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FiveThirtyEight Plays the 'What-if' game on CFP Scenarios

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kjonesATX's picture
December 4, 2015 at 4:52pm
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It's a round table discussion of some folks over at FiveThirtyEight, including Nate Silver. Some interesting back and forth, and I think the scenario that they discuss that has a decent shot at happening, is a UNC win over Clemson combined with a Stanford win (in this one, assume Bama wins). Here is Nate's take:

I think the committee starts from the premise that it doesn’t have much respect for UNC and thinks they’d get demolished if they were in the playoff. So it wants to find an excuse to leave them out. But it has trouble taking Clemson over UNC when UNC just beat Clemson. How about Ohio State? Maybe, but they’re not a conference champion either — and frankly, if you’re going to take a one-loss nonchampion, Clemson’s resume is at least as good as Ohio State’s. That leaves Stanford. They’re a politically correct choice, having won their conference title and having played a much better schedule than UNC.

When you think about it from that angle, it reminds me of last year and the Buckeyes crushing Wisconsin 59-0 to give the committee the "politically correct" choice, and thus not having to explain why they might have taken TCU (Clemson in this scenario) over Baylor (UNC). Here is Ohio State (Stanford in this scenario) that fits our playoff criteria.

Further down, Nate has an interesting take on Ohio State in general:

Ohio State’s a fascinating case, @allison. Because, remember, the model’s job is to replicate human thinking. And it thinks humans should really like Ohio State for some pretty basic reasons. One-loss power conference team. Defending national champion. (That’s factored in implicitly in way the model uses Elo ratings, which carry over slightly from season to season.) Coming off a HUGE win against Michigan. Only loss was against another very good team, Michigan State.

But the narrative that developed around Ohio State was poor. I actually thought the Ezekiel Elliott comments after the Michigan State loss might have hurt them — it made it seem like they had blown their chance instead of reminding voters that this was a very good football team that had a chance to redeem itself against UM.

I never thought about Zeke's comments like that. All I thought, was that if he hadn't said what he said, then the team might not have come out as angry and hungry as they did against TTUN. But it makes some sense, from their outsider perspective, that it could have been seen as the players feeling like they blew their one and only chance at the playoffs. 

Hopefully none of this matters, and whatever justification the committee wants to make for putting Ohio State is fine with me.. Even if they come out and say it ($$$$$).

This is a forum post from a site member. It does not represent the views of Eleven Warriors unless otherwise noted.

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