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NEW ORLEANS — The College Football Playoff debuted in 2014 with ESPN asking a simple question: Who’s in? Since then, there have been countless hours spent and words spilt pondering the possibilities before, during and even after the season. Speculating about which teams will make the Playoff can be a bit much in mid-September, but those debates have become an integral part of college football. The subjectivity baked into the process of determining a national champion, a longstanding tradition in the sport, is both maddening and alluring.
Advertisement There is a reason why the CFP selection committee releases a month’s worth of essentially meaningless Top 25s before selection Sunday. Fans love to complain about the rankings and the committee, but as long as they’re talking about college football, that’s generally viewed as a good thing. The Big Ten and SEC appear intent on putting an end to all that, and turning the selection committee into, basically, a seeding committee, with almost all of the Playoff participants determined by a combination of conference standings and play-in games .
Commissioners Greg Sankey (SEC) and Tony Petitti (Big Ten) mostly deflected questions about potentially overhauling the CFP, starting in 2026, after the latest summit of their two conferences’ leaders in New Orleans this week but gave a few hints about where their collective heads are at. “We also have an interest, and I said this in December, in understanding selection committee decisions in the last few years,” Sankey said. “We have different views.
We entrust them with that work, but there are domino effects from those selection decisions. Again, I’m not forming the agenda, but I’m identifying things that are regularly a part of our conversation with lots to understand.” Asked if redefining the role of the selection committee would improve the Playoff, Sankey decided it was a leading question.
“That’s a tricky way to get me to commit to something that might be said in a meeting or not. So I appreciate the effort,” Sankey said. Petitti and Sankey have been careful not to criticize the committee after the first season of the 12-team Playoff.
Plenty in SEC country took care of that for them after the conference that has dominated college football for much of the past two decades had only three teams make the first expanded field. Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel began serving on the committee in 2022, when it was a four-team Playoff, and served as chairman and face of the 13-member panel last year, the first season with a 12-team field. He said expansion changed the committee’s task but not the scrutiny it faced.
Advertisement “And so whatever pressure is there, pressure is there,” Manuel said. “But the people around the room have the best interest of the game of football in mind, the front of mind. And so structure doesn’t matter.
In other words, it’s going to be pressurized anyway, just because of the concept of picking teams and ranking teams. So it’s all good. Y’all feel it, too.
Y’all run y’all weekly ‘who should be where’ and then people yell at y’all, too. It’s no different than the committee.” Sankey said selection committee decisions trickle down into everything from the SEC’s four-year-long debate about whether to go from eight to nine conference games to nonconference scheduling (SEC-Big Ten challenge, anyone?) and ultimately just how rigorous their schedules should be.
“How do we understand the function of the selection committee?” Sankey said. “Is it meeting the objectives established? How are the criteria used? You know, my members want to understand, how is strength of schedule fully evaluated in the selection room?” “From my perspective, how you qualify for the postseason impacts the regular season,” Petitti said. “Or how you perceive you qualify for the postseason.
What factors you think are important ...
I think that informs the way you think about the regular season. They’re all tied together.” To that end, the Big Ten and SEC believe creating clearly defined paths to the Playoff will improve everything about college football.
An idea floated last year to give conferences multiple automatic bids to an expanded — again — CFP has not gone away, despite the fact that it is difficult to find anyone outside the Big Ten and SEC who likes it. The model that seems to have traction includes 14 teams, with four spots each going to the SEC and Big Ten, two each to the ACC and Big 12, one set aside for the best of the six other Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and one at-large spot that provides an access point for Notre Dame but could conceivably go to the highest ranked team that hasn’t already played its way in. Advertisement The conferences would determine the means by which their teams get those bids.
There would be no comparing resumes. No more eye test. No more debating whether a spot should go to the most deserving team or the team that would be favored in a hypothetical matchup.
In reality, there will be no need for a committee to meet as frequently as it does in the current system, though ESPN might like to continue the midweek content and still run a weekly rankings release throughout November. There is some upside to taking the subjectivity out of the CFP process. Despite the beliefs of some conspiracy theorists, the committee does a hard job in good faith .
There will always be complaints about who’s in and who’s out. But allowing the whining of Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin and other SEC propagandists about the performances of teams like SMU and Indiana to hijack the conversation during the opening rounds of the Playoff this past season was not great for college football. Creating well-defined postseason qualifications makes sense, because that’s how sports generally works.
Win something, get something. The current selection criteria and guidance given to the committee is intentionally broad and vague. To sum it up: Pick the best teams.
The committee could be given a more focused set of criteria and maybe even some metrics to direct their decisions, the way it’s done in other college sports such as basketball. But the small-sample-size nature of football makes what works in other sports less effective. Having good teams play more games against good teams and “settling it on the field” is, ostensibly, not a bad idea.
Predetermining the quality of the teams by conference is a bad idea, if for no other reason than it marginalizes dozens of schools with substantial and passionate fan bases. Advertisement But the Big Ten and the SEC see opportunities to create still more revenue for themselves with more marquee early-season nonconference matchups and high-stakes late-season intraconference games. And since they don’t trust the selection committee process to properly reward them in the end, they’ve come up with a way to eliminate that part of the CFP altogether.
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