By Chris Schumerth
Transparency. Isn't that an important part of what we want when it comes to the rules and processes that govern our lives? In sports and otherwise?
As a graduate student in sports journalism and one who has long held more than a passing interest in college football, I recently jumped, then, at the possibility of learning more about the College Football Playoff selection process through a mock committee exercise that multiple cohorts of media professionals went through in Dallas. As a mock committee member, I came in prepared to talk about the field selected from the 2024 regular season, under the 2024 format and protocol, under the premise that the 2024 conference championships had just been played. Here were my main impressions from the experience:
It's grueling. The time we put in—an evening of norm-setting with CFP staff and a morning of the mock exercise that carried into the early afternoon—was at best half and maybe more like a third of what actual selection committee members put in to produce the final playoff bracket. The format for group decision-making allows for a lot of verbal debate. Numbers and metrics are displayed and shifted often to allow for new data points and teams to be discussed, and sometimes the more empirical evidence that is presented and explored muddles the picture rather than clarifies. That's appropriate because it challenges whatever biases we may have come into the room with, and a particularly articulate or persuasive peer may change our minds. That happened to me a number of times, as I would find myself voting in a way that I would not have before the discussions began. We started with the top of the poll and worked our way down from there, but there was also time to re-evaluate and re-discuss the initial decisions and votes as we got further into the process.
The process is about creating a top-25 ranking, and the playoff spots are a byproduct of that. In producing those final 25, we started with the top four by "listing" a larger number of schools (six, in our case,) that might be deserving. The two programs that were not chosen rolled over to the next four spots, and we would collectively "list" four more to go with the rollovers, and then we would discuss again and vote when the discussion felt like it had been exhausted. Going four at a time doesn't add up to 25, so the first four rounds of discussions and votes are for four spots each, and then the last three rounds are for three spots. Votes are submitted on a computer screen in front of you, and other committee members don't have access to how you are voting. The computer system then spits out the group result of various votes. During all of this, we were certainly aware of the playoff implications for our discussions, but our focus was really in creating a big-picture order that we had to create team by team and spot by spot.
The data is transparently available and discussed, but human judgment matters, too. Bowl Championship Series standings were generated by a computer model that adjusted the influence of voters vs. data. But while the CFP does offer its selection committee a number of "principles" to use to compare teams (strength of schedule, head-to-head competition, comparative outcomes of common opponents, and availability of key players), it also doesn't flinch from the importance of committee member perspectives. Which team was better, Indiana or Boise State? Alabama or SMU? And what was more important, best win or worst loss? Win-loss record or strength of schedule?
The process depends upon the collective commitment that the room is filled with a diverse group of people who know and love college football and who come at the objective from good faith. But the process for making determinations is a democratic one for an odd number of voters (who sometimes have to recuse themselves from votes and even the room when there might be a financial or emotional conflict of interest).
Members of our cohort—surely just like members of the actual committee—held contradictory views at different times during the process, and the only way to deal with the disagreements was to lean into them. To give them the due that coaches and players and even fans deserve for the "blood, sweat, and tears" that they're putting in.
Chris Schumerth is a graduate student in the Sports Capital Journalism Program at Indiana University Indianapolis. His writing has appeared in a number of publications, including, most recently, Indianapolis Monthly and HoriZone Roundtable. He also broadcasts as a color analyst for IndianaSRN.
