Four weeks have passed since my last college football column, and a couple of points I made there have been reinforced.
In that column, I lamented the hasty firing of Ed Orgeron. Since then, six more FBS schools have fired their head coach, including four Power 5 schools. Slate writer Joel Anderson hit the nail on the head when he tweeted, "It doesn't seem tenable for every mid-tier Power 5 school to fire their coaches on a $12 million buyout for going 5-7. Most of these schools don't have the right to believe they deserve better."
"Don't have the right to believe they deserve better" is harsh, but true. Not every school can be a natty contender, and to that I will add, for G5 schools, not all of them can be the next Boise State in football or the next Gonzaga in basketball. Yet, their fan bases, and in all likelihood, their boosters, demand just that, and if serious headway towards that ridiculous goal isn't reached in two years, they run the coach out of town.
I can't wait to see where all of these schools that fired their coach in mid-season 2021 will be in five years. I would bet folding money that for the majority of them, it will be "worse off."
So, boosters and fans need to chill. You want to know who else needs to chill? Cincinnati-to-the-playoff proponents in general and Jason Benetti and Andre Ware (who called the South Florida/Cincinnati game Friday night for ESPN) in particular.
We know that announcers and analysts for national outfits like ESPN are not going to dump on the teams they are covering, and I have no problem with that. But to hear Benetti and Ware tell it, it's a damnable outrage that the Bearcats aren't in the playoff (and that's also fine, but I don't agree), and they kept making the same points, with increasing indignation, over and over and over and over and over again. It was painful to watch.
The entire argument is most likely moot, because (as I wrote in the column linked above), if Cincinnati wins out, they will almost certainly be in the playoff. They are only one spot out of it now! (Note: I write this a few hours before the CFP makes their weekly rankings, and I am assuming they will still be in fifth.)
But to hear Benetti and Ware tell it, the playoff committee announced that no Cincinnati team will ever get in under their watch. There are good arguments to be made for Cincinnati's inclusion, but Ware and Benetti went with bad arguments. One was their extreme disdain for "style points," which is code for "margin of victory." Cincinnati has only barely beaten two of their last three conference foes, but they won, Benetti and Ware argued, and it shouldn't matter whether they won 20-19 or 50-0.
Except, of course it should matter. We only have so many ways to tell disparate teams apart. If a team trucks their opponents week in and week out, that's a pretty good indicator that they might be better than a team that ekes out victories week in and week out.
If you want to discourage teams from running up the score in order to impress playoff voters, then let's place a cap on margin-of-victory awesomeness at, say, 25. That's a four-score game.
But the boo-style-points argument wasn't even their dumbest argument. They also argued that the committee was holding Cincinnati's membership in the American Athletic Conference against them, and they would not be on the outside looking in if they were already in the Big 12.
Mind you, they didn't say, "a Power 5 conference," they said the Big 12 specifically.
I honestly believe they forgot that there was (at the time of the broadcast) ALREADY AN UNDEFEATED BIG 12 TEAM RANKED THREE SPOTS BEHIND CINCINNATI IN THE PLAYOFF RANKINGS!
So, somehow the committee is biased in favor of the Big 12 while simultaneously holding the Big 12's prize pony in an even worse stall.
And why was Oklahoma ranked so low (and surely lower now that they've lost)? Because they have spent the season barely beating their opponents and thus haven't racked up those evil style points. Somehow, Benetti and Ware didn't extend their argument to the Sooners.
They also didn't mention another undefeated team that, like Cincinnati, is a Group of 5 school, has a Power 5 scalp (albeit admittedly not impressive as Notre Dame, but one that has knocked off two ranked opponents on the road), and is undefeated. Unlike Cincinnati, they have won four in a row by double digits. Of course, I am speaking about Texas-San Antonio.
Do I think UTSA belongs in the playoff discussion? No. Do I think they are as good as Cincinnati? Also no. But, they were left off the CFP initial top 25 rankings entirely, and, by my lights, that's a greater outrage than all this flimsy and pointless gnashing of teeth and rending of garments people are doing over Cincinnati.
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