What does everyone think of the final selections?
The teams I thought would be selected were selected exactly in the order they were selected. There was some grumbling with my oldest son who thought the committee sold out for money with the Ohio State selection but I see it differently. TCU & Baylor have to do a better job of non-conference scheduling and they should add a conference championship, as all selections were conference champions. TCU and Baylor are excellent teams but they didn't separate themselves as the others did with their scheduling.
Could the selection committee have done a better job of telling eveyone what exactly the guidelines would be and why? Most certainly. But, I like this better than a computer ranking, and I think the committee did a very good job.
I thought Kirk Herbstreit had it right in his discussion about the selections before they were announced. His rationale was exactly how the committee was thinking. The lesson learned through all of this is to play your 8 conference games, 2 non-confernce games and 1 FCS game.....win them and play in the conference championship to get a shot at the Final Four.
I'm with your son in that Baylor and / or TCU got screwed. I do agree that the guidelines for selection were not communicated very well. Did you hear the commissioner of the Big 12 speak yesterday? He said that the question was posed to the committee if not having a conference championship game would hurt them and they were told no. Now that's all everyone is saying is what hurt them and he said if they knew going it that it would have hurt them then they would have created one. But when all this started going down it was too late to create one. If all that is true then yes the Big 12 got screwed.
I hate the non-conference schedule was too weak argument. DI football does not get to have scrimmages against other teams so until you strap it up and play some other team you are just guessing how good you are going to be. So you have to play some weak teams to treat them as a scrimmage. But let's also look at everything else. It's not like Ohio State played a murderer's row of a non-conference games plus you factor in the played in the Big 10 who is just barely above a mid-major conference. The Big 12 is either the second toughest or third toughest conference in the nation. So you factor in quality of conference opponents that makes TCU / Baylor stand out more. Was the non-conference schedules weak for TCU / Baylor? Yes and yes they probably should play tougher teams but these schedules are set years ahead and probably before the whole playoff idea came out. The Big 12 conference actually plays everyone in their conference so that's 9 conference games which means they play one less conference game than everyone else.
I agree that everyone will always have debates / complaints about the last ones in but (to me) this is obvious they got it wrong and played favorites to a name school and conference. So let's think about this - Alabama beats Ohio State by 20 plus points and Baylor beats Michigan State by 20 plus points and TCU beats Ole Miss by 20 plus points - is that proof that the committee got it wrong?