Las Vegas man has simple idea for college football playoff

By
Las Vegas Review-Journal

Don’t be influenced by the cap with the bogus UNLV logo on front, and the overstuffed notebook that resembles George Costanza’s wallet on “Seinfeld.”

A Las Vegas man named Dyer Lawrence has come up with a new system for a college football playoff that is so simple it’s elegant.

“As far as I know, this is the only original idea I’ve ever had,” said the native of the Brighton neighborhood of Boston of a playoff plan he concocted watching Doug Flutie throw Hail Mary passes at Boston College.

There is only one criteria: wins and losses. Teams receive cumulative points, and are docked cumulative points, based on the records of their opponents. At season’s end, the top eight or preferably top 16 in Lawrence points advance to the playoffs.

Does it work? This season, Lawrence’s top four point-getters were the same four in the official playoff. His system would have produced the following eight-team bracket: No. 1 Clemson vs. No. 8 Michigan, No. 4 Oklahoma vs. No. 5 Ohio State, No. 3 Notre Dame vs. No. 6 Central Florida, No. 2 Alabama vs. No. 7 Georgia.

Broadened to 16 teams, Fresno State, Boise State, Washington, Penn State, Appalachian State, Louisiana State, Army and Cincinnati would have been seeded nine through 16.

Lawrence has done the points for every season dating to 1969. Most of the first-round matchups are intriguing.

In his perfect world, each team would play eight conference games, two to four nonconference games and a conference championship game. The nonconference schedule would consist of home-and-home series determined on “National Call Out Day” — each team would select, or call out, nonconference opponents based on where it finished in the points.

“Who’s Alabama gonna call out, Boise State or USC?” he said. “For a month out, you’d have people talking about who they should call out. Teams would start playing their weight. Every game would be important. There would be implications with the Army-Navy game.

“You wouldn’t need Condoleezza Rice, or a computer that nobody understands. Penn State wouldn’t drop two spots because it did not beat Indiana sufficiently. It’s so simple, it’s genius. As far as I know, this fixes everything in an easily understandable way.”

Las Vegas tunes in

Boston (7.9), nearby Providence, Rhode Island (6.5), and Chicago (5.8) attracted the highest TV ratings for the NHL’s annual Winter Classic — which comes as little surprise, given the Bruins and Blackhawks were participating teams this year.

What is a little surprising is that Las Vegas (3.4) tied Buffalo, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut, for fourth place among TV viewers.

What is a lot surprising is that Las Vegas was the top-rated TV market for the Dec. 30 English Premier League soccer match pitting Liverpool against Arsenal, according to Soccer Insider’s Steven Goff of the Washington Post.

More on Hopkins

Three days after its basketball team competed in the D3 Hoops Classic at South Point Arena, longtime Johns Hopkins football coach Jim Margraff died of a heart attack. The winningest coach in school history with a record of 221-89-3, Margraff was 58.

In mentioning the vaunted Johns Hopkins lacrosse team, I probably was remiss in not pointing out that Coronado High’s Kieran Eissler was a midfielder for the Blue Jays from 2013 to 2017.

And this from RJ reader Bob Harnish: “We lived in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, (near) the town of Shippensburg. There was a kid who played for his dad, Bill Enfield. Son Andy went on to Johns Hopkins. He at one time held the NCAA record for foul shooting (and) then he got into coaching …”

Andy Enfield coached Florida Gulf Coast to the 2013 NCAA Sweet 16 as a No. 15 seed and now is the coach at Southern California.

0:01

Tate Martell, the former national Gatorade Player of the Year at Bishop Gorman and heir apparent to the starting quarterback job at Ohio State, clarified his Twitter post advising disgruntled Georgia recruit Justin Fields against transferring and competing for his job.

“If Justin wants to come, by all means come,” Martell told the Buckeye Wire website after the Rose Bowl. “I’m just telling him it’s not as easy as it sounds because the offense is just really difficult to pick up. When I first got here, if I would have ever went with the (first team) during spring ball, it would have been an absolute (expletive) show out there.”

Fields on Friday indicated he will indeed transfer to Ohio State. Let the (expletive) show begin.

Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.

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