Will the tweak the playoff system now? | Page 2 | Syracusefan.com

Will the tweak the playoff system now?

You could be in the conf title game and still be on the bubble as well though.

Say the B12 as the 10th and 12th best teams and two others had a 4 loss team in the finals and they both win. Not playing would not leave you in
 
Chip said:
I'll be curious how many Indiana fans will infiltrate South Bend for this once in a Hoosier football fan lifetime game.

Not that it will matter, but ND season ticket holders have been known to sell to the highest bidder (Nebraska and Georgia games, which ended up looking like neutral site matchups).
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Start at $1000
 
Chip said:
I'll be curious how many Indiana fans will infiltrate South Bend for this once in a Hoosier football fan lifetime game.

Not that it will matter, but ND season ticket holders have been known to sell to the highest bidder (Nebraska and Georgia games, which ended up looking like neutral site matchups).
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I was wondering about that , I remember watching the Cinncinatti game at South Bend a few years ago and there was a lot of red in the stands , the Bearcats aren’t known for a traveling fan base at all . Guessing you will see a lot of red again .
 
Chip said:
I'll be curious how many Indiana fans will infiltrate South Bend for this once in a Hoosier football fan lifetime game.

Not that it will matter, but ND season ticket holders have been known to sell to the highest bidder (Nebraska and Georgia games, which ended up looking like neutral site matchups).
Expand...
It's only a short 4 hour drive, and I personally know many people who are going to try... but it's going to be pricey. ND is not a massive stadium and it's hard to get tix during the regular season, I can't imagine prices for a playoff game.
 
Ragman2000 said:
It's only a short 4 hour drive, and I personally know many people who are going to try... but it's going to be pricey. ND is not a massive stadium and it's hard to get tix during the regular season, I can't imagine prices for a playoff game.
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I wonder if since it's a playoff if the visitors will get more tickets than usual? Not a lot but more available.
 
Capt. Tuttle said:
Get rid of the eye test and names. Develope a mathematical system to find the best team’s objectively.
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Dammed both ways. Eye test welcomes (SEC/B10) bias. As do most/all of the algorithms. You cannot tell me that those don’t have baked in metrics to recognize the traditional programs. It may even be unintentional on behalf of the programmers, but they’re there.
 
metrics are just eye tests as well but they don't have any method to fix the mistakes they bake in.

The problem this year wasn't who they picked, it was more how they made up the plan to seed them.

Then we had so much I don't know with teams like Indiana who dominated bad teams for sure but nothing else, or a team like SMU with a great record but lost its 2 toughest games.
 
Capt. Tuttle said:
Get rid of the eye test and names. Develope a mathematical system to find the best team’s objectively.
Expand...

Several years ago I got really interested in hockey analytics when the LA Kings won the Stanley Cup as the 8th seed in the Western Conference. There was a guy with a hockey analytics website who was predicting before the playoffs started that the Kings were going to win - his analytics showed they had a crazy number of "bad losses" that year and they were possibly the best team in the league.

What was interesting was an interview with him the following year before the season started, when he was asked how he "knew" the Kings were going to win. He said he didn't "know", but thought they had a really good chance when he compared his system to what he observed on the ice. He would never just rely on analytics alone, it required a sanity check as well. The analytics results basically fell into four categories:

1) Results that were obvious without any analytics, like teams who spend more time in the offensive zone score more).
2) Results that were so marginally relevant as to be inside the margin of error.
3) Results that appeared significant but weren't - an example of where that might have happened in college basketball is when Syracuse was good but JB played stall ball at the end which allowed teams to close the margin of the loss. That may have led to Syracuse being undervalued in computer metrics which would have only been observable by comparing analytics results to actual game play and seeing there was a possible issue.
4) Results which were not immediately obvious but were relevant. There are very, very, very few of these. (He thought the Kings being massively better than the game results would indicate was possibly one of them, decided to go big and predict them to win it all and got lucky when they did. That led to him getting hired to lead the analytics department for an NHL team...sometimes success is just shooting your shot. Its better to be lucky than good, but success is usually a combination of both).

