'A good four years' for College Football Playoff; and no, it won't expand to eight teams

George Schroeder | USA TODAY

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IRVING, Texas — In Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany’s absence from the College Football Playoff’s annual meeting, the opportunity arose for an epic prank. Text him, one fellow commissioner after another was urged, with a message something like this: “Hey, we’re talking about going to eight teams — wonder what you think?”

There were no takers.

“He’s having a good little vacation,” Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson said, chuckling. “Let him enjoy it.”

They all laughed, but there was never a chance it would happen. The gag, we mean — but also expansion or much of anything else when it comes to changing college football’s postseason structure. The power brokers are too busy enjoying what they’ve wrought.

“It’s been a good four years,” said Bill Hancock, the Playoff’s executive director, and he cited TV ratings and reviews of the semifinalists’ experiences and, well, a lot of other stuff during what he termed a “nuts and bolts” meeting — but the best gauge might have been the decision by Delany not to attend.

“I think we’re in a tremendous position,” Thompson said. “Where this championship has gone in four years is phenomenal.”

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If anything changes, it would be the natural result of a dramatic turnover in the selection committee, which has six new members (of 13 total) and a new chairman. It only takes one member, Hancock noted, to change the chemistry of a committee (he should know; he worked for years with the NCAA’s men’s basketball committee).

“But the base protocol,” he added, “remains the same.”

And that’s perhaps the most important takeaway from the Playoff’s annual meeting. Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens moves into the chairman’s role, taking over for Texas Tech’s Kirby Hocutt. And the new selection committee members — athletic directors Joe Castiglione (Oklahoma), Scott Stricklin (Florida) and Todd Stansbury (Georgia Tech), along with former Arizona Republic sports columnist Paola Boivin (now a professor at Arizona State), former coach Ken Hatfield (Air Force, Arkansas, Clemson and Rice) and former USC and NFL defensive back Ronnie Lott — will bring new perspectives into the selection process. The committee’s complexion could change.

But they’ll follow the same guidelines as the previous four incarnations of the committee: Select the “four best teams” with “an emphasis on winning conference championships, strength of schedule and head-to-head competition when comparing teams with similar records and pedigree.”

As Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott put it, echoing a phrase in the Playoff’s original position paper: “It’s as much of an art as a science.” It’s another way of saying it’s a subjective process. And even with the inclusion the last two seasons of teams that did not win conference championships (Ohio State in 2016 and Alabama in 2017), there is zero impetus to change.

As has become customary, the 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, who together form the Playoff’s management committee, were given a briefing by Hocutt on how last season’s bracket was chosen.

“We want to know what they were thinking and why they think it,” Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said. “We have to be willing to say, ‘OK, 13 honest people go into a room and make the right decisions. Some of those right decisions are made by individual vantage points. We always talk about that process, but we think we got it right the first time.”

He added: “I think this year there was a belief Alabama was just a better football team than (Big Ten champion) Ohio State,” he continued. “It’s always going to be based on the full body of work. They need to be pretty sure they’re right. But in the case of Alabama, they won the national championship so it’s hard to say they weren’t one of the four best teams.”

That validating result also occurred in 2014, when the selection committee chose Ohio State over Big 12 co-champions Baylor and TCU (or TCU and Baylor, you pick the order), and the Buckeyes went on to win it all. Even in 2016, when Ohio State was chosen and Big Ten champion Penn State was left out — and then the Buckeyes were blown out in a semifinal by Clemson — the selection was only mildly controversial.

In its first four years, the Playoff has never gone through a storm like those that seemed to routinely envelop the Bowl Championship Series, its predecessor. Hancock suggested it was because fans are more comfortable with the selection process as compared to the BCS, which used an amalgam of polls and computer rankings.

“People know how the committee functions and they like the fact that we have 13 experts in the room,” he said.

For now, at least, there’s no hint of a desire to change anything.

“They are very happy with the way things are going,” Hancock said. “I can’t say it any more plainer. It’s been a good four years.”