College Football Playoff Selection Committee Could Be Monitored By Media

If you wanted more transparency from the BCS during bowl selection, then it’s likely that the new college football playoff selection committee — which will choose four schools to compete in a four-team playoff to name a national champion — will have all the transparency you need.

Because now, it’s likely that the committee could have its selection proceedings monitored and recorded by a member of the media.

The BCS higher-ups like executive director Bill Hancock are pretty giddy about the idea, because, in their eyes, it would legitimize the process and allow for any biases and shoddy selection to be written and put for everyone to see. In essence, the public could get to hear what these conversations were like through a media member, likely a member of the Football Writers Association of America.

It’s about damn time.

Because transparency is something that the entity that is college football has lacked since forever. For a decade, fans have lambasted the BCS because of its biases towards the SEC or its bias towards whatever school they wound up selecting for BCS bowls and the national championship game. Anything that had the potential to become a narrative among fans and the media has become a narrative.

Whether the claims by crazy-as-hell fans were justified is irrelevant. The point is, the higher-ups will seek to minimize any dissatisfaction with the process and will do anything in its power to make sure the committee reaches a consensus with the public, even if it means subjecting the selection committee to extreme scrutiny in their proceedings.

As we know, though, monitoring these meetings will deter any sort of groupthink and will force the members of the committee to think twice about their own biases and be objective as humanly possible.

Obviously, there are caveats. One of them is that the members of the committee will become far too driven to eliminate their biases — to avoid scrutiny by the media — that they will select teams against their own beliefs, even if the teams they had originally chosen are likely to be the correct ones. The fear of becoming “too political” — much like some Supreme Court justices may vote opposite their political lean to avoid seeming too far left or right — could soil this whole thing.

But that’s pretty damn unlikely, in a group that could have dissipated accountability with 11 to 19 people being involved in the selection committee. It isn’t as if the proceedings will air live on CBS or something. So long as the members stay objective, there won’t be a problem with biases.

Of course, that isn’t to say there won’t be a select group of fans who will cry foul on the members for being cheating douchebags or what have you. There’s always going to be dissatisfaction with leadership, and the minority will always be more vocal than the majority. But there will be no excuses — save for crying that a team was selected as the fifth best team as opposed to the fourth, which is pretty petty, but it’ll happen — come 2014. Fans will have nothing to whine about when a national champ is crowned in a couple of years.

Finally, fans will be able to have some closure.

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