How the College Football Playoff Selection Committee Painted Themselves Into a Corner

The 2014 regular season is over, the conference championships have been decided, and now the College Football Playoff Selection Committee has to try to fix the mess they’ve created.

It’s the first year for the College Football Playoff, so everyone knew there would be a few snags…some wrinkles to be ironed out, if you will…even an unexpected surprise to two.

But I’m not sure anyone expected the selection committee to fumble quite as much and as often as they have, and now this group of twelve people has to figure out how to get out of this corner in which they’ve painted themselves.

As David Byrne once said, “Well…how did I get here?”

It really started before the season even began, when this whole playoff idea was launched upon a public so desperate to see the BCS gone, they would have bought into anything with the word “playoffs” in it….and brother, did we ever.

I was one of the few who looked at it early on and said, you know, this really isn’t a playoff…it’s an expanded version of the BCS minus the computers. It’s the old AP/UPI poll system, with an electoral college abiding loosely by the votes of their constituents.

But rest assured, it’s not really a playoff.

That fact aside, the problems begin with how teams are measured. The criteria used (and this is directly from the College Football Playoff website) are supposed to be “obvious factors like win-loss records, strength of schedule, conference championships won, head-to-head results and results against common opponents.”

Obvious factors…hmmm. That’s a bit ambiguous. And of all those factors, win-loss records, conference championships and head-to-head results are the only truly quantifiable points. The rest consist of opinion, speculation, and the all-powerful “eyeball test”.

So why then did the committee choose to put the truly measurable factors so low in their process leading up to this final week of rankings?

Well, at least Alabama and Oregon did their part to make the committee’s job a little easier. Winning the SEC and Pac-12, arguably the two best conferences in the nation, made their selection to the final four teams easier than a win against SMU.

But what is the committee to do about these third and fourth spots?

Let’s start with Florida State. Like them or not, they’ve been the one constant throughout the season in that they’ve won their games. It wasn’t always pretty, and it wasn’t always against the most fearsome competition, but the Seminoles won (29 straight dating back a couple of years).

Anyone who has ever seen a winning streak knows that the longer it goes on, the harder it is to continue winning. So hats off to the Seminoles for being able to do what no other team has…win every game, period.

For that tremendous feat, the committee chose to…drop the Seminoles down in rank?

OK, so here’s big mistake number one. If you feel that the strength of schedule and the way a team has played has them at number two or number three, then fine. That’s your opinion as a group. But to continue dropping them as a consequence of winning their games seems a bit, well….suspect.

By the time the Seminoles got to their last couple of games, the committee knew very well who they were and who the opponents they had yet to play were. If Florida State won those games, they should have at the very least remained steady in their ranking spot.

Moving on.

The TCU-Baylor fiasco has been a talking point for weeks, and now will really come back to haunt the committee.

For those who don’t know, TCU and Baylor both have only one loss each, and TCU’s one loss was to…Baylor. So logic dictates that Baylor would be ranked higher than TCU, right?

Apparently our committee did not study on Vulcan.

Not only did the committee rank TCU higher than Baylor, but for some weeks they were ranked as many as six spots higher than the Bears. Again, if the committee and all their data points to TCU being the better team despite losing to Baylor, then fine. However, the schedules and “body of work” (which was the reasoning given by the committee for giving TCU the higher rank) were not that far apart.

At most, TCU should have been ranked one or two spots ahead of Baylor, at least giving credence to the fact that they had beaten the team ranked slightly higher than they.

When you cap off this exploding soda bottle with the fact that the Big 12 doesn’t have a championship game, and therefore can’t truly settle it on the field (not that it hadn’t already been settled), you end up with a giant mess on your hands, not to mention your face.

And what college football postseason quagmire wouldn’t be complete without the Urban Meyer factor?

Ohio State went from being written off before the season even began, to one of several teams claiming to be one of the top four in the nation. Their one stumble…against a weaker than usual Virginia Tech in Week 2. But since that game, the Buckeyes took a backup quarterback, turned him into a legitimate Heisman candidate, lost him the week before the Big Ten Championship game, and then rode their 3rd string QB to a 59-0 rout of a very good Wisconsin team.

The committee has had every opportunity to bump the Buckeyes into the top four, particularly after the regular season was completed with a drubbing of rival Michigan. But the season-ending injury to quarterback J.T. Barrett had the committee thinking twice about whether or not tOSU would be sustainable, and so they remained on the outside looking in.

All of these subtle brush strokes and backward steps now have the committee painted into a corner, with no real exit available without tracking mud and unsightly footsteps over their freshly completed floor.

Herein are the problems the committee now faces when trying to decide the four teams to play in the College Football Playoff.

1. The precedent of having one-loss teams ahead of an undefeated team has already been set, so teams who feel they’ve played better football and more difficult schedules than Florida State will have a gripe if left out behind the Seminoles.

2. Nothing was ever truly decided in the Big 12. The two teams at the crux of the problem — TCU and Baylor — now each own a “share” of the conference title (although, with the regular season head-to-head win by Baylor, that doesn’t make sense either). Since both teams won out, can you really move Baylor ahead of TCU after ranking them lower for so many weeks?

3. Conference champions are supposed to play a part of the formula, and as stated above, the Big 12 has (technically) two champions. Do you penalize the Big 12 for not having a conference championship game like everybody else? (I mean seriously, even Conference-USA has one).

4. Ohio State proved they are the same quality football team regardless of who is standing under center. How does their schedule and body of work compare to Florida State, TCU and Baylor? And if the final tally is supposed to be who the best four teams are right now, do you discount that early season loss to Virginia Tech?

5. How much can you really count strength of schedule? For instance, when Florida State scheduled Oklahoma State and Notre Dame, there was probably little consideration given to the possibility that they would be 6-loss and 5-loss teams, respectively. And traditional SEC rival Florida was mired in another sub-par year as well. Is it right to punish FSU because teams on their schedule didn’t live up to expectations?

The unfortunate truth is that now, the committee is going to have to turn to more sinister reasoning decided behind closed doors, and come up with a viable excuse to toss out to the public. Do they pick Ohio State because their fan base likely travels better than TCU or Baylor? Or is a Buckeyes selection their way of brushing their blunder with TCU and Baylor under the rug?

Do they finally play the head-to-head card, and make a Baylor selection more or less an apology for being such numbskulls for the last six weeks? Or do they continue with the excuse that TCU’s body of work (because yeah, that season finale against Iowa State…whew!) is better than Baylor’s, and Ohio State’s.

Better yet, just make the injustice of moving an undefeated team down in the rankings complete, and let the Seminoles sit and stew in the Orange Bowl against Ohio State. Then you can include Baylor and TCU and not have the entire state of Texas loading up their gunbelts.

Two playoff spots, four teams all worthy of being included. Ugly business for the inaugural year of the playoffs.

It it too late to initiate a “play-in” game?

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