We continue to beat this drum. Same thing happened to Alabama, Texas last year, UGA has been up there too.

It should be the exact opposite. If you’re the best team in the country your opponents are over matched and will have to foul to stay competitive

https://twitter.com/joshpatecfb/status/1878570528497074593

Everyone loves to say “Ohio State, Bama, etc” get all the calls. And you will remember one that went their way. But the reality is the best teams get absolutely screwed every year by officiating and subconscious bias

13/18 national titles and by far the most dominant league on draft day and in NFL production.

If that is unearned benefit of the doubt, I'm truly curious what 'earned' benefit of the doubt looks like.

But let's take Bud at his desired criteria

https://twitter.com/BudElliott3/status/1878113597223526544

The top 5 teams in the SEC played these teams OOC:
- vs ACC champ 31pt win, vs Ga tech win
- vs Michigan 31-12 at Mich
- vs Wisconsin 42-10 at Wisc
- vs NC St w 51-10
- vs ACC Champ win on the road

6-0 multiple blowouts

Most can’t process these things and their (lack of) implications on the SEC vs Big Ten:
- Notre Dame was favored / higher-rated over Georgia
- Ohio State was favored / HR over Oregon
- Georgia would have been favored / HR over Oregon or PSU
- Tennessee (9) is still right behind Oregon (8), PSU (7) I don’t know how many have said to us in threads that Notre Dame over Georgia was an upset. It wasn’t, in computers or Vegas, it only was in the dumb CFP rankings focused on conf champs.

Josh thought here:

ESPN is trying to spin it positive, but that Alabama vs Michigan game was exactly why I said Penn State would beat Alabama - Jalen Milroe is just plain horrible versus teams that can afford to stay in 2- or 3-high zone because they can stop the run. It’s hard to think of a top team in recent memory more hamstrung than Alabama was with Milroe. 2024 Michigan was but they don’t have remotely the same surrounding talent. McCord was better. Maybe some of the old Les Miles LSU teams?

The CFP committee is making the same mistake they made last year: signaling that who you play and how you play doesn't matter. Loss column is all that matters.

They're telling teams they should immediately cancel any meaningful out of conference games. 🧵 It was clear last year, in how they ranked Oregon and FSU until the very end, that they were hoping things "worked themselves out" so they wouldn't have to make hard, unpopular decisions, that adhered to a voting ideology of getting the best teams in.

Of course, nobody could have seen this type of thing coming.

The people who pushed for this to be allowed also like to talk about access and parity for the lesser teams - when in reality they've merely expedited the death warrant for half of CFB.

https://twitter.com/barstoolsports/status/1839297936427200771

Because this sort of thing is what is going to push us into a new tiered system of a super league for the handful of programs who can afford this sort of thing, and another tier for everyone else.

The romantic notion of a Cincy type team being competitive in the playoffs dies.

The House settlement in college football is failing, a 🧵

In short, it appears that the judge seems to have seen the settlement for what it likely was: an end-around to get legal pay-for-play without going through Congress. As many of you know, my day job is being a senior partner in a major IP law firm. I'm not an antitrust guy, and I don't do agency/sports law, so it gives me a different perspective (of which there are many).

Also, I do have to say these opinions are my own, not those of my firm or clients.

The college football super conference era + expanded playoffs will mean fewer, good out of conference games.

B12 champion is basically going to play what would have been a G5 schedule a few years ago, and B10/SEC schedules get harder. Why on earth would they add more Ls OOC? Everyone's goal will be to have as clean of a record as possible to be in that top 10-12 ranked range. The voters and committee have made it clear that clean records and destroying bad teams is more important that even big wins (see Oregon vs Texas ranking all year last year)

Can't wait to read about how University of Michigan athletic dept files bankruptcy because RedBird Capital jacked up the rent payments on the Big House in 15 years.

https://twitter.com/On3NIL/status/1793264019006005322

I read the comments from the PE guys involved and still don't see the value add, at all.

All I see are vultures and jackals who have no understanding of what makes CFB great that will gladly profit in the short term and move on to the next thing after they've killed it.

I hire and direct software engineers and have 20 years of experience. The leetcode fad is just the newest form of extreme nerd club gatekeeping that distills decades of experience down to whether or not you can live-code math trick questions.

https://twitter.com/davidnix_/status/1791105351686737924

The result is a very strong core of early career engineers who are still fresh on academic stuff or have time to spend six months grinding test questions and can do them live from memory.

Bud knows this is an incredibly lame false equivalency.

Saban didn't buy a million dollar home with his first coaching job. He probably got room/board and a ~$15,000ish stipend. Sound familiar?

https://twitter.com/BudElliott3/status/1767703735311188202

People like Bud will gladly campaign to ruin a vessel for tens of thousands of kids who have very little value in the NIL market as an athlete, but have great need for an education and being molded by men who have 30 years of experience in doing so.

