The “When You Lose Doesn’t Matter” Argument is Really Stupid

The CFP committee keeps telling me it doesn’t matter when you lose to get into the College Football Playoff. Here’s what Jeff Long said on Tuesday about Ohio State potentially losing to Michigan State or Michigan.

We don’t talk about weighting wins if they’re late in the season or early in the season.

One problem with that, it says on their website that it does matter. Now, it doesn’t explicitly say that, they aren’t that stupid. But it says as much in not as many words.

The committee has told us they are trying to pick the four best teams. That’s the language.

Because humans are confined by the limits of time, the committee must only select the four best teams right now. Condoleezza Rice is a tremendous human being, but she can’t outwit time. She can only pick the best teams right now. Which means, almost by definition, that when you lose matters. It has to!

If a team loses its first game then wins its next by 10 and its next by 20 and its next by 30 until the final week it wins by 110 points and another team wins its first game by 110 points and then by 100 and then finally by the final week, it loses — guess which team the committee considers the “best team” even though they did exactly the same thing.

[someone from the committee is reading this thinking, “this is silly, the teams we pick would never score that many points!”]

Anyway, I point this out to point out the fact that if OSU and OU win this weekend, they will probably play next weekend for a ticket into the College Football Playoff because we’re going to ignore that OU got thumped by Texas because it happened a month ago. Turn that around. What if OSU loses to Baylor this weekend? Do they still get to play OU for a ticket to the playoff? Negative. They’ll be playing for their Peach Bowl lives.

There are numerous reasons for this. OU is a brand. OU played Tennessee in its non-conference schedule. OSU has squeaked by all season. But the main one, the overriding one, is that OU lost long enough ago that it’s easy to sweep under the rug.

So don’t keep telling me that when you lose doesn’t matter.