If you don't do a sanity check, you are going to make errors of classifying conclusions which belong in the third category with ones that belong in the fourth. It'll be objectively accurate via the analytics that one team is "better" than another - it'll just be wrong. What he also tried not to do is what I'll call the "Millhouse approach" (shots fired) of coming to the conclusion first and then mining for data to support that conclusion, since that just leads to conclusions from categories 1 & 3 getting allocated to category 4.

In reality all the pro sports leagues have "objective" systems for selecting and seeding playoff teams, and we can find in most years a team that other objective systems and/or our personal eye tests would indicate a better team was left out. The big difference is that the pro league model is clearly laid out with no room for politics, while college is going with a selection committee which guarantees it will be a political process many feel is unfair.

TL; DR summary - I agree that doing away with the selection committee and going to some apolitical selection process is needed. I don't have any delusions that will lead to us selecting the 12 best teams...I don't even think it'll be free from charges of politics. It'll just be a system that can be defended from those charges with some credibility, where the current approach can't be (and the efforts to do so are laughably bad and destroy the credibility of the person making that argument).
 
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Cusefan95 said:
Results that appeared significant but weren't - an example of where that might have happened in college basketball is when Syracuse was good but JB played stall ball at the end which allowed teams to close the margin of the loss. That may have led to Syracuse being undervalued in computer metrics which would have only been observable by comparing analytics results to actual game play and seeing there was a possible issue.
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This is so important. Not so much because we'd be undervalued, but because people would figure out the algorithm and then exploit it in ways that don't otherwise make any sense. Just like youtubers and tiktokers do.

Include margin of victory, for example, and all of a sudden Mississippi Valley State is getting non conference invites from every single blue blood and Boise State can't fill a non-conference schedule.
 
OttosShoes said:
This is so important. Not so much because we'd be undervalued, but because people would figure out the algorithm and then exploit it in ways that don't otherwise make any sense. Just like youtubers and tiktokers do.

Include margin of victory, for example, and all of a sudden Mississippi Valley State is getting non conference invites from every single blue blood and Boise State can't fill a non-conference schedule.
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Yeah, I'm not sure a lot of SEC or Big 10 power schools are going to do a true home and home with Boise or the like.
 
SU94 said:
I'm no ND lover, but that was a real schedule made unexpectedly worse by the struggles of FSU and @USC.
They won at TAMU, beat (unexpectedly) undefeated Navy and Army, solid Louisville and Georgia Tech.

Virginia and Purdue admittedly stink.

ND is about where they should be this year.

They need to join a conference, however.
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Miami was on the schedule too, but Miami got the game moved to 2026. Army was the late schedule replacement.

FSU and USC both stunk, not ND's fault.

Forcing a school to join a voluntary group against its will ? Anti-American.

No to ND joining a football conference. Full stop.

Here are ND's schedules for the next two years:

2025:
2026:

 
FasterCuse said:
I wouldn’t mind something similar to the BCS. Get rid of all rankings until week 5, and then a composite of various computer models based on current year results.
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Probably would be better... but these polls generate interest. So dollars defeats fairness.
 
SmilinBob said:
I wonder if since it's a playoff if the visitors will get more tickets than usual? Not a lot but more available.
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No, its the same as any other game. Indiana only received the normal visitor's allotment. 3500 ? 5000? No more than that.

ND Stadium holds almost 78,000 people. Not "massive" but not that small.
 
TerryD said:
Miami was on the schedule too, but Miami got the game moved to 2026. Army was the late schedule replacement.

FSU and USC both stunk, not ND's fault.

Forcing a school to join a voluntary group against its will ? Anti-American.

No to ND joining a football conference. Full stop.

Here are ND's schedules for the next two years:

2025:
2026:

Expand...
FYI, the Syracuse athletic department thinks the 2026 game is at the dome. It will be interesting to see what happens there.
 
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