College GameDay’s Chris Fallica joined ESPN 102.5 The Game’s Braden and Fitz Wednesday morning to preview the upcoming college football season. Fallica, known as “The Bear” on GameDay, frequently offers his insight on the world of college football.
Fallica led off the interview with an interesting stat about the significance, or lack thereof, of preseason rankings, “You’re not going to get each of the preseason top four teams in the playoff. You go back over the last 20 years and of teams in the top four entering bowl season, only 28 of them started the year in the top four. On average that’s about one and a half per year.”
After revealing that stat, The Bear is looking for a darkhorse candidate to rise up and earn a spot in the playoff. Fallica looks to Stanford as a potential school to make the playoff, Stanford is not being looked at as a contender right now by the majority of the media.
Despite losing Solomon Thomas and Christian McCaffrey, Fallica still believes Stanford can run the table. The Cardinal have a favorable schedule by getting Washington and other key Pac-12 games at home.
When prompted with the hot button question of, “how good is the SEC?” Fallica offered a response SEC fans would love, “I think top to bottom the SEC is still the best”.
With dependable talent from Vanderbilt and Ole Miss all the way up to Auburn, The Bear cites depth the SEC has for why he thinks the SEC remains on top.
The interview moved toward how the committee can truly determine the most worthy teams of being in the playoff, regardless of the conference they play in.
Fallica believes the committee needs to utilize advanced strength of schedule metrics to improve who they select for the playoff. Aside from ESPN’s FPI, Fallica suggested sources such as “Bill Connelly’s S&P+” among other statistics for measuring a team’s schedule difficulty.
The Bear cited last year’s Washington team as an example, “Washington had the worst non-conference schedule in the country last season.” Then Washington lost their lone game in the playoff, 24-7 to Alabama.
By using advanced metrics to determine strength of schedule, Fallica says the committee can avoid controversy by adding consistency with statistics.
To hear the full interview with “The Bear” you can listen on The Game’s SoundCloud page down below.