College Football Playoff: Has the Selection Committee Been Getting it Right?

The College Football Playoff selection committee has a difficult job, and no matter how well they do it, people will be unhappy.

The new College Football Playoff format is like blank canvas this year, and the strokes painted by the selection committee will leave an indelible mark on how this new system is viewed.

While no system is perfect, it remains to be seen how widely accepted this playoff format will be. People were in such a hurry to ditch the BCS and its computer-generated rankings, they may have forgotten the one thing that will play a big factor in deciding this playoff.

The human element.

Anytime you mix the opinions of people along with some criteria that can be very loosely interpreted, the end result is going to raise some questions and have some people very unhappy.

The 12-person committee is supposed to be taking criteria such as win-loss records, strength of schedule, head-to-head results and conference championships won (which obviously hasn’t happened yet). Of all those things, only win-loss records and head-to-head results can truly be quantitatively considered, as even conference championships can have a subjective slant added.

So far the committee has had three opportunities to show us how they will view all these criteria, and what to expect as the end of the season nears. Have they gotten it right? Well, they’ve at least gotten more right than wrong, but there are still a few things that have to come into question.

They have at least been transparent, with committee chair Jeff Long holding a press conference after their rankings are released to field questions and offer explanations, regardless of how flimsy we may view them to be. It would still be interesting to see how individual committee members voted, and which ones recused themselves from ranking certain teams.

The one data point that everyone seems to think should matter has been the biggest point of contention so far, and that’s head-to-head meetings. In the minds of most, if two teams come into the mix from the same conference with the same overall record, and one team has beaten the other, then the ranking should seem elementary.

“I thought the name of the game was to keep winning” – FSU head coach Jimbo Fisher

Not so fast my friend.

Here’s one of the items on which the committee has failed.

Baylor and TCU…both Big 12 teams, both with just one loss, and Baylor has beaten TCU in their head-to-head meeting. So Baylor should be ranked higher, right?

Not according to this jury.

Despite the head-to-head win over TCU, the Baylor Bears were ranked six spots below TCU in the initial rankings, with Baylor coming in at No. 13, while TCU sat at No. 7.  There were some grumblings at the time, but it was the first rankings, and everyone seemed willing to give a little leeway and room for improvement.

But when the second set of CFBP rankings were released, No. 12 Baylor still sat six spots behind No. 6 TCU. Now people wanted answers, and the answer they got didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. The committee felt that the “body of work” they saw in Baylor warranted a higher ranking.

This is when we get into those nebulous phrases and terms that can drive coaches nuts. Body of work? They both play in the Big 12 for goodness sake. And even if Baylor had a more impressive win than TCU, to separate the two teams by 6-7 spots seems way out of whack.

But if Baylor fans were upset after the second ranking, they were livid after the third. In Week 12’s ranking, TCU moved into one of those coveted top four spots that will get you into the playoffs, while Baylor is still lingering three spots down at No. 7.  If head-to-head meetings are the first tiebreaker when deciding a conference champion, they should definitely be given more credence than the selection committee has done so far.

Strength of schedule has been another area where the differences in opinion between coaches (and fans) and the committee have been seen, because without the use of RPI or any other data point, how these committee members view schedule strength is completely subjective.

Despite playing what most view as one of the weakest schedules of the Top 10 teams, Florida State sat firmly at number two in the rankings for the first two go-rounds. There were cries of foul from teams and fans of teams with one loss who had played much more taxing schedule than the Seminoles.

But after struggling with Louisville and Virginia, the committee decided that maybe FSU did have a few warts, and dropped them to No. 3, which flipped the script of indignation over to Seminoles head coach Jimbo Fisher, who said he thought the “name of the game was to keep winning”, and not about style points.

(Hey Jimbo, there’s a group of folks from an unranked 9-0 Marshall team waiting to see you in the lobby.)

So its obvious that the points of head-to-head victories, and strength of schedule will have some interpretive dance done by the committee in the coming weeks, and they’re going to make it rain on someone.

But perhaps the most curious thing we hear about in terms of these rankings is something that isn’t even listed in the criteria to be considered, but yet you hear the term thrown around all the time through the first three weeks of this thing.

The “eyeball test” – which seems to be a combination of perception vs. reality along with some conference bias, and that was seen quite clearly a couple of weeks ago in the case of Ole Miss.

In the first set of rankings, Ole Miss was had just suffered their first loss of the season to a then No. 24 AP-ranked LSU team. Everybody but everybody was sure that despite having been ranked in the top four prior to that loss, the Rebels would be out of the picture for now.

When Ole Miss came in ranked at No. 4, the whispers of SEC bias turned into deafening shrieks of favoritism and cronyism. But how else do you differentiate between over a dozen one-loss teams? You have to take the conference in which they play (or don’t play) into consideration, right?

The committee had best be careful about that one when when the final two weeks are here.

So how good of a job has this committee to this point? Let’s just say that what is termed as criticism and growing pains will be rephrased into calls for a return to the 1970’s way of deciding a champion if certain things aren’t done better.

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