2017, Championship Week Recap (I Was Wrong)

If there is one thing we can all agree upon, I think that it was certainly a very interesting weekend. I wasn’t planning on making a Recap post this week, but I have a few things to get off my chest, and I might as well do it here and put a bit of a bow on things. Basically, I made a lot of predictions over the past week or so, and I did not exactly knock it out of the park. But, que sera sera. Just for fun, let’s review exactly how wrong I was, and perhaps more importantly, why:

1) My spreadsheet picked 4 upsets in the Championship Games, but only got one right.

I am not exactly sure why, but based on my power rankings, I picked Stanford, TCU, Wisconsin, and Georgia to win, and of course only the Bulldogs actually won. My spreadsheet historically does a surprising good job projecting spreads, but it sometime can get a little wonky. Just as example, after this weekend’s action, Penn State is ranked 3^rd, Wisconsin 4^th, TCU 10^th, Iowa is 14^th, MSU is 20^th, and USC is 28^th. It will be really interesting to see how this plays out in the Bowls, and who knows, maybe it will spot some interesting upsets that will actually come to pass.

2) In my final bowl picks, like many people, picked OSU over Alabama

This has been litigated on the internet to death, but I am in the camp that quality wins trump a bad loss, and winning a conference championship trumps watching the conference championship from your couch. OSU has 3 wins over teams ranked higher than any team Bama beat. Yes, OSU had two loses (and one of them was a late-in-the-season train wreck). But, Auburn also had two loses and I never heard anyone say they would have been out had they won a close game over Georgia. Basically, this came down to the infamous “eye test.” Ironically, to me this is the exact same situation as last year when the committee put OSU in over Penn State. At that time, my eye told me that OSU was not that great, which is also what my eyes tell me when I have watched Bama play this year. But, apparently the committee used their eye and simply confirmed that, yes, those are in fact Alabama jerseys those kids are wearing, so let’s just put them in. The fact is, Bama could have played their way in, but they lost in a not-so-close game to Auburn, who then lost is a less-close game to Georgia. At least last year OSU could make the argument that they lost to PSU on a somewhat fluky blocked FG late in that game. Bama has no such excuse. The committee seems to feel that (perhaps a healthy) Bama would beat OSU on the neutral field. That’s nice, but I am not convinced of that. The way we actually decide who is better is based on winning and losing real games and not based on imaginary scenarios. It must come back to the resume of what actually happened on the field. The committee messed up last year by putting OSU in, and they messed up again this year by snubbing them.

3) I didn’t quite get the NY6 Bowls Correct

At around midnight Saturday night, I posted my NY6 Bowl picks based on a couple different scenarios (the most important of which was the OSU-Bama issue).  In the Bama over OSU scenario, I got pretty close to the actual picks, but the committee did make a couple of different choices.  First, I correctly predicted Wisconsin would be ranked ahead of Auburn (which I predicted would also cause the Citrus / Outback / Holiday debacle). But, once you make this assumption, the number of remaining permutations is small. I did also predict that TCU will still make the NY6, but quite honestly, I knew deep in my heart that this wasn’t going to be true. TCU started the week ranked ahead of Washington. In my opinion, the fact that they were forced to play Oklahoma again in the New and Completely Unnecessary Big 12 Championship Game was not reason enough for them to lose the spot that they had. In reality, it doesn’t work that way, but it should. I don’t like that Washington got rewarded for not winning their division (why does that should familiar?)

I did predict a OSU-USC match-up, but I did not expect it to be in the Fiesta Bowl and not the Cotton Bowl. Actually, this is one place where I will give the committee credit.  Ohio State has played in the Fiesta Bowl two years in a row, so simply switching the venue to Dallas was a creative solution to this problem that I didn’t think of. This may be the only thing the committee got right that required any level of complex thought. 

The one that puzzles me a bit is why the committee matched #7 Auburn with #12 UCF and #9 Penn State vs. #11 Washington. In the past, it seems like the committee has basically tried to put together the closest ranked teams.  So, I would have matched Penn State with Auburn and Washington with UCF.  At first, I thought that the Cotton Bowl (where I had matched Washington and UCF) would not want the Group of Five Champ two years in a row. But, switching the USC-OSU game to Dallas solved this problem. It looks to me like the committee want to specially set this match-up to give the SEC a bit of an easier game. That’s weird, and I am not sure why this decision was made. It is not consistent with the way this was done in any previous year.  But an SEC team has not played a Group of 5 team in the NY6 yet, so maybe that is the reason? Odd.

