Why Alabama Deserves To Be Ranked In The College Football Playoff Top Four

The first complaints about the College Football Playoff rankings when they were released on Tuesday night were about Alabama being ranked in the top four. But truthfully, people were going to complain about the Crimson Tide no matter where they landed.

Such is the Alabama mystique: It causes some people to overrate the Tide and others to complain that they're always overrated. Alabama is simultaneously the symbol of pro-SEC bias and the symbol of the conference's enduring strength. There is no middle ground when it comes to Nick Saban's program, which may face more scrutiny than any other team in the country.

This year's squad was—is—bound to be particularly controversial. The Crimson Tide have a loss, but they also have more impressive wins than most of their counterparts. The playoff committee apparently overlooked said loss in ranking the Tide ahead of every other one-loss team, as well as eight of the country's 11 undefeated schools.

It's possible Alabama got some benefit of the doubt because of its history, a kind of sports brand recognition. So long as playoff rankings involve a human element that takes into account the faulty "eye test," that sort of bias is inevitable. And yes, the SEC was certainly overrated this year. But all that said, there's reason to believe the committee got Alabama's ranking right, which presents an exciting new prospect for college football, something we have rarely seen from pollsters and seldom witnessed in the BCS era.

Namely, there's more to assessing team performance than wins and losses.

Let's start with Alabama's resume. On one hand, the Crimson Tide suffered a home loss. On the other hand, that loss came to Ole Miss and only happened because Alabama essentially gave the game away. The Crimson Tide also have blowout wins at Georgia, at Texas A&M and against Wisconsin at a neutral site. Nobody else can claim that many good wins, even though Alabama has yet to beat a truly elite team. If the Tide beat LSU this week, they will rightfully jump to No. 1 or No. 2 in the rankings.

What's exciting about this ranking is that the committee is actually taking into account how the games were won and lost. Because if we're really ranking teams based on performance, then W-L outcomes devoid of context shouldn't hold nearly as much weight as they do.

Take the Michigan-Michigan State game. The Spartans won on a crazy last second muffed punt return, boosting the Spartans in the rankings and dropping the Wolverines. But had Michigan been able to simply get that punt off, it would have been the other way around. Did Michigan really perform that much worse because of one play? Did Michigan State perform that much better? Of course not.

When it comes to the teams at the top, the committee seems to be following the advanced statistics model, rewarding performance and devaluing pure wins and losses. In fact, the F/+ statistical ratings are in near total agreement with the committee. At some point, the committee has to reward team records, because that's how college football works. But at the very top, among teams within a loss of each other, the committee and statistical rankings look at lot more like each other than either looks like the Associated Press rankings:

This is not "brand-name" bias by the committee. It's a calculated effort to ensure that total performance is rewarded—because as statistics have shown us, a team that dominates a schedule with one close loss is not worse than a team that happened to win its coin-flip close game.

That's not how the polls have always done it, but that's how they should be doing it. If Alabama benefits from this more informed thinking, then so be it. Right now, the Tide deserve their ranking, and the committee should be commended for—to borrow a phrase—honoring the process of everything that leads to wins and losses.

* Now that we've spent a lot of time talking about what the committee did right, let's look at their biggest mistake. Apparently, they ranked Baylor and TCU ahead of Iowa because those teams have explosive offenses. That is mind-bogglingly dumb. Statistically, Iowa's defense is just as good as TCU's offense. Offense shouldn't be rewarded over defense.

* Strength of schedule helps to an extent, but any power conference team that goes undefeated is still getting in. Would Baylor get in with one loss after playing Lamar, Rice and SMU in its non-conference season? Probably not. But the Bears will get in if they go undefeated. This isn't going to drastically change non-conference scheduling philosophies.

* The Pac-12 is in trouble. Stanford is the conference's highest-ranked team at No. 11, which is stunning, considering the league was supposed to be the SEC's challenger in the preseason. Maybe Stanford gets in if it wins out, but it's behind one-loss Alabama and undefeated Clemson, Big Ten and Big 12 teams in the pecking order.

* The New York Times had an outstanding piece on a better way to evaluate the rankings. Look at them grouped by conferences. Through that lens, the rankings should look like this: 1. Undefeated Big Ten champion, 2. Undefeated or one-loss SEC champion, 3. Undefeated ACC champion, 4. Undefeated Big 12 champion. The upshot? If you're an Iowa or Michigan State fan fretting that your team will be left out if it goes undefeated, stop worrying.