going to have to play one of these at large teams in the first right. If you are one of the high if you were one of the four power conference champions, more than likely. And that fifth team, which could be the highest ranked non champion, you're probably going to get the group of five. You're probably going to be a 14 to 19 point favorite.

Those are ways for you to be able to get to the quarterfinals. So as you're going through these final weeks of the season, we are going to be talking about the sixth, seventh and eighth best team. Not are they going to be left out or not, but can they win their conference?

And if not, are they going to finish as the highest ranked non champion? Because otherwise, the difference between playing Liberty and playing Ole Miss or Liberty. This is extremely significant when you're talking about trying to make it to the quarterfinals of the college football playoff, which would be a little bit closer to that New Year's Eve, New Year's Day time slot.

So I'm in favor of a move to five plus seven. And I do think that that is going to make conference championship Saturday more interesting because there is a massive difference in the probabilities of a team making it to the quarterfinals the round of eight. If you are a power conference champion or the highest ranked non champion, because anything else you're going to be looking at three point spread four and a half six point spread a one score kind of game.

Not only chances of making it in, but chances of making it far based on the matchup that you would draw real quick. I just want to explain to people who might not know what five plus seven is five plus seven is five highest ranked conference champions, plus the seven best at large teams. So so the debate is six plus six and it would have been six plus six had we still had a Pac twelve. I guess technically we have a Pac twelve, but it's a Pac two and it really isn't a power league anymore. So it's going to be five, which means the four power leagues and I'll use air quotes for the ACC just so people will get the joke. Big twelve, big ten SEC plus the next highest ranked league, which might be the Sunbelt, might be the Mountain West, might be the American. I guess there's an off chance it could be Conference USA or the Mac, but probably not. Anyway, it'll be probably one of the first three leagues that I mentioned. So those five would go and then the next seven best at large teams.

Real quick question about this. Do we know that if you are the fifth ranked league, let's just say app state wins the Sunbelt and they become the fifth ranked next best ranked league. But in the college football playoff rankings, which I'm sure will be done exactly the way they've been done, they come in like fourteenth overall, right? Yeah, they would be the twelve seed. Correct.

Yeah. Every the only like fast forward button is if you are one of the four highest ranked conference champions, those will be your one, two, three and four, five through twelve will also include that fifth automatic bid, but not slotted ahead of other teams that it's higher than. So I've been running this in years previous and there were times where the fifth conference champion or the sixth conference champion might have been the nine, right?

And they might, they would not have been the twelve. Like that's when you were dealing with UCF running hot, right? That's when you were dealing with the Houston or something like that. Um, this past year, again, Liberty, which was down in the twenties, I believe on selection Sunday, they would have been right to the twelve and my expectations since UCF Cincinnati and Houston are all in the big twelve now that the way that those other conferences have been treated by the selection committee. It might be Cusa because Cusa, it's got Liberty, but I think we're going to be talking about a two lane, a Liberty, I mean, SMUs in the ACC. Now, a lot of these programs that we think of in terms of competing for those group of five spots. You know, those, those programs are already in power conference with a different avenue to get there, but your app state, your James Madison, your two lane, um, your Boise state, like these are going to be the programs that are going to be competing for that spot, which I do think eventually is just going to be the twelve, which means you're playing, I don't know, whichever of Alabama, Georgia, or Texas. Did it win the SEC? Right.

Let's say Notre Dame is by far the best team in the country all year long. Best they can do is five, right? Correct. Okay. I just, I just want to make sure I'm pretty sure, cause that's the way it was negotiated initially, but who knows, uh, how it's going to look, but they can't be a conference champion as currently construed.

