Even with all the metrics staring them in the face

by omahadomer, Saturday, July 25, 2026, 10:08 (4 hours, 39 minutes ago) @ Jeff (BGS)

it's impossible to get around nakedly political decisions like Alabama last year.

If anything should have convinced them that these "rankings" beginning in the middle of the season would eventually expose them, vaulting Alabama over ND in the last weekend of the regular season was a howler. Alabama beat Auburn 27-20 in a game where they were outgained by 131 yards and limited to 280 yards of offense. Auburn had already fired its coach, finished 5-7 (going 1-7 in the conference) and ended the season ranked #70 by Howell.

Yet the committee chair gushed all over a 6-yard TD pass Bama threw on 4th and 2 with 3:50 to go in the game.

Meanwhile, N.D. was beating Stanford 49-20 by out-gaining the Cardinal by 212 yards and out-rushing them 187-86. The game was 42-3 in the 4th quarter before Freeman called off the dogs (and probably got hate email from gamblers because the line on the game was N.D. -31.5). Stanford was 4-8 and finished #99 per Howell.

Both N.D. and Bama played on the road.

Yet this was the justification for flipping N.D. and Bama.

Then Bama had its one impressive victory (over Georgia) thorough erased when Georgia throttled Bama 28-0 in the SEC championship game. The committee explained that it wouldn't "punish" Bama for being in the championship game and losing, yet it always has dropped teams after losing their conference championship games.

In fact, Virginia dropped two spots after losing the ACC championship game to Duke 27-20. OSU dropped from 1 to 2 losing to Indiana.

As long as humans are willing to ignore data like that (none of which depends on fancy stats) no "consideration" of metrics will do the trick.

I didn't mind the BCS system of including computer rankings. It was basically done in by Nebraska making the NC game after getting whipped by Colorado 62-36 and then getting whipped by Miami. But any team that year was going to get whipped and NU getting in required an absurd number of dominoes to fall its way and they all did.

Annually, the Massey composite computer rankings do a quite nice job of lining up the teams.

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"Somewhere in Middle America"