College Football Playoff Selection Committee Details Released

In a big press release, the College Football Playoff has announced the details of the selection committee that will decide who gets to play in the four-team playoff and other rotating bowls beginning in 2014.

Let's start with the most basic part, that being the members. Arkansas AD Jeff Long will be the chairman, and four other active ADs are on it: Barry Alvarez of Wisconsin, Pat Haden of USC, Oliver Luck of West Virginia, and Dan Radakovich of Clemson. If you're counting along at home, that is one active AD from each of the power conferences. It will not upset the balance, of course, should Luck get the job at Texas that DeLoss Dodds is vacating soon.

Two former coaches are on it as well, in Tom Osborn and Tyrone Willingham. Osborn is a former AD as well. Other former administrators of various types include Mike Gould (former Air Force superintendent), Tom Jernstedt (former NCAA VP), Condoleezza Rice (former Stanford provost), and Mike Tranghese (former Big East commish). There is one former player, Archie Manning, and one media rep, former USA Today writer Steve Wieberg.

That makes 13 members in total. The CFP brass intends for members to have three-year terms, although some will be shorter in order to allow for a rotation.

The next, or perhaps actually the most, important thing is the selection criteria. For the first time around, the committee basically gets to make it up as they go along:

Unlike the BCS, which uses a formula based on a combination of computer rankings and human polls to select teams, selection committee members for the new playoff will have flexibility to examine whatever data they believe is relevant to inform their decisions. Among the many factors the committee will consider are win-loss record, strength of schedule, head-to-head results, and conference championships won.

Boy, I can't imagine how that won't be a train wreck. No sir.

The committee will meet during the season and release "interim rankings", although it's not guaranteed that we'll get them on a weekly basis as with the BCS standings.

The release has some more minutiae about how the committee came to be, so check it out if you're interested. All of the names had been leaked by now, so none of them are a surprise. What is and isn't a surprise is that the committee won't have a set criteria to work with. It is, because how could you not come up with something, but isn't, because the people who ran the BCS are running this and management of the BCS was nothing if not hamfisted.

So there you have it. This is how we're going to pick the teams who will play for it all from 2014 and on.

UPDATE

"The committee will place the top seeds at the most advantageous sites..."In current system, LSU has played at "home" for BCS title twice.

— Joe Schad (@schadjoe) October 16, 2013

It's three times, actually, and Schad has already acknowledged that error on his Twitter feed, so relax on that.

The news here is that the site for semifinal games will depend on the higher seed's location. Months ago when the rotation came into being, the powers that be did not clarify anything on this front. Now we know.