So we'll, uh, we'll see what the whole thing, uh, what the whole thing is. Real quick, do you think we're going to stay at twelve? Cause I don't. I don't think we will get beyond sixteen and I don't think we will get beyond sixteen because, um, your, your, your math, not only of the number of games that's played, but of the number of weeks that there are in the calendar. Like FCS does the 24, but FCS also plays a shorter regular season schedule. And with so much of the inventory of these media rights deals being the regular season schedule, I just, I don't see, I don't see us getting beyond sixteen. If you add, if you go to sixteen, you're not adding necessarily another week of action. You're making the teams that were having a buy play a first round opponent. So twelve to sixteen feels like a move that could be made.

I don't see it growing beyond that. Yeah. Twenty four would be adding another week of action.

The, uh, but sixteen would, uh, would not real quick. You mentioned, go ahead. Have you looked at the playoff schedule for this year? No, I haven't even looked at next week's hockey schedule, Chip.

Well, they're back home. All right. And we have, I know Chicago on Monday. Oh, so it's going to be from December 20th to January 20th from Thursday, December 20th, the very first first round game to the national championship game in Atlanta on January 20th, one month of college football playoff.

And it's not exclusively split up weekend, weekend, weekend, weekend, because that would make too much sense. Right. And the NFL's kind of taking care of that. Yeah, but, um, it is it is going to be a long season, a second season of college football. No way. And I cannot add another week to that, Adam.

I can't stand for it. We have things to do. Well, could you mention it with that? You were looking at the end of the regular season in the NFL win and you're in losing your out. The problem with the college game is that that doesn't really exist. And it brings me to the next part of our conversation, because right now in college basketball and I know we're going to fold our conversation over the next few weeks as we talk more and more about the end of the college basketball season.

But I was on CBS Sports HQ doing takeaways from Tuesday night action. I understand. I totally understand which. But they can they tell us that, well, the net is just a tool. This is it does.

It's not the be all and end all, except that every single conversation. Well, this team is blank. Something and something in quad one games. Well, where do you get quad one from?

Joe Jerry, whatever your bracket name is, where do you get quad one from the net? They use the net to determine quad one, quad two, blah, blah, blah. Does college football have or need a metric like this?

Absolutely. Well, first of all, it does not need a metric like this. And that is because we are not sorting through three hundred and sixty teams, right?

We we are ranking a much smaller group of teams and we are ranking a much smaller body of work. We need context. We don't like, for example, Gary Parrish, you know, I know that you're a fan of the Iron College basketball podcast as well.

Heard him on your show last week. You know, he says not all quad one wins are the same. Correct. Absolutely right. And by not relying on those sorts of metrics, you are allowing nothing but context. I also think the dirty secret of college football is that yelling about context is what keeps the conversations going. If we just had numbers to get everything sorted out, the conversations will be over too quickly. We talk about sport 12 months a year.

There's only 12 games in a regular season. Come on, man. We need to keep adding some wood on that fire.

But because I have I haven't cracked the code, but I went back to a lot of here's what the net is and you reverse engineer some results. Without the ones like you who work tirelessly to keep things running, everything would suddenly stop hospitals, factories, schools and power plants. They all depend on you, no matter the weather, emergency or time of day. You're the ones who get it done at Grainger. We're here for you with professional grade industrial supplies. Count on real time product availability and fast delivery.

Call click Grainger dot com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Hey, Mel, Bri here. Got to work from home today because the whole family caught a nasty.

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Just use instacart, Brian. And as an efficiency tool, you're not that different from a Vegas power rating, right? Like you want your if you want your net to go up, the the compete the algorithm wants to see you beat a team by more than the algorithm thought you were going to beat that team. That's just a Vegas spread.

Yep. College basketball spreads, for the most part, are just set by predictive models. Then they move based on the market. But I think that it is much easier to figure out and it's not as much this like under the hood.

How are we going to do this? If you win by margins that are greater than what are expected, your efficiency rating is going to improve. I look at Vegas power ratings for college basketball all the time.

I see how these things adjust. You know, the net ratings line up with predictive models that are available, like whether it's a Bart Torvik or a Ken Palm. Like those numbers are much more aligned than a lot of the resume metrics.

