I've been looking at the tiebreaker to determine the Pac-12 championship game participants, and boy is it lousy. Based on what I think the current outcome of the season will be, it eliminates a team that is 2-0 against the three "tied" teams right off the bat.
As you may or may not know, the Pac-12 championship game this year will not be between the division winners, but the two teams out of all twelve that have the best conference record. That of course could end up with a tie, that is solved using the Pac-12 tiebreaker.
Follow this scenario: Utah and USC win out. Oregon loses only to Utah. UCLA therefore loses to Oregon and USC. Meaning:
- Utah loses to UCLA, beats USC, Oregon
- USC loses to Utah, beats UCLA
- Oregon loses to Utah, beats UCLA
- UCLA beats Utah, loses to Oregon, USC
The games in bold have already happened, the rest are part of this hypothetical scenario.
The standings if this happens, with all conference teams grouped together:
1. Utah 8-1
[tie] USC 8-1
[tie] Oregon 8-1
4. UCLA 7-2
5. etc.
Utah, USC, and Oregon are all 8-1 and we need to apply a tiebreaker. So we look at the rules for "Multiple-Team Ties" and apply this rule:
- Head-to-head (best cumulative win percentage in games among the tied teams).
Ok, so Utah is 2-0 against the other teams, USC is 0-1, and Oregon is 0-1, since USC and Oregon didn't play.
Pretty simple, right? Utah is in and now we need to determine whether USC or Oregon gets in. BUT WAIT. We didn't read all of rule 1:
- Head-to-head (best cumulative win percentage in games among the tied teams). If not every tied team has played each other, go to step 2.
It looks like we don't use head-to-head when "not every tied team has played each other" which is the case here. So instead of picking Utah, we go to step 2
2. Win percentage against all common conference opponents (must be common among all teams involved in the tie)
Immediately you can see the problem. Both Oregon and USC beat UCLA, but Oregon lost to them. So among their 6 common opponents, USC is 6-0, Oregon is 6-0, and Utah is 5-1. That means Utah, who beat both the other teams, is odd man out and USC will face Oregon by these rules.
Most of the time when three teams are tied with one loss they are all 1-1 against the others so the rule is moot anyway. But in the case above, which could easily happen, a clear #1 team is left out of the championship game.
They probably made the "opt out" rule for the case where two teams played each other and one didn't, so one is 1-0, the other 0-1, and the last team is 0-0, and didn't want that to determine who gets in. They didn't think about the 2-0, 0-1, 0-1 scenario obviously.
There are a lot of ways for the season to play out but they ought to think about fixing this rule for the future, unless they want the team that's defeated both the other participants to be left out.
There's a chance that they didn't write out the rule correctly, but as written it's pretty clear, and it means that if you beat the best teams but lose to a slightly lesser team, you're out of luck in the Pac-12 as far as the championship game is concerned. Don't worry though, what harm could it do? Other than potentially eliminating a Playoff slot for the conference, at least before the Playoff is expanded to 12 teams.
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