Argument 1: The Big Ten is awful and that means Michigan State won't make the Playoff
This is a good one to start with, because it shows that many of these arguments have a bit of truth to them. It is quite obvious that the Big Ten is not having a good season, with all but three teams having already lost a non-conference game. Combining those on-field results with general anger from many fan bases paint a pretty bleak picture about the rest of the season for the conference.
In spite of the Big Ten's self-evident terribleness, the second part of that argument doesn't hold water. The general argument I've read is that the lack of potential marquee wins will eliminate Michigan State from contention. While I agree that the Spartans' upcoming schedule doesn't feature much in the way of top opponents, there is more than one way to collect a big win. If Ohio State turns out to be about the 20th best team, would a three touchdown victory by the Spartans be any less impressive than a three point victory over a top-5 Buckeye team? Would it perhaps be more impressive? The current spread between Sagarin's top team (Oregon) and 20th best team (Kansas State) is only 11 points on a neutral field. While the top teams carry an air of invicibility about them, they're really not orders of magnitude better than other teams. If Michigan State can navigate their remaining schedule in dominant fashion, they should have a strong argument for inclusion in the Playoff, regardless of what other pratfalls befall the Big Ten.
The main message of all of this is to not fall victim to the conference fallacy. Michigan State appears to be a step above the rest of their conference, and shouldn't be overly punished for other's down years. It's both cliché and true that they can only play the teams laid out before them. If they play those games in a manner that makes them appear to be a top four team, they should be in the playoff no matter how stained their conference's reputation is.*
*All of this assumes that the Big Ten remains at least at the level of the AAC or higher, which they currently are (scroll down here). If instead you're playing something like Marshall's schedule, then you pretty much need to dominate every snap.
Argument 2: How can Georgia be ranked above South Carolina? Stanford over USC? Human polls are terrible, and shouldn't start until later in the season
One thing you can always count on in college football is people complaining about rankings that don't perfectly correspond to the head-to-head matchups that preceded them. This season is giving us a couple of great examples with some of the marquee matchups from the early weeks. If you paid attention to the polls this week, you may have noticed that the AP has Georgia one spot ahead of South Carolina, and Stanford one spot ahead of USC. This isn't just a human poll phenomena either. If you look at some of the major computer polls, you'll see Georgia and Stanford ranked higher than the teams they lost to in many of them.
While the poll guidelines do say to consider head to head results, I think those generally get overrated when people compare teams. Both UGA-USC and Stanford-USC were three point games that could have easily gone either way (the former was literally decided by a chain link, and the latter was all kinds of crazy). I accept that we can use the final results of these games as tie-breakers; since the season is so short, we really don't have much of a choice but to treat it as small sample theater. That said, for evaluate purposes games between great teams that go down to the wire should generally be thought of as ties. Do we really think that the USC team that gave up almost 500 yards rushing to Boston College is better than the Stanford team that has destroyed its non-USC opponents thus far? Are we completely forgetting week one, when Georgia looked as impressive as anyone, and South Carolina couldn't stop anything? If we're being honest with ourselves and evaluating the whole of what these teams have accomplished, it's hard not to agree with the ordering of these teams in the polls.
The second part of this argument is a little tricker, but even more important than the first. I touched on this a bit in a post from last season, but I thought I would address this particular point a little more right now. Typically, when a highly-ranked team loses early in the season, the chorus of complaints arises: Why was that team so highly ranked? We don't know anything? Why even do rankings early in the season? I agree that our knowledge in the early part of the season isn't perfect, but I would argue that our relative lack of knowledge about teams in September is actually less of an issue than out adherence to ordering teams by number of losses in November. The famed college hoops analyst Ken Pomeroy has studied this in his sport, and found that pre-season polls generally predict post-season success better than late season polls. FiveThirtyEight also uses the pre-season poll in its model for predicting the tournament.
The basic reason why this works is that, when freed from the sometimes misleading small-sample win-loss record, analysts are able to better pick which teams are truly the best. We will probably never be able to fully predict which young offensive line will jell or which freshman QB will end up winning the Heisman, but pre-season predictions still end up doing a decent job of telling us which teams will be good and which will be bad. That our predictions and our models aren't perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't use them*; rather it means we should strive to continue improving what we know, while acknowledging the usefulness and limitations of our current knowledge. In the end, this means that we shouldn't take early season polls overly seriously, but we also shouldn't stop trying to do the best we can.
*If you're going to read just one hyperlink from this post, make it that one. A good summarization of how one should treat current models in pretty much any field.
Argument 3: Why didn't Georgia run the ball with Gurley on first and goal?
Background on this in case you weren't watching: Georgia was down three late in their game against South Carolina. Following a Gamecock interception, they had a first down at the four yard line. The first play was a pass, after which they got called for intentional grounding.
I understand the general idea behind this sentiment. Todd Gurley is awesome, and is most certainly Georgia's best offensive weapon. With three plays to go for the win, it makes sense to spend at least one of them letting Gurley try to make something happen. That said, I think this complaint is a bit silly for a few reasons:
It smells of post-hoc fallacy - Quite simply, It seems like fans are only angry because this didn't work out. Earlier in the game, Georgia had trusted goal line plays to both their QB Hutson Mason and to their seldom-used fullback, and both resulted in touchdowns. Had the late-game play worked as well, we would have heard nothing of this.
Georgia rushed and passed about equally well - If we credit sack yardage to the pass game (this is one of the few areas in which I prefer the NFL, as they actually do this), then we get the following numbers for Georgia: 34 rushes for 222 yards, 26 passes for 186 yards. While I don't have anything more advanced available at the moment (success rate would come in handy here), taking the simple averages shows that the two methods of collecting yardage were roughly equivalent. Todd Gurley has a lot of hype, and we remember all of the times he's come up with amazing plays, but he isn't perfect, and the Georgia pass game seems to be coming along well enough to trust it in important situations.
Play calling is about game theory - This is probably the most important counter-argument. Here's what the Head Ball Coach had to say about it:
Spurrier: Were you surprised Georgia didn't go to Gurley on first-and-goal from the 4? "I think we all were."
— David Cloninger (@DCTheState) September 14, 2014
The field of game theory is a complicated area, but the basic practical implication is this: In order to attain the best long-term outcome, you often need to make a sub-optimal decision in the short-term. Even if we make the concession that running the ball is the best option for the Georgia offense, that doesn't mean they should run the ball every play. Because of this, it's tough to judge play-calling on individual plays, except in certain circumstances (if a coach calls a boneheaded play on say 4th and 1, feel free to call for his firing all you want). Rather, one needs to take a more overarching view to truly judge the quality of play calling. Per my count from the last section, Georgia ran the ball about 60% of the time against the Gamecocks, which most would probably agree is a good balance given their relative abilities.
In the end, you can still question Georgia's late game play calling all you want. I'm just not convinced there was an easy right or wrong answer in that situation. What I find really silly is that this line of thinking has seemingly put the blame on Mike Bobo, when the Bulldog defense was once again the main reason Georgia lost a big game. Bobo hasn't been perfect during his near decade as the Bulldog's offensive coordinator, but he's overseen multiple quarterbacks that went on to the NFL, and has led an offense that has been the program's greatest strength over the past few seasons. Let's pump the brakes a bit before getting aboard the #firebobo train.
Argument 4: The SEC is Overrated
Nope
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