When you want real bad to call someone a racist, but also don't know the facts 🧵

1. College isn't professional. It is its own thing, bound by Title IX legislation and a lack of unified bargaining

2. No professional sport operates the way the current NIL + free transfers.

https://twitter.com/jessegbo/status/1760526893655142722

An elite NFL team can't go to their biggest sponsor and say

"Hey this elite QB plays for a crappy team, will you throw a bunch of money at him so he can just dip out on his team and play here next year"

Continual conflation of what CFB is now with pro sports is just lazy

Just to recap, let's say Florida manages to survive a schedule like this year: Miami, FSU, TAMU, UCF, UT, UGA, Tex, LSU, Ole Miss

Hypothetically Alabama in the SECCG.

And in a 14 team playoff they have to play FOUR MORE GAMES.

https://twitter.com/PeteThamel/status/1760430279678738439

Where is the concern for the player in all this? Where is the concern that we won't EVER crown the actual best champion because teams will be nowhere near 100%?

Is this what we want CFB to be? The team with the easiest schedule who happens to get injury luck is the "best"

Why the Super Bowl isn't filled with five-star recruits, a 🧵

Simply put, it's a matter of volume. Let's start with this point: there are only ~32 five-star recruits per HS class. That's only 1 per NFL team per year. As 40% won't pan out, each team can only sign 2-3 per 5 years. This highlights that there are are way, way more athletes as you drop down each recruiting tier.

It increases about 10x each jump, so 33 five stars, 330 four stars, 3000 three stars, 10,000 two stars.

If all were equal, you'd have 100 former 3 star players for every 5 star.

While I appreciate Kirby's comments, there aren't any good solutions.

Paying players to play bowls or tying NIL to a full season's participation is only valuable to players who weren't opting out anyway.

1st day players aren't risking $$$ for $

There's a bigger issue.

🧵 For a decade, there has been a huge push from sports media and a large portion of CFB fans to devalue anything but the playoffs.

Journalists, who are largely pro-sports focused, push for massive change with zero concern for unintended consequences.

Contextualizing stats is important. Both Washington and Texas are thought to have bad pass defenses and it will be their weakness in the Sugar Bowl.

Surface level:
Washington Total Pass Defense Rank: 118th
Texas Total Pass Defense Rank: 84th

Yikes. But wait! 🧵 Let's dig into this a little bit:

When adjusted for opponent, things look better:
Washington Relative Performance Total Pass D: 76th
Texas RP Total Pass D: 56th

But there's more!

From a team analysis standpoint (vs Michigan), way too much is made of Alabama's near-loss to Auburn.
1) Auburn is favored over Maryland, they're dead even in FPI and FEI, and Maryland-Michigan was very close.
2) Bama outgained AU by 115 yards.
3) The NMSU loss was an outlier.🧵 If you want to talk deservedness for the playoff, that's one thing, but Alabama's issues with Auburn weren't the sort of thing that flags a terrible team.
1) Bama was hurt on big plays, not snap-to-snap.
2)That Auburn team had also handed Arkansas its worse loss 2 weeks prior.

Basic transfer portal logic in CFB:
1) It does not get more players drafted
2) It does slightly change *who* gets drafted
3) It does not create more scholarship opportunities
4) It does shift HS scholarships more to small schools (transfers take P5 slots and open G5 ones) 🧵 Saying "the transfer portal is good for the players" is an oversimplification. It is good for players who transfer to a bigger school and get more NIL money and a higher draft slot. But it's equally bad for players you don't know who they replaced. Is that, overall, "good"?

The argument that FSU is estopped from even challenging the GOR because they agreed not to take any action against it is really dubious. "You agreed not to damage the GOR so we decide everything" is obviously weird logic. That said, I don't know how FSU wins this.
(I am a lawyer)

https://twitter.com/ChrisVannini/status/1738253803596488931

Taking the argument to its conclusion, the ACC is arguing that because FSU agreed not to damage the GOR, then FSU can't bring a suit about whether the agreement itself is valid. Covenants not to sue are a thing, but you can always challenge the *covenant* itself.

Nobody wants to say it out loud, but here's the truth about the CFP rankings 🧵

Oregon/FSU were overrated for different reasons heading into champ weekend

You either pay your taxes as you go or all at once, but you have to pay. The committee failed to live by this truism First, Oregon:

Bama, Texas, and Ohio St all had better resumes than Oregon. More ranked wins, same number of losses, all with tougher schedules.

But dropping Oregon would ruffle feathers, especially among those who clung to early-season narratives about P12 strength.

This is the first year since 2014 I feel someone will get screwed out of a CFP slot and have a legitimate beef.

Texas, Alabama, or FSU not making it isn't fair.

Let's look at some others 🧵

2015 Ohio St - Lost to Mich St but Mich St was without their starting QB. 2016 Penn St - Won the conference but lost two games, including one to an unranked team. 39 point loss to Michigan

2017 - Ohio State two losses

2018 - UGA left out. 2 losses, including a brutal close game to Alabama in the SECCG. Oklahoma wasn't better imo but conf champ 1 loss