GRAPEVINE, Texas — To get into the College Football Playoff “Selection Central” board room, I first walk past a hat rack. There are 13 hats hanging off this rack, each one with the name of a different member of the CFP selection committee.
It’s a cliché, of course, but the idea is that each member removes his or her hat — representing each person’s inherent biases — before all 13 sit down to determine their ranking of teams. I have come here to the Gaylord Texan hotel to participate in the media mock selection exercise ahead of the first year of the 12-team CFP. I’m representing new committee chairman Warde Manuel, who has been on the committee for a few years already and also serves as Michigan’s athletic director. I don’t have to put his hat on just to ceremoniously remove it, but I appreciate the reminder as I walk into the all-important board room.
Last Friday, my colleagues and I went through the selection, seeding and bracketing processes in a truncated version of what the real committee experiences over two days. I learned how the process has worked for the past decade and how it’s changing to incorporate a larger bracket. But I also came away from the exercise realizing that this new CFP will definitely not solve all of college football’s biggest problems.
Here are my biggest takeaways from my brief time on the mock CFP selection committee:
- Seeding is going to be very confusing — and very frustrating. I’ll explain in detail below.
- The CFP will not avoid rematches, so it’s possible you could see Michigan-Ohio State three times over the span of a month.
- The amount of data made available to selection committee members is amazing, but because they don’t make it public throughout the season, it’s hard to understand where members are coming from when they make controversial decisions (like Florida State last year).
- The CFP says its Strength of Schedule (SOS) metric isn’t that important, but a rudimentary ranking of FBS teams 1-134 is baked into so much of its data that it’s hard to avoid. SOS doesn’t take into account the sequencing of games, but it does compare the relative team strength (based on game results, margin of victory capped at 24 points and the location of games).
For the exercise, we used resumes and results from the 2023 season, through conference championship games. That meant we were evaluating Michigan, Washington, Florida State, Alabama and Georgia right after their league title games. Yes, we hotly debated the Seminoles’ inclusion, and, somewhat humorously, our final vote ended up matching the actual selection committee’s. The biggest difference between our ranking and the actual committee’s was that we went with Washington as the No. 1 overall seed (due to a persuasive argument made by The Athletic’s Chris Vannini — and I had to abstain from those conversations and vote because I represented Manuel).
When it came time to put our rankings into the 12-team CFP model, we then used conference affiliations as of the 2024 season. So, Washington took the Big Ten champion spot, Michigan became the top at-large team and so on. Florida State’s spot ultimately didn’t matter that much in a 12-team bracket because the Seminoles easily secured the No. 3 overall seed as the ACC conference champion.
Arizona ended up as the highest-ranked (current) Big 12 team, so the Wildcats earned the No. 4 overall seed — despite checking in at No. 14 on our rankings list. That means that they get a spot (and a first-round bye) ahead of teams like Ole Miss and LSU, which were ranked 11th and 12th respectively. Had we truly been picking the 12 teams we considered the “best” in the country, we would have ranked Nos. 1-12. But because of the rules that require the top five conference champions, No. 14 Arizona got into the field. And our fifth-highest ranked conference champion wasn’t in our top 25 at all!
If no Group of 5 champion is ranked in the final top 25 — and remember, we had to consider SMU an ACC team as we went through seeding — the committee then separately ranks the remaining FBS conference champions. So, we went through a separate voting process to compare the resumes of Liberty, Tulane, Troy, Boise State and Miami (Ohio). We then decided Liberty was the best of the bunch, so the Flames slid in at No. 12. That means that both Ole Miss and LSU were on the outside looking in. Our final bracket included the teams we ranked first through 10th in the country, plus No. 14 Arizona (as the No. 4 seed) and unranked Liberty (as the No. 12 seed).
That is not going to go over well for the fan bases of teams that get ranked inside the top 12 but don’t get included in the bracket. It’s also just generally confusing, because if the SEC and Big Ten have multiple top-four teams, they still only get one top-four seed per league. There could be a very small margin between, say, Texas and Georgia coming out of the SEC championship game … but they could end up four seeds apart in the bracket.
Once we had everyone’s seeds right based on conference championships won, the bracketing was straightforward. The CFP staff told us we couldn’t take rematches into account, so we just plugged the highest ranked at-large teams into the bracket in order of how we ranked them. Seeds 5-8 got to host home games, which meant on-campus games for Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama and Georgia based on our bracket.
We then sent No. 1 Washington the Rose Bowl for the quarterfinal round (because of the Big Ten’s contractual ties to the Rose Bowl), No. 2 Texas to the Sugar Bowl (because of the SEC’s ties there), No. 3 Florida State to the Peach Bowl and No. 4 Arizona to the Fiesta Bowl. The semifinal sites are determined solely by proximity, so we assigned Washington’s half of the bracket to the Cotton Bowl, and Texas’ half of the bracket to the Orange Bowl.
The overall process was fairly time-intensive, and that was even after we sped up some of the rounds of voting. Essentially, you vote in pools of six or eight teams at a time, debate them and then rank 1-6 or 1-8 on secret ballots. That process is repeated over and over again, so you are never actually listing teams on your ballot as 1-25. It’s good because you’re always examining teams in bunches, but it can be a little complicated to explain. We also didn’t get the full experience of the selection committee because we weren’t given access to the game film the real committee members get — which allows them to watch a whole game in about 40 total minutes.
The CFP staff that helped us go through the exercise made sure to emphasize that our job was to pick the “best” teams and not “the most deserving” teams. They told us not to be predictive or too speculative, but it seems like an impossible task to me with these parameters. If I think Alabama is better than Florida State as I’m voting, that means I think Alabama would beat Florida State if they played next week. But I digress.
Ultimately, I have more sympathy for the committee members as I come out of an experience that required me to literally sit in one of their seats. It’s a hard job because you’re comparing teams with very few data points and not a lot of common opponents across the board. And every committee member has different values. The former coaches may rely more on the eye test, while I might care more about the “Top 12 stats” we were shown — which are supposed to correlate with winning in college football today. One might largely excuse a loss due to an injury while someone else can’t ignore a head-to-head result, personnel be damned. It’s extremely subjective, but that is what the sport’s powerbrokers wanted it to be.
So, we try our best to learn from what past committees do. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various team resumes. We project the field as best we can. But we must always remember that we could easily end up wrong because we aren’t in the real room where it happens when those decisions are actually being made. And that’s the fun of it all — that we don’t know for sure. In the mean time, let’s debate, discuss and argue. That is, after all, one of college football’s greatest traditions.
