The task of the College Football Playoff committee has never been easy, although it has often been obvious. In the four-team era, there were numerous seasons with just four clear candidates; other years, there was maybe a single decision to be made.
Yet despite that, the committee was routinely vilified for bias, hypocrisy and inconsistency, mainly because of the folly of the weekly rankings show each Tuesday (beginning in November) on ESPN.
It was there that for five weeks — despite limited data — the committee had to roll out rankings as if the “season ended today,” which it didn’t.
It made massive controversies out of issues that would naturally play themselves out — like ranking two teams that were set to play each other. Coaches and fans were left to try to figure out what the most important criteria was — head-to-head victory or number of losses or margin of victory or strength of schedule or strength of record or …?
A week later, it would be something else.
The committee was trapped. These are 13 well-meaning and highly intelligent people trying to follow protocols and do an honest job, but trapped with an impossible — and pointless — task.
The show became a public relations problem for the committee. It undermined the credibility of a group that needed to be trusted.
And those were the good old days.
The playoff is now 12 teams strong, requiring even more work and more tough decisions from this year’s committee. It’s not just selecting the field but seeding the teams, including choosing who gets a bye, who gets home-field advantage, who gets matched up with whom.
Go ahead and try to pick between the 8 seed and the 9 seed, It’s always going to be razor thin, yet one team — the one that gets to host the game — will be given a massive advantage.
There was one impactful way that the College Football Playoff could have helped out not just the members of the committee, but the sport as a whole — end the weekly rankings show.
It’s just a publicity stunt and ratings grab. It holds no other value. It’s not like college football lacks for media and fan attention, let alone debate on who is getting into the playoffs.
The real damage that will continue to be done by having fans question and condemn various committee decisions (all of them unnecessary) over the next month-plus isn’t worth it.
Ranking 25 teams each week may seem like a quick and fun task, but if you really dial in it isn’t.
This is a vast sport (134 teams) playing disparate schedules that produce limited common data. This is a challenge after 13 games. The committee did it Tuesday with just 61.5 percent of the info.
There weren’t any massive surprises in the first iteration of the rankings. Oregon is No. 1, which was the case in the AP poll the last three weeks. Ohio State is No. 2 and Georgia is No. 3. Blue-bloods like Notre Dame and Alabama landed in the top 12 at No. 10 and No. 11, respectively. SMU and Texas A&M are on the outside looking in at Nos. 13 and 14.
That’s the problem with doing these now though. No. 15 can look a lot like No. 19. In the past it didn’t really matter. It doesn’t now either, except the committee — in this case, University of Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel — has to explain the reasoning behind each decision which historically is then reversed at some future time.
The decision parlance that has emerged from committee members has become comical — things like “game control,” road turnover margins, etc.
The show does nothing to help anyone, except maybe give a slight bump to ESPN’s Tuesday night viewership.
No one wants a playoff chosen by a committee, but there isn’t another choice. The NFL’s system only works because 14 of its 32 teams reach the playoffs, eight of them via automatic bid after a 17-game season featuring a slew of common opponents.
College football can’t do that.
It could create a single, public computer formula, but there is little to no trust in that. College hockey does something like that, but it has fewer teams, more games and more playoff spots … and it still has a committee to serve as a guard in case the formula goes haywire.
So a committee it is. Someone has to make the tough choices. Is it subjective? Is it about resumes? Is it a combo?
There is no simple answer, just the efforts of the people willing to take the heat for making the call. The microscope was intense in the past. It is about to get worse.
After 10 years of taking heat under the old four-team system, the folks that run the College Football Playoff would have been wise to end the weekly rankings, shut down the show and have its group meet just one time — after the conference championship games are complete.
Make one final decision and then walk away.
It would have spared them from the coming cries of hypocrisy and double standards, which don’t help the product, the sport or the new playoff.
