College Football Playoff

Ivan Maisel is an acclaimed sportswriter with over four decades of experience covering college football. A graduate of Stanford University, Maisel began his career at The Atlanta Constitution in 1981, where he covered Clemson's run to the national championship. Sports Illustrated hired him as a reporter the following year. He began covering national college football in 1987 for the Dallas Morning News, then moved to Newsday in 1994. He rejoined Sports Illustrated in 1997. In 2002, ESPN.com hired him as its first college football writer.

Maisel's work at ESPN extended beyond traditional writing, as he contributed coverage through podcasts, radio appearances and multimedia projects. He played a key role in launching ESPN's College Football Daily podcast and served as the Editor-at-Large of ESPN College Football 150, the multi-platform project commemorating the 2019 sesquicentennial of the sport. In that role, Maisel served as the writer and host of "Down & Distance", a podcast series, as a producer of "The American Game" and "The Greatest", two 11-week series, and as a producer of "Saturdays in the South," an eight-week series on the SEC Network.

In 2021, Maisel helped launch On3 Media and spent two years writing for its website.

Maisel has been honored nine times for Best Story by the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA), most recently for a 2022 remembrance of the late football coach Mike Leach. The FWAA honored Maisel in 2016 with the Bert McGrane Award, the organization's Hall of Fame.