Fortuna Files: This sport can’t get out of its own way
News, notes and more from a busy week off the field
Let’s get right to it.
1. I don’t know about you, but I long for the good ol’ days of selection committee controversies. You know, like when the chair is the AD of a school that just happens to make the tournament as the last team in.
2. Mack Rhoades clearly had no business being on this year’s College Football Playoff selection committee, let alone chairing it. The fact he was subject of an internal investigation into an alleged confrontation with a Baylor football player was not enough to push him aside. It took what Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger is reporting is a second, unrelated investigation for Rhoades to ultimately take a leave of absence from the school, and subsequently the committee. (Baylor and the CFP both cited “personal reasons” for Rhoades’ leave.)
3. Yes, I know getting up there and taking the verbal bullets for the rest of the committee can be a thankless job, but Rhoades was particularly bad at it through two weeks. Remember when the CFP announced in August that it enhanced “the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule”? That press release included the following:
4. Instead of more insight into those metrics, we got Rhoades talking last week about CJ Carr’s deep ball and about Ohio State’s offensive line play. He reeked of a guy trying to show that he knows ball, rather than presenting data to support his committee’s rankings. Hell, he even said this week that Notre Dame turned a corner offensively at Arkansas — a game that came after the Irish had already put up 40 points vs. Texas A&M and 56 points vs. Purdue.