This year, the College Football Playoff selection committee really screwed up.
And that’s saying something. This is a selection process that has always been wildly inconsistent and confusing. But, for more than a decade now, those of us who know and love college football have had to take it seriously. We tune into the weekly TV show to see the committee’s Top 25, even though the chairman will say things that don’t make sense. Sometimes, a so-called “bad loss” will matter one week but not the next. Or a blowout might drop one team but not another that suffered a nearly identical result.
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But we go along with the system and the process because we love the sport. And the new 12-team bracket has meant dozens of teams are in the mix late in the season, with so many more meaningful games played each November. We accept that this is a selection committee comprised of human beings who are, obviously, subjective. We understand that there will be bubble teams with flaws, and that it’s going to be difficult to compare them to one another.
We go through this whole exercise because it’s better than having computers spit out two teams to play each other in the Bowl Championship Series. And the 12-teamer includes and engages so many more teams than the four-team field did.
But the process has to work for the CFP to earn and keep our trust. This one didn’t. This one made a mockery of the whole sport.
On Sunday, the selection committee put Alabama and Miami into the bracket as its final at-large selections. This happened even though Notre Dame was ranked ahead of both of those teams two weeks ago — and hasn’t lost since then. This happened after five weeks of the committee putting out rankings with Notre Dame ahead of Miami (despite losing to the Hurricanes by three points in Week 1).
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At any point in the past month, the committee could have flipped the two teams to respect the head-to-head result as a tiebreaker. Instead, the group waited until the 11th hour and a weekend in which both Notre Dame and Miami sat idle to flip the order. CFP selection committee chair Hunter Yurachek had the gall to say that the Week 1 result finally (and only) came into play because the two teams were slotted back-to-back in the rankings. Because if they were two spots apart instead of one, they’re suddenly so different they shouldn’t be directly compared? That’s a ridiculous thing to say and an even more preposterous way to behave, if it’s true that the committee wouldn’t ever decide to factor in the head-to-head result when BYU was sandwiched in between the two.
“Once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, we had that side-by-side comparison that everyone had been hungering for with Notre Dame and Miami,” Yurachek said on ESPN. “You look at those two teams on paper, and they’re almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, the results against their common opponents. But the one metric we had to fall back on, again, was the head-to-head.”
All of that was true on Tuesday, when the committee had Notre Dame at No. 10 and Miami at No. 12. All of that was true the previous week, and the one before that, too. The committee had the Fighting Irish ahead of the Hurricanes in those rankings, too. So, understandably, Notre Dame felt blindsided and furious at the last-second swap.
But the committee’s handling of Alabama and BYU was perhaps just as egregious. The 11-1 Cougars lost to Texas Tech by 27 points in the Big 12 title game, their second lopsided loss of the year to the Red Raiders. The committee dropped them one spot because it was a blowout loss and “BYU did not perform and look great in either one of those games versus Texas Tech,” Yurachek said on Sunday’s teleconference with reporters.
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Meanwhile, 10-2 Alabama lost to Georgia by 21 points in the SEC championship game, a lopsided loss to a team the Tide had beaten by three points in September. That previous win had obviously been a huge part of Alabama’s resume to date; it’s why the Tide was ranked No. 9 coming into the weekend, landing on the right side of the bubble. And then Alabama’s blowout loss on the eve of Selection Sunday apparently didn’t count against it. The Tide stayed at No. 9.
“The biggest difference in those two situations was the fact that Alabama had already beaten Georgia at Georgia earlier in the year,” Yurachek said. “The biggest difference is Alabama had that big win at Georgia, which is arguably the best win of any team this season.”
But … Alabama had already gotten credit for that win! That’s why the Tide were ranked ninth coming into the weekend. Completely ignoring the impact of a blowout loss for one team (Alabama) but not another (BYU) is indefensible. But that decision helped the Tide, who were also helped earlier this week when the committee bumped Alabama ahead of Notre Dame on the apparent strength of a seven-point win over 5-7 Auburn … for reasons. This is a team that hasn’t played well in well over a month, but the committee bent over backwards to make sure Alabama was always shown in the most flattering light.
“A couple things really stood out to us over the last 24 hours as we compared Alabama to both Notre Dame and Miami,” Yurachek said. “Alabama’s schedule strength was the highest of any team in the top 11, and also their win at Georgia, 24-21, earlier this season, arguably the best win for any team, and they also had a win against Vanderbilt and then a previous win at Missouri and Tennessee, both of whom had been ranked in our Top 25 at various points this year.”
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In the past, it only mattered if teams were ranked in the committee’s final Top 25. They didn’t get credit for wins against teams ranked at the time (or ranked at any time). And, oddly enough, Texas — a team with three wins over teams in the current top 14 — wasn’t even close enough to the field to sniff it.
So, where do we go from here? College football is a great sport with a bad process to select and seed its postseason participants. And unless something changes with the actual procedural steps and the selection criteria, it’s impossible to trust. It’s a group of people picking teams they like — based on vibes— behind closed doors.
And that’s a problem.
