Scott Van Pelt, who is considered one of the most respected and nuanced voices in sports media at ESPN, has recently turned his focus to the structural inventory of college football. The 2009 on-going changes that have swept the sport include expansion beyond all consequences of the College Football Playoff’s (CFP) current form. The subject has moved from merely who gets in to how competitive balance is maintained, as well as a fair selection process. From Van Pelt’s commentary saddling the bourgeoisified reality with workable effort, it shows that these competitive problems in college football probably will not have a clear, perfect solution.
The veteran broadcaster has frequently brought to his audience a heartbreaking realization about the unevenness of the matches in the first rounds of the CFP. These controversies, realized both by the fans and media, become compounded and everybody blames the selection committee for glaring omissions in the selection of better and more competitive teams. Van Pelt, however, emphasizes that it is often subject, retroactive analysis. He would argue that what was really wrong was never a misstep on the part of the committee but rather the essential problem of trying to compare teams from wildly differing conferences and schedules.
In live airtime with SportsCenter, Van Pelt and fellow analysts discussed possible indices the CFP committee can adopt going forward. One of the metrics proposed would be to weigh a team’s “ceiling”, or their best, most dominant victories, against their “floor”, which would consist of their worst losses. The strength and dominance of teams in the trenches, particularly the line of scrimmage, can also be seen as a measure of evaluation. These ways are just examples of refining the subjective selection process, but Van Pelt warns that there is no guarantee that any specific metric or combination of criteria will yield matchups of a competitive nature.
This failing toward a clear answer is deepened by change in the wider-known picture of college athletics at large. Newly injected, the NIL opportunities and the transfer portal are upending the concept of team configuration and the idea of player loyalty. Clearly, added layers of complexity have been introduced to team evaluation, which make traditional metrics become increasingly less predictive of overall strength and cohesion. Though necessary, these economic changes stirred up a new kind of volatile broth that makes the search for competitive consistency all the more elusive.
The ultimate issue Van Pelt makes serves as that needed reality check to the sporting world. That proves to be the real world where media and fans hunger for certainty and a guaranteed fix; college football has always been, in that regard, an inherently subjective organism, today accelerated by the economy. Blowouts were the rule in the two-team BCS era, just as “blowout” became synonymous with the four-team playoff-all signs of a deep-rooted problem. There is no clear, perfect answer to that either, argues Van Pelt, as it calls for a more measured, nuanced discussion, recognizing that developments may improve the system but that this complex, multimillion-dollar enterprise may never be fully streamlined into a perfectly competitive, easily justifiable tournament.
