The final week of the College Football season before the bowl games are upon has gave us its four playoff teams: Number one Clemson, number two Alabama, number three Michigan State and number four, Oklahoma. That’s the selection committee, but even in a BCS world, we would have gotten the same four teams making the playoff.
There is far less controversy surrounding the selection this season. The Pac-12, with Stanford, might have an argument, but they had two losses. The rest of the champions, except for Clemson (undefeated), were beaten just once. And it’s impossible to complain about Oklahoma not having a championship game. They didn’t share their title with anyone (unlike Baylor & TCU last season), and finished the season, just like Ohio State, with big wins one after the other.
These hypothetical rankings were made by taking the AP Poll as part of the human factor instead of the Harris poll which doesn’t exist anymore. Combine that with the Coaches poll to the results provided by six different computers (Anderson & Hester College Football Computer Rankings, Billingsly Report, Colley Matrix, Massey Ratings, Jeff Sagarin’s College Football Rankings, Peter Wolfe’s Rankings) and you get more or less the BCS.
Both the AP Poll and the Coaches poll gave the same top 4, with Michigan State bumped by the AP Poll to number 3. Was it for a reason? To make things more comfortable for Alabama? To pit Oklahoma in a revenge match against the team that drubbed them a year ago in the bowl game? Hard to say. But this might be the first year, including the BCS era, without any controversy as to the identity of who get to play for the championship.
The rest doesn’t matter. It just helps fill up the bowl games, with the Fiesta Bowl probably ecstatic about the Ohio State – Notre Dame matchup, while the Rose Bowl took Iowa to play against Stanford, their first every meeting, surprising as that sounds considering the Pac-12 – Big Ten relationship. The Buckeyes might be the best team in the country and certainly in the Big Ten. The Fighting Irish lost their two games by three points. It’s something of another semifinal, although it doesn’t mean anything. The following rankings, by the committee, are all that matter.
