College Football Playoff committee finishes recusal policy for members
The details of how the new College Football Playoff system will work are slowly beginning to come together, and after two days of meetings, the committee responsible for choosing teams who will play has completed another piece.
According to a report from CBSSports.com, the committee completed and forwarded their recusal policy to the 10 FBS commissioners, who will be called the Management Committee for purposes of the playoffs.
The policy is to determine which members of the committee can and cannot participate in discussions involving particular teams based on their ties to that team. The details of the policy, and how in depth it goes, are not yet known.
Some would argue that members should recuse themselves based on affiliations with a conference, or even as far-reaching to having family members with degrees from schools. That, more than likely, will not be the case.
Selection committee chairman Jeff Long, the Arkansas AD, could not comment or go into any details of the policy because it has not been accepted and adopted yet.
The new playoff system will begin with the 2014 season, when the committee will select top four teams to play in the first ever FBS college football playoff. They then will select the teams to play in the four bowls beneath the playoff — Orange, Rose, Cotton, Fiesta, Sugar and Chick-fil-A — who have agreements to rotate through as playoff bowls for the next 12 years.
If the policy resembles the same one used by the NCAA basketball tournament, there shouldn’t be any real issues. The biggest problem facing the FBS committee is the limited number of teams that they must select as compared to the 64 (plus however many they continue to add) in the basketball tournament.
There have been fears that the SEC, already considered to be too powerful in the eyes of other conferences, will have too much representation in this committee, and will receive favorable treatment. The fact is that the members of the CFP committee have degrees from at least 20 institutions between them.