OHVATN":3l5u3ax3 said:
Riiiiiight. Your use of the English language is too proficient for me to believe that deep down your brain actually believes anything in that post you just wrote.
Thanks for the compliment, but just because you may think I'm smarter than the average bear doesn't mean that I can't be both a cynic and a realist. Let's face it, when we boil all the records, loyalties, one-upmanship, and hype away, the CFP is really about $money$. Big money -- $7.3 Billion over 12 years (a man could get by on that kind of cash
). The SEC and Big-10 are BY FAR the most profitable conferences in college football. ESPN wants those conferences' fans watching the CFP. I find it very difficult to believe that the selection committee could not help but feel intense pressure to somehow get both an SEC and a Big-10 school into the playoffs. The Big-10 was already in. Who would they have chosen from the SEC, an 11-1 Alabama or a 11-2 Ole Miss/Florida winner? The cynic is me says they'd have somehow "cooked-the-books," decided that conference championships don't really matter that much after all, and put Bama in at #4. But, like I said, "We'll never know."
OHVATN":3l5u3ax3 said:
I guess that's why the Committee used their "funny math" to rank Ohio State ahead of Stanford and Iowa. Oh wait, they didn't. Then, I guess it's because Stanford and Iowa have a greater "brand value" than the defending national champions Ohio State.
You know better than that -- rankings really don't mean much for #'s 5-8: they're not going to the CFP and they're pretty-much guaranteed New-Year's 6 bowls, so the committee can afford to be altruistic there. It's not a money issue, so they can bang on their chests and point to Stanford over Ohio State and say "See, we DO mean it when we say conference championships are REALLY important."
All that being said, we're just throwing "what-might-have-beens" at each other knowing it's impossible to resolve. The facts are that Arkansas DID convert the 4th and 25, MSU DID block the punt, and we ended up with CFP that we have. Everything else is conjecture and makes my head hurt.
My apologies to the OP -- how we got from UT contract extensions to this discussion is the ultimate in thread-creep.