How the College Football Playoff committee is already opening itself up to criticism

The folks running the College Football Playoff are banking on the public to trust the process because of the people involved. Condoleezza Rice. Tom Osborne. Archie Manning. And so on.

"The members of the Selection Committee are an outstanding group of people with high integrity and excellent judgment," said CFP executive director Bill Hancock.

I, for one, agree with both that statement and that sentiment. I trust the people (specifically in this case, but in general when it comes to college athletics) and trust the basics of the process – put 13 reasonable folks in a room and they ought to be able to pick the top four teams in America.

It won't always be neat, of course. There will be disagreements with the choices and seedings. Some years there will be intense ones. Some years it'll be simple. A selection committee isn't a perfect system but there is no perfect system when trying to choose four teams out of a field of 128, especially with limited (12-13 games) and disparate (few common opponents) data to work with.

Division-I college football is wild. It's played in 41 states by schools big and small, religious institutions, military academies, state schools, city schools, rural schools, you name it. That's the beauty of it. It's not neat. It can't be neat.

In the end, you get some people together and pick the playoff field. The dynamics of the group force everyone to be open and honest. Opinions on a team that may not appear reasonable to start, can be argued until it might make sense. It'd be best if there were a little more intellectual diversity on the panel (particularly someone with an advanced statistics or even a background in setting point spreads) but whatever.

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These are good people. It'll work fine. This isn't that complicated.

Except, the College Football Playoff is making it seem complicated – really, really complicated in fact.

The flaw in how the system is being set up isn't the system – 13 people pick four teams – it's how they are trying to guard against unwarranted criticism. You'll never generate enough rules to eliminate screams for additional transparency or the elimination of individual bias. You're going to get called a liar and a cheat and get deluged with emails featuring the subject line: "your biased."

It's like the playoff has no confidence in itself, no willingness to at the end just sit there and say, 'Hey, here's the field, it's the best we could do, deal with it.'

It gives critics life by creating all of these rules and requiring secret ballots and weekly top 25 polls – polls are mathematically unsound to begin with and really, a top 25?

This system is setting the committee up for some serious heat.

Want a bad idea? The committee will meet in person six times, beginning on Oct. 28. Why in person? Who knows? Why beginning in the middle of the season? Who knows?

Whatever debates people will have on October 28 will almost assuredly be sorted out during the next six weeks of the season. Yes, we really like that currently 7-0 team but when they finish the season 9-3, what exactly was the point of discussing them in the first place? And why did we subject ourselves to getting blasted for under or overvaluing a team when assigning any value at that moment offered zero benefit?

The committee should meet once, in December, the day after all the games are played and all the available data is in and, in truth, opinions, friendships, rivalries and voting coalitions haven't been formed via weeks and weeks of meetings and pointless polls.

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