W said:
once again the issue for the committee will be what to do with potential 11-1 teams that don't play in their conference championship game.
the Georgia-Tennessee loser
and Michigan-Ohio State loser
I think the flip side of this is that both the polls and the selection committee appear to not worry about sorting out -0 teams in the sake conference and overvalue zero-loss teams and undervalue losses to good teams (or rather seem to include them only as trend sorts lower in priority.)
Generally the committee does this if they have even the thinnest fig lead to wear to protect their primary clients (and benefactors) in the P5 and there is little doubt the expansions by the SEC and the Big Ten are designed to force the CFP to give more consideration to those schools based on opponent quality in order to overcome public support for -0 Cinderellas.
If the playoff expansion continues on the current course, the collision of interests will be in the at large pool. Today we mainly have seen the SEC, Big Ten, and in a one-year exception ACC & Notre Dame take more than one slot in the semifinal in a year. In the future one of those slots gets converted to top four seed and the other moves into the at-large pool.
As many zoo posters have noted, only a couple of the conference champions will play the kind of schedule that deserves a first round bye, or immediate selection to the two or four-team championship series. The key determinants of being selected has been
1. Undefeated
2. Won conference championship game (and therefore is conference champion)
3. Is a P5 team
When all four slots couldn't be filled with teams that met the first two, it allowed Cincinnati in last year mainly to avoid an anti-trust suit and secondarily to date public expectations after years of carefully avoiding Go5 teams and giving them the consolation prize of a somewhat less interesting NY6 bowl.
Under the new system in theory the first step is to seed the four top seeds. Second step is to select the six at large, and third step is to seed the bottom eight. We KNOW that the selection committee will exercise their judgment to create interesting matchups in the first round (likely on campus). I think what we all imagine is the selection committee rankings determine the slotting of the non-bye seeds, but that very much is not how the NCAA tournaments are run especially men's basketball.
If you were to call that selection process "holistic", it would match how one Texas A&M admissions officer described the school's admissions after the top 10% freshmen have been established and if you were to call both non-transparent and borderline nonsensical I would have a hard time disputing that.
But since it will be impossible to have 12 undefeated teams when expanded playoff selections are made, and additionally since it will be more likely less competitive conferences will occasionally have a less capable team win their conference championship (remember ooc games are not included in the conference championship game selection), I agree how -1 and -2 records are treated will become ever more interesting.
I am listening closely for how much of the "best four" rhetoric carries over. If it does then they may internally game the rankings to have the interesting matchups. If it doesn't they will start talking about interesting matchups more. That kind of discussion has not been "out loud" during the best four era, but it seems to be an undercurrent of the invites. See our experience in 2020 as a specific example…
