College football fans have a new weekly ritual: waiting for the College Football Playoff committee's top-25 rankings on Tuesday nights and then debating whether they make sense. Through two weeks, the 13-person committee has produced as many questions as answers, continuing the sport's tradition of using an opaque and remarkably subjective method to determine who plays for a national championship.
The CFP lists four criteria for the committee, including strength of schedule and how a team looks, but every formula relies on subjective judgments. The committee has favored the SEC in virtually every calculation so far; last week, every SEC team in the top 12 had a team from another conference directly behind it with at least one fewer loss.
The committee uses a "pod system" grouping teams in blocks of four — 1 through 4, 5 through 8, and so on. Chairman Hunter Yurachek has said head-to-head results only come into play if teams are in the same pod. That explains why Notre Dame was ranked two spots above Miami last week despite the head-to-head result, and why Alabama remained ahead of Tennessee even though the Volunteers won their matchup; the teams were in different pods.
Last season, Notre Dame opened eight spots ahead of Miami, the team that beat them in Week 1. The gap shrank weekly, but Miami did not move ahead until the final rankings placed them in the same pod, leaving the Irish out of the playoff and sparking days of criticism. The CFP's official language also cites "comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory)," though the SEC's cited 10-2 record against other Power Four opponents represents a small sample size.
Sources: Las Vegas Review-Journal
Original reporting: Las Vegas Review-Journal →
English (US)·