DOUG FRANZ

The College Football Playoff Committee is not biased, the SEC is the best

Oct 31, 2014, 5:15 AM | Updated: Apr 28, 2015, 2:00 pm

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It seems clear the average college football fan is completely convinced there is Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster, UFOs hidden by the Federal Government and the City of Atlantis.

I have a belief in my soul that Americans are smarter but I’m quickly being proven wrong.

Let’s test you. How do you feel when you read this?

THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF COMMITTEE HAS NO SEC BIAS.

Allow yourself to consume what anyone is saying if you hear the SEC bias argument.

PLAYERS:

The players playing in the SEC are consistently ranked as the top high school players in the country. The NFL drafts more players from the SEC than any other conference. The majority of players on NFL rosters are from the SEC.

Logic would say if a conference has the best players, it would be the best conference. If you think that’s bias, why does the NFL focus on the SEC. An NFL GM gets fired if he doesn’t draft the best players. He’s not interested in bias. He’s only interested in the tape. The film proves to NFL GMs the SEC is the best.

If someone tries to convince you there’s an SEC bias and this is not the best conference in college football, they’re also saying they know more about college football players than 32 NFL GMs.

COACHES:

Alabama boosters paid the remaining $3.1 million left on Nick Saban’s mortgage. Feel free to argue how stupid that is, but that’s the level of seriousness involved in SEC football. The conference with the highest paid coaches are in the SEC. If you’re sick, don’t you want to go to the best doctor? Wouldn’t you assume that pays the highest for doctors has some of the best in country? The SEC has the best players and coaches so they put out the best football.

If someone tries to convince you there’s an SEC bias and this is not the best conference in college football, they’re also saying the SEC isn’t the highest paying conference in college football.

CALCULATOR:

Have you ever been in a math class and someone argued that the reason A2 + B2 = C2 is due to Pythagoras’ bias against the love being received by hypotenuses? Math says the SEC is the best, not bias.

The top 5 in the latest rankings from Jeff Sagarin are all SEC teams.

How does the SEC bias/Big Foot guy explain “math bias” as the reason? A math genius who has spent his life putting together a formula to mathematically rank college football teams can not set-up a pro-SEC calculator that wouldn’t be exposed by now. Every week he puts the results in and the formula spits out the leaders. It’s not bias, it’s the SEC.

If someone tries to convince you there’s an SEC bias and this is not the best conference in college football, they’re also saying they have analyzed years of data and proven Sagarin has secretly written in a “Southern quotient” into the formula to weight the birth city of a southern city ahead of the rest of the country.

ESPN:

They have a vested interest in the success of the SEC because of the SEC Network, therefore ESPN needs the SEC teams in the playoff.

So that affects the committee how?

The committee members are unpaid. The Big 10 Network is partially owned by Fox Sports. Where were the Big 10 teams in the playoff? The Pac-12 Network is not on DirecTV. Condoleezza Rice has convinced nations to avoid blowing each other up and is now employed by Stanford. If she can win over national leaders, she can convince old retirees to place a Pac-12 team in the playoff to help improve the Pac-12 Networks’ reach and ratings.

The believers of an ESPN bias leading to a dominance of SEC teams is conveniently disallowing any other network being able to influence committee members which is either amazingly hypocritical or frighteningly ignorant.

If someone tries to convince you there’s an SEC bias and this is not the best conference in college football, they’re also saying people have a tendency to watch channel 253 more than they watch channel 15.

MARKET SIZE:

One of the major factors involved for TV is market size. It’s very simple. The bigger the market, the more eye balls. The more eye balls, the better chance at ratings. The better chance at ratings, the higher dollar charged to advertisers.

No matter how great the SEC is, TV networks will always make more money on the Big 10. In order to believe in a major bias toward the SEC, one also has to accept a bunch of suits conspiring to make less money. ESPN/ABC and Fox would make millions more dollars on a playoff dominated by Big-10 schools as they would SEC fans.

The SEC has Atlanta but then it drops to New Orleans, Birmingham and Nashville (although they recently picked up Houston). The Big-10 has New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philly and Pittsburgh, Columbus/Cleveland/Cincinnati, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indianapolis, Baltimore and Milwaukee. These markets –and the states they’re in — dwarf the SEC. A playoff with two Big-10 teams would bring in millions more to the network televising the playoff.

If someone tries to convince you there’s an SEC bias and this is not the best conference in college football, they’re also saying ESPN would rather be the best sports network in Gainesville and not the United States.

THE COMMITTEE:

In order to believe in a committee bias towards the SEC, you have to believe:

1) Oliver Luck, who was a finalist to be a Rhodes Scholar and received a law degree after his NFL career was over, is susceptible to the jedi-mind trick.

2) The former Secretary of State for the United States of America can’t handle herself in a room full of college football power brokers and she breaks down, deferring to their desires of SEC domination.

3) Legendary Big-10 coach, Barry Alvarez, has completely turned his back on Wisconsin and wants to suck up to the almighty ole Ball Coach to impress him.

4) Tom Osborne is intimidated by Nick Saban.

If someone tries to convince you there’s an SEC bias and this is not the best conference in college football, they’re also saying some of the smartest minds in the history of college football do not care about the reputations they’ve earned in the sport they love and are willing to throw it all away because they love fan ridicule.

If you don’t want the SEC to have multiple teams in the playoff because you want to preserve the regular season as a stronger playoff elimination, we disagree but I respect you. There is a great deal of logic in the phrase, “You can’t win a National Championship if you can’t win your own division.” I, on the contrary, want a playoff that has the four best teams in the country.

If two, three or four teams all come from the same conference, so be it.

This argument is completely based on opinion and I’d be glad to try to convince you I’m right while giving you my full attention as you explain why your opinion is better.

It’s the outcry from Atlantis island trying to push the only way to explain three SEC teams in the playoff is because there’s a bias that helps television, investors or the committee that scares me into believing our country has jumped the shark. The SEC bias argument is not a debate of opinions. It’s an argument between the educated and the ignorant.

Doug Franz

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The College Football Playoff Committee is not biased, the SEC is the best