So I to you your text today. So do we have a net rating? I would say Bill Connolly's SP plus right at ESPN is mostly an efficiency model. It is a predictive rankings that is based on your returning production, how you're doing on a down to down basis, your success rate.

It is building out a power rating that you can use to set lines much like Las Vegas does. And so, yeah, there is a net rating in college football. I just think that it's more used by the gambling prediction side of the world than it is by people that are ranking things. Because ultimately, the net to me is not that different than an efficiency rating or a power rating. Right. And my point with things like net and again, they don't use the net like NC State.

A few years ago, NC State's net was thirty three, but they missed the field because they didn't have great numbers in quad one or quad two. And their strength of schedule was garbage. Right.

Right. But it were their non-conference strength of schedule. But I mean, all you got to do is look at half the teams that are in the top twenty five in the Big 12 and look at their non-conference schedules.

I mean, like a skunk just showed up. They're all bad. I mean, there there are teams that beat nobody outside of the league in the top hundred and and they didn't even try. They played 10 games that are with teams that are outside the top 200 in in the power rankings. And they're in the top twenty five.

It doesn't matter. They figured out the math. And once the number is set and then just then there's not enough room, not enough time, not enough games for the numbers to change.

Now, the die is cast. We know what these teams are going to be. So every single time these teams take the floor, they're, you know, no worse than quad two opportunities. Whereas there were games last year, like there were only if you were on your home court last year, there were like two quad one opportunities in the ACC. That's it, too. It was when either Duke or there wasn't Carolina last year.

I forget who the other team was like when two teams showed up. That's it. It's all you got.

And that's the right to be fair. Beat like crush teams. And this is why. But the ACC plays by and large, the ACC plays better, better nonconference schedules. We keep patting ourselves on the back of football. Don't do it in conference. I get Steve Forbes has been calling out this this all season long and he's been pointing to examples. And he's been saying this is how the system is gamed.

And then you know what he did? He went and beat Syracuse ninety nine to seventy. Right.

Any Georgia Tech eighty to fifty one and walk ons, but not getting into the game. But now it doesn't matter is running up the score. And after each of those wins, they jumped up and net far more than they have after other wins, even though the wins were not against good teams. Right.

But right now you can only move so, so much because that we've already we already know what the ranges are going to be. Wake would have to basically win out right to really severely impact their rating in a positive way. Because when Wake played some good games in the beginning of the season and the nonconference and they won some and lost some and maybe lost a couple more than they won or one or whatever it was. So rather than being like eleven and one or twelve and one in their nonconference like Iowa State was, you know, they were like ten and four, whatever the numbers were.

So they were already set at a certain level and you just not moving enough. I think I think if you crush teams, you can jump up. It's an efficiency rate like doesn't matter who you're not going to crush teams. You're not going to crush teams in your own league like that. Well, I listen.

Steve Forbes doing it. Didn't do it on Monday night against Duke. Apparently not. Yeah, but I I think that you can you can improve your standing in the net. It's just you got to run it up on people. And that's where the thing that's really difficult for the ACC going back to again, I'm pulling from I do a lot of college basketball work for sports line, like our CBS gambling subsidiary. And I do look at a lot of these odds maker power ratings. And you're looking at literally eight teams that are separated by three points on a power rating, which is say that in no situation is one team more than two possessions better than another.

And if that plays out to expectations, it's impossible to blow anybody out. Then we should pay Louisville. We should pay Louisville extra to just get absolutely run by a hundred every game. Who's going to who's going to say no Notre Dame? Take one for the team. Come on, let's go. Let's run the score up.

Chip Patterson, my friend at chip underscore Patterson. Thank you, man. I appreciate your time. As always, cover three podcasts. Go check it out every day.

Sounds good. You'll be well. Without the ones like you who work tirelessly to keep things running, everything would suddenly stop hospitals, factories, schools and power plants.

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