How the College Football Playoff system can improve in 2015

The first year of the College Football Playoff could be considered a success, but like any complicated new idea, there’s always room for improvement.

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Now that all the dust has settled and everyone has a feel for how this College Football Playoff system will work, it’s time to start thinking about the things that can be done to make it even better. Undoubtedly already better than the BCS, there are a few items to be tweaked in the new system.

The first thing that most will mention is simple – add more teams. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen this year and maybe not even next, but it is one of the items that will make the entire playoff idea more feasible and more enjoyable. Four teams is good. Eight teams would be great. Sixteen – that would be heaven.

But beyond just expanding the field, we have to take a look at what problems arose in 2014, and how they can be avoided in 2015.

The biggest fix needs to be a clear-cut definition of what items are receiving the most weight, and in what order in terms of how the committee is voting on their rankings. Right now there is just a general list — win-loss records, strength of schedule, conference championships won, head-to-head results and results against common opponents — with no real defined weight for each of those factors.

Last season, the head-to-head category came under question when the TCU Horned Frogs spent weeks ranked ahead of the Baylor Bears, despite losing to Baylor during the season and having an identical record.

It should have been made clear from the beginning that head-to-head would be one of the last factors considered (even less than strength of schedule) to avoid any of the unpleasantness that we experienced.

But on that situation, it would probably be worthwhile to institute a policy that if two teams from the same conference have identical records and their only difference is a head-to-head meeting, that game should be given a high priority in the rankings.

There should be more quantifiable formulas involved (yes, BCS-haters, I see you cringing), and less subjective opinion. Not in the way of bringing back the computer algorithms, but some definitive idea of “factor x will have two times as much bearing on rankings as factor y”.

There was also a bit of dancing around about how the Big 12 was shut out of the playoffs due to a lack of conference championship game. It was never 100 percent stated that the lack of such a game was the reason both Baylor and TCU were omitted, but it was strongly implied.

“We had co-champions presented to us as a committee,” committee chair Jeff Long said via SI.com. “So we evaluated [Baylor and TCU] as co-champions. That’s what we were presented with. We weren’t given an either-or. We were given co-champions, and that entered into the discussion. I can’t answer how it affected individual committee members.”

Dec 7, 2014; Grapevine, TX, USA; College football playoff selection committee chairman Jeff Long speaks to the media at the Gaylord Texan Hotel. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

On that point, individual committee members need to be more accountable.

The committee did a very good job in being transparent about their rankings on the whole, but perhaps something similar to what is seen in other polls, in being able to see an exact tally of the rankings by each committee member would be useful. Not only should the committee as a whole be accountable, but each individual member should have to answer for any oddities in their ranking.

Since committee members are required to recuse themselves from ranking any team with which they have an association, there should be no reason to keep each person’s votes secret.

One of the most important changes that should be made is in how teams from conferences outside the Power-5 are viewed and ranked. One of the ideas behind this playoff system was to bring about some fairness to all FBS teams, and to allow an easier path for those in “smaller” conferences to be able to compete for a national championship.

This simply did not happen in 2014.

While strength of schedule is an important factor, it should also be taken into consideration that an FBS schedule is an FBS schedule, regardless of conference. And while some may consider certain conferences to be weaker in terms of scheduling, there are a lot of Power-5 teams who have more than one cupcake (even FCS level) on their schedule.

If a team like Marshall from an FBS conference (Conference USA) is undefeated, their body of work should be given just as much consideration as an FSU team coming out of the ACC. It’s not that playing a C-USA schedule is as tough as an ACC schedule, but Marshall should have been rewarded for their play in terms of rankings.

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Had Marshall finished the season undefeated (and they didn’t lose until the last week of the regular season) they would have been unfairly shut out of the playoffs.

Of course, this is where the argument for more teams takes the most weight. As long as there are only four teams involved in the playoffs, it’s going to be next to impossible for teams outside the Power-5 to squeeze their way in.

To summarize, more defined factors of rankings, more transparency, and more consideration given to non-Power-5 teams are the three biggest improvements that can be made to a system which gave us one of the best college football seasons in recent memory.

The addition of more teams seems inevitable, and the sooner the better. But until then, the system should be made to be as completely bug-free as possible.

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