Replacing conference championships with power pairing

And now we have pretty good evidence that the playoff selection committee doesn’t really care one way or another. So let’s get rid of them! Imagine a world in which we’re spared the annual indignation of having to watch Florida lose to Alabama 59-2. Imagine a world in which historical rivals always play each other every year and yet, by almighty Rockne, the best teams in a conference always play one another, too. Imagine a world with no divisions. By which I mean: a world in which we eliminate divisions such as the ACC’s perplexingly named Atlantic and Coastal divisions, and all teams within the same college football conference compete as one.

Not only have I imagined such a world, my friends, but I have seen one. I have seen it in the hallways of a high-school debate tournament.

High-school debate tournaments — all of you will be shocked to learn that I was a master debater in high school — face some of the same constraints that college football conferences do. In any given tournament, there are lots of teams of radically varying quality levels, and there’s not nearly enough time to have them all play one another. A typical debate tournament, for example, might involve 60 teams but only six rounds of competition, with the best eight or 16 teams advancing to the playoffs (or what debaters call the “outrounds”). Each round is precious, and you don’t necessarily want to watch some some pimply-faced sophomores from a Class D school debating a Class A juggernaut like my alma mater, East Lansing High School, any more than you want to watch Rutgers lose to Michigan 78-0.

The solution that debate tournaments devised is something called power-pairing. Power-pairing just means that teams with the same record are paired off against each other, so that a team that starts off the tournament 2-0 will face off against another 2-0 team, for instance. It usually works by drawing the first two rounds of a tournament at random,1 and after that, everything is power-paired.

This turns out to be a surprisingly elegant solution. It helps to make the matchups relatively even, which not only helps students to learn more but also usually tells you more in determining the best teams. Furthermore, the pairings are somewhat self-correcting. Suppose a good team happens to randomly draw very tough opponents in its first two rounds and gets off to an 0-2 start. They’ll receive some compensation by being paired with easier opponents the rest of the way out — an 0-2 team and then a 1-2 team, and so forth. As another bonus to this system, the best teams are put through the gantlet and really earn their keep. A team that finishes its tournament undefeated or with just one loss will have beaten a lot of very good teams along the way.

What would power-pairing look like in the context of a college football season? Here’s an example that I drew up involving this year’s Big Ten. I experimented with a few different setups, and happen to like this one, but feel free to disagree with the particulars (this is more a proof-of-concept than anything I’ve thought all that much about).

It works like this: Each team plays nine conference games, the same number they play under the Big Ten’s current rules. Five of these are scheduled in advance, while four are power-paired or “flex” matchups determined only once the season is underway. To be more specific: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/make-college-football-great-again/

DWags wrote:Amazing. I love it. It won't ever happen.

Turtleneck wrote:

DWags wrote:Amazing. I love it. It won't ever happen.

You're right. It will never happen. I really hate the unbalanced alignment of most conferences. With MSU, OSU, PSU, and UM in one division, do you really end up with the two best teams in the conference championship?

WhiteBoyHatcher wrote:I don't think it's the conferences that need to change. Well, other than the Big 12.

WhiteBoyHatcher wrote:I don't think it's the conferences that need to change. Well, other than the Big 12.

Herbie Green wrote:I like Nate Silver, but this article sucked ass. You can't practically change schedules in the middle of the year. Or was this supposed to be comedy?

Turtleneck wrote:

Herbie Green wrote:I like Nate Silver, but this article sucked ass.  You can't practically change schedules in the middle of the year.  Or was this supposed to be comedy?

You're not really changing schedules "in the middle of the year."

Herbie Green wrote:

Turtleneck wrote:

You're not really changing schedules "in the middle of the year."

Ok I am wasted so tried to reread it.  Until I came to this point:

"Five of these are scheduled in advance, while four are power-paired or “flex” matchups determined only once the season is underway."