Selecting the field for the College Football Playoff is a hard job when nobody plays anybody | Sporting News

It was nearly 20 years ago NCAA executives conceived their mock selection exercise for college basketball reporters. About 20 of us who covered the game closely were invited in to see the tools and data the members of the men’s basketball committee – colloquially known as “the selection committee” – employ each year to select and seed the teams comprising March Madness.

I compared it, at the time, to an archaeologist being presented a first look at the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I went through this process four times. I believe that’s a record, shared with Jerry Palm of CBS Sports. I since was hired by Fox Sports to deliver regular bracket projections during the season for the network’s various platforms. I’ve done it for five years and four tournaments, and once I placed among the top dozen of nearly 200 online brackets.

So I felt fully qualified when I suggested to my boss, Bill Trocchi, that I use March Madness procedures to project the selections and seedings for the first-ever College Football Playoff 12-team field.

You know who isn’t qualified to meet that standard, though?

College football itself.

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As much as we see major-conference college basketball coaches occasionally operating from fear – preferring a few too many sterile neutral-court environments to the homecourt interconference spectacles that give the sport life – college football is operated as if any high-major opponent represents a combination of 1995 Nebraska, 2001 Miami and 2019 LSU.

Nobody plays anybody. So the data the sport needs to lend more objectivity to the selection process is unattainable. The data you do see presented as evidence of this team’s worthiness or that team’s failings is so flimsy it’s like a skyscraper built on a foundation of banana pudding.

CFB lacks power non-conference games

Only 27 percent of games involving Power 4 teams are interconference games. And the vast majority of those games are transacted against, shall we say, less capitalized opposition. It could be teams from the Mid-American, the Sun Belt, Conference USA or, far too often, those competing at the “Football Championship Subdivision” level – what we used to call Division I-AA. There’s little opportunity to establish relative strength among the conferences when they play so rarely.

Teams from the Southeastern Conference played 64 non-conference games in the 2024 season, their first with Oklahoma and Texas as members. Of those, 15 – or 23 percent – were against FCS opponents. The SEC won every such game. That inflated their non-league record to 55-9. Against other P-4 opponents, they were 13-6. That’s better than 6-13, but as it involves essentially one game per team, it doesn’t clearly establish superiority.

The Big Ten plays even fewer games outside the league, because it joins the Big 12 in contesting a nine-game conference season. It plays slightly fewer non-DI opponents numerically, but its percentage is essentially the same as the SEC. Against P4 opponents, the league on the whole is just 6-8 (less than one game per team), although half the losses came from the bottom five teams in the B1G standings. On the other hand, its top five teams played a combined two games against outside major-conference opponents.

If you want to believe the SEC is the stronger conference, you can make a case, but it necessarily involves a fair amount of belief and projection, or a reliance on a history that seems less relevant because of massive changes to the structure of the sport.

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We can implore the CFP committee to be less opaque. That’s certainly a worthwhile goal. The problem is if they showed us how teams are evaluated, they’d have to acknowledge they have little that’s tangible to differentiate them. There is no college football equivalent of KenPom or Strength of Record.

Yes, ESPN does have an SOR number for football, but it is based on too little to be worthwhile. If you need evidence, Notre Dame ranks No. 5 in this metric for the 2024 season. Whether one considers it a benefit or a burden, the Irish, with an ACC scheduling agreement comprising five games on their schedule, were not matched with any of the league’s top four teams. They played three P4 opponents with a winning record, none better than 8-4. The played three opponents that were a combined 6-30. Their major opponents own a composite 40-56 record. And ND lost at home to a Group of 5 team that was 7-5.

It’s not just Strength of Record that highly values Notre Dame’s performance against this pitiful schedule. Predictive-type metrics love them more. They’re No. 2 in ESPN’s Power Index. They’re No. 1 in the Sagarin ratings. They’re No. 3 at TeamRankings.com.

What are we doing here, people?

What the College Football Playoff committee ought to do is reward teams that played and won significant non-conference games. The March Madness committee has issued such an edict. I always have been opposed and have been known to call it “social engineering”. It seems irrational to value significant out-of-league victories more heavily than those in conference.

CFP selection committee needs more data

The football committee needs the help, though. It needs more interconference play to establish how much to value an average SEC or Big Ten or Big 12 win. It needs those games to add legitimacy to whatever metrics they choose to employ to sort the contenders from the pretenders.

It’s been commonly suggested the committee should use a more data-driven process less informed by the personal evaluation of the selectors. But the data is significantly opinion-based, as well. Because games against Mercer and Western Illinois and Houston Christian are not telling us which teams are great.

The top dozen major-conference teams in Tuesday’s release of the weekly CFP rankings played a grand total of two non-league games against the committee’s top 25 teams. They were 1-1 in those games.

The 12-team CFP is an enormous step forward for the sport. Expansion and the introduction of automatic bids for conference champions invested an extraordinary value to the 2024 season, from the season opener to this weekend’s league title games. Next, it’s time for those in control of the playoff to use their power and authority to make the regular season even more meaningful – and more enlightening to those charged with constructing the playoff field.