Champion vs "best team"

March Madness and College Football alike routinely face scrutiny for whether or not their approaches to crowning champions will select the "right team."

The Fairleigh Dickinson upset victory over Purdue, a 16-seed over a 1-seed, was a pretty stunning moment in the March Madness of 2023.

Now I and many others were Purdue-skeptics, but looking back even my own bracket still had them in the Sweet 16 before getting exposed. The reasoning was simple, they have 7-foot-4 potential National Player of the Year Zach Edey.

The goliath center put up 22.3 points per game this year on 60.7% shooting with 12.9 rebounds per game and 2.1 blocks. The simplest reasoning said such a big, overpowering force would dominate tournament games against overmatched, smaller teams who couldn’t handle him around the rim on either side of the floor.

Fairleigh Dickinson was certainly a smaller team. The degree to which they were a tiny, overmatched team has been wildly overstated in selling the shock of the moment, but they were indeed small. The starting guards were 5-foot-8 and 5-foot-9, the two wings were both 6-foot-4, and the “center” was 6-foot-7 with the main forward off the bench also coming in at 6-foot-4.

Surely Edey and Purdue would crush them with size? Nope. FDU’s athleticism and ball pressure totally flustered Purdue’s freshmen guards and Edey only attempted 11 field goals while his team was 19-53 and 5-26 from behind the arc while committing 16 turnovers.

FDU won that game with superior athleticism and strategy, yet as in all other topics on Twitter, the takes were flowing.

War Blogle 🦃 @WarBlogle

If you’d rather see Fairleigh-Dickinson win just so you can say OHHHHH, you don’t care about the tournament determining the actual champion and this is why this format is not good and is just fun for 4 days.

The more teams you include in a process to determine the champion, the more you increase the variance of outcomes, which frustrates many who want to see the “best team” win at the end of the year. You’ll often see opponents of the expanded college football playoff vacillate between, “the weaker teams are going to lose anyways!” (But are they?) and “you don’t want the best team to win???” which are nearly contradictory.

Obviously there’s something to the argument, but I think the case is wildly overstated.

What does “best team” mean?

The idea of a “best team” is sort of axiomatic. Best at what?

Putting together a flawless regular season? Winning a given game regardless of opponent? Most of those qualities would make a tournament a reasonable way to determine a champion.

Some older fans of college football who recall the system prior to the BCS embrace the subjectivity and say voters choosing based on their opinions was a good method. The very nature of college football makes subjectivity an essential component, as there are over 100 teams in multiple conferences who don’t all play each other even on a rotating basis. So teams would play their seasons and then voters would pick who appeared most impressive.

I noted recently that developing a postseason which forced teams around the country to compete against SEC teams had been detrimental to their ability to win titles. Those times when we didn’t really know how a Big 10, Big 12, or Pac-12 Champion would fare against an SEC Champion appears to have been a time of bliss for many.

Nowadays college football settles on who the “best team” is, assuming for a moment that’s even a good proxy for “champion,” by having a select group of people choose four teams from totally different leagues with minimal competitive overlap and then having them square off in a four-team, single elimination tournament. So it’s still pretty subjective.

So what does “best team” mean and why does this process better guarantee that team is named champion over another, more inclusive process?

The argument seems to be this:

Even the “best team” won’t win every game 10 out of 10 times. If you increase the number of games and opponents, you increase the chances that the “best team” draws an unlikely loss and is eliminated.

It’s expressed as though the best team is a mathematical reality and our job is to find the equation which tells us who it is.

But we don’t even have an actual definition for what the best team is. We can’t take the answer our championship gives us and test it with formulas to see if the equation can be balanced and the answer will hold true.

The increase of the use of analytics to judge American sports competitions attempts to do this, but there is no way to measure a “best team” because we don’t know what that means.

Any answer you come up with, that treats “best team” as a mathematical reality, will inevitably run up against the cold hard reality of results.