4) I was wrong about the Outback Bowl

I went on record saying several weeks ago that I felt MSU was a lock for the Outback Bowl. The ultimate reason for my mistake is clear to me now: I didn’t think the Big Ten Conference would allow Northwestern to get screwed over as badly as they did. The secondary reason is just based on my personality: I like rules. By that, I mean that I have an innate fascination with complex sets of rules. When I was a kid, I loved pouring over my Dungeons and Dragons books, because I loved the complex rules about battle and characters, etc. (Also, those multisided dice are sweet). But, I never actually payed D&D very much. I just loved the rules. This situation is similar. The Big Ten has a clear set of procedures to pick team for Bowls. It is a little bit like a puzzle to solve. These rules should be based on the actual performance on the field. (Yes, I know it is really about the money, but IT SHOULDN’T BE, and that is really hard for me to get over). Based on these rules. A team that finishes conference play at 7-2 should not, under any circumstances, get passed by a team that went 5-4. So, based on this knowledge and assumption, MSU should have been a lock to Tampa, even if the Citrus Bowl was available. I was wrong. Sorry about that. 

As everything played out over the weekend finally resulting in the Citrus Bowl being out of play, Michigan getting the Outback Bowl, and MSU dropping to the Holiday Bowl, I was honestly FUROUS. I was already writing the angry letter in my head to the Big Ten office where I was going to demand Jim Delany be fired, Michigan to be forced to give back any bowl revenue, and new rules be put into place to prevent this in the future. I also might have suggested that Michigan be expelled from the Big Ten, just for good measure. It was an early draft.

But, after I thought about things for about 15 minutes, I quickly made peace with the situation. In all honesty, I wanted MSU to play in the Holiday Bowl. San Diego is a cool city, and MSU has never played there. This is a good chance to add yet another unique trophy to the trophy case. I don’t actually like the Outback Bowl, I simply like being right. Furthermore, the idea that Michigan fans (and we all know it’s coming) will use this as ammo to suggest that everyone knows that they really were better than MSU (and Northwestern) all along is absolutely infuriating (and psssst false).

That all said, this is not at all a bad deal for MSU. At the end of the day, I want the Bowls to create good match-ups, and in this case, we get #16 vs. #18.  Sure, it would have been nice to get the prestige of playing #17 LSU in the Citrus Bowl, but it would have been fairly crappy to have had to play unranked, 8-4 South Carolina in Tampa. In my original solution to this whole Bowl conundrum, I would have put MSU in the Outback Bowl against LSU regardless. If the Citrus Bowl were open to the Big Ten, I would have sent NW there and figured the SEC could put a weaker team (like South Carolina) there to create a better match-up. (Granted, I am assuming here that the SEC would play along, but LSU will now go to Orlando 2 years in a row, which is pretty silly.) In effect, my solution was make the Outback Bowl the one with the better match-up and therefore the defacto better bowl.  If I look at the situation that actually played out, essentially the same thing happened, but in this case the Holiday Bowl is the defecto better bowl than the Outback Bowl.  MSU won in both scenarios.  If anything, Michigan if screwed someone over it ws Northwestern, not MSU. It is even possible that this was partially Hollis’ fault. Maybe he actively courted both the Citrus Bowl and Holiday Bowl because he could see the potential match-ups. Maybe Hollis actually screwed over Northwestern. Maybe we will never know. But, upon reflection, this is a good draw for MSU, in more ways than one, and I think that it was a good day for MSU, after a fashion.

Oh, and for the record, my spreadsheet likes MSU over Wazzou by 4.6 points.

Finally, regarding that Outback Bowl match-up, it pits a team that hasn’t beat a team with a winning record since 2016 against a team that hasn’t beat a team with a winning record since September 9^th. SOMETHING HAS GOT TO GIVE!

That is all for now. As always, Go State, Beat the Cougars!