Or as Herm Edwards put it…

The search for “best team” always runs into the dilemma of the pesky rules of the game, which determine outcomes independent of what “should” happen when different teams compete.

Officials missed, so and so was injured, this team just had the wrong strategy, the ball bounced the wrong way, etc. It can go on forever but the winner is the guy who scored more points.

What I think people really mean by “best team” relates to potential. Which team had the most talent, or the greatest capacity to put together the strongest run. The guy complaining about FDU’s upset over Purdue seems to be thinking something like,

“Purdue was a more likely champion than FDU. They had more talent, more potential, but our system didn’t bear that out, it routinely doesn’t bear that out, and it’s a flaw in our system.”

But you run into the same issues. How do we know what their potential was? Because of their regular season success playing within a particular conference measured by wins and losses or point differential? Because of recruiting rankings for the players on their roster?

The steel manned case looks like this:

• Factors like W-L record, strength of schedule, point differential, and recruiting rankings tend to correlate to which teams win championships.

• When a team who objectively measures high by those metrics loses, it’s likely a fluke.

• A system which encourages the occurrence of those “flukes” is an inferior one.

This makes a certain amount of sense, but it runs headlong into the biggest problem of this whole line of reasoning…

The art of choosing champions

If the way to define “best team” is the team who performs best in a regular season at W-L record, strength of schedule, point differential, and recruiting rankings (or whatever you prefer), thus ensuring they have the highest potential…then why play additional games?

Why not use those metrics to define the champion? You could even move past the bowl games and the flawed voting rationales of the coaches or chosen sportswriters. Just settle the criteria, let teams play the games they play, and then use the metric which you think best correlates to determining the “best team” to crown a champion.

But we don’t do that and I don’t think very many want to.

Why?

Because it’s ultra lame and runs counter to the essence of sport.

The better argument is that if you want to be the champion, you go compete based on the process laid out, and you prove you’re the best team on the scoreboard by the rules.

Obviously the nuanced response from the “reward the best teams!” folks is that while you do want an entertaining proving ground, you want it to mirror potential and upside demonstrated in the regular season to the fullest extent possible. Why? To protect the investment, made by both the program or fanbase, into regular season performance.

This is obviously laudable. It’d be silly to have a college football tournament with all 128 or however many teams after playing a regular season. The regular season needs to matter in choosing a champion or why play it? The reason bowl games are tanking with program interest is because they have no part in determining anything meaningful.

It used to be that bowl games were a proving ground, but now that it’s the conference title or playoffs where you make your meaningful statements, the bowl games are languishing with decreased participation.

Yet they still draw in mega fan interest, partly because they’re fun to watch but also because they take place in a primo television period over the holidays. A major factor in the expansion of the playoffs is to translate that marketshare into meaningful bowl games where the program investment matches the viewership.

Sounds like a win-win, right? A few more teams compete for the title, more fans are drawn into the process, and the games we love watching over the Holidays have renewed stakes. Who’s the loser in all of this?

Well theoretically a team who had a great regular season and loads of potential for a great run, which is the closest definition for “best team” we can find, is at increased risk of falling prey to an unlucky day and failing to secure the championship.

However, another team who had a good regular season and won two or three games in a row against the best competition in the country would be crowned champion instead. That hardly seems arbitrary.

If War Blogle’s Auburn Tigers go 10-2 in a tough year in the SEC where they play Alabama and Georgia every season, but then they make the playoffs because of expanded participation and win three games in a row to secure a title with a win over the better of Alabama and Georgia who’d beaten Auburn by a narrow margin with home field advantage…will Blogle really argue the Tigers weren’t the best team?

The rules are clear. To win a championship you have to either win your conference championship OR have an impressive enough regular season to impress the selection committee. Then you need to win the tournament games and you will be crowned champion.

To cling to college football’s past history of anointing a team via flawed reasoning rather than the field of play is anti-sport. I suggest we accept our notions of a "best team” are subjective and not ironclad truths and embrace what competitive team sports can actually offer us. Winners and champions.

Complaining is for the losers.