It is an era of good feelings for the College Football Playoff: Most fans seem to prefer the idea of a committee deliberating and voting on the nation’s top teams to the old system under the Bowl Championship Series, which infamously used computer rankings.
“It’s a very thoughtful process,” Steve Wieberg, a member of the playoff’s selection committee, said in an interview last week.
The committee’s first rankings are set to be released Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., though, so historians will most likely date the end of the era of good feelings to 7:31.
“One of the first questions Bill Hancock asked me was ‘Are you prepared to deal with the heat?’ ” Wieberg said, referring to the playoff’s executive director. He added, “There will be room for disagreement, but I think people will be able to say, ‘I see where you’re coming from.’ ”
Perhaps.
Officially, the committee will consider “strength of schedule, head-to-head results, comparison of results against common opponents, championships won and other factors.” This is akin to saying a restaurant critic will take into account “the food’s deliciousness, service, atmosphere and other factors.”
Which is what makes Tuesday so significant: For the first time, observers will glimpse what the committee esteems — and doesn’t.
The committee plans to convene this week and in the weeks afterward, with its final rankings, due on Dec. 7, determining a final-four bracket. Those picks will also help decide the composition of other bowl games.
Jeff Long, Arkansas’s athletic director and the committee’s chairman, will explain each week’s rankings at a news conference, with the ballot count, as well as the individual ballots, remaining secret. Still, the rankings themselves will offer the best indication of the committee’s view of the sprawling Football Bowl Subdivision, with its 10 conferences and 124 teams of wildly disparate resources, styles and talent pools.
Already there are only three undefeated teams, and only two in the so-called Big 5 conferences — the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-12 and Southeastern Conferences — from which it is widely assumed the four semifinalists will emerge.
Mississippi State, of the SEC, is the top team in The Associated Press’s poll, released Sunday, and is almost certain to have a spot in the playoff committee’s top four.
Florida State, an A.C.C. team ranked No. 2 in the A.P. poll and the other unbeaten Big 5 squad, most recently eked out a home win over No. 6 Notre Dame, the best win on its résumé. The SEC’s one-loss elite — No. 3 Alabama, No. 4 Auburn, No. 7 Mississippi and No. 9 Georgia — are arguably as deserving of a top-four spot.
The Pac-12 teams have committed “fratricide” — as the committee member Condoleezza Rice told ESPN — beating up one another without leaving a clear favorite. The Big Ten has three highly ranked teams in the A.P. poll — No. 8 Michigan State, No. 13 Ohio State and No. 17 Nebraska — yet the conference is suffering from an image problem that could hurt all its teams’ chances. The Big 12 is a jumble.
Three pairs of teams could shed some light on the situation.
ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI The teams have the same record (7-1, 4-1) and play in the same division, the SEC West. The Crimson Tide have the edge in the A.P. poll but actually lost to the Rebels on Oct. 4. If the committee also rates Alabama higher, it will indicate that head-to-head results are not a high priority.
EAST CAROLINA AND MARSHALL Marshall, No. 23 in the A.P. poll, has the nation’s best record (8-0), which some are arguing should grant the Thundering Herd a place near the top of the committee’s rankings even though they play in a Group of Five conference, the name given to the lower-profile F.B.S. leagues. “They’ll have as good a chance as anyone,” Hancock, the playoff’s executive director, said in July of the Group of Five teams, and Marshall’s conference, Conference USA, has hired a public relations firm to lobby for its inclusion. But the Herd have not played a Big 5 team, and East Carolina, No. 21 in the A.P. poll, has played three and beaten two. The committee should rank East Carolina higher than Marshall if it wishes to back up its strength-of-schedule talk.
OREGON AND TEXAS CHRISTIAN The gap in the A.P. rankings of these one-loss teams with comparable schedules — the Ducks are No. 5, the Horned Frogs No. 10 — is in part a result of the preseason poll, which had Oregon third and did not have T.C.U. ranked at all. Wieberg, one of the playoff committee members, said he “immediately admired the fact that we weren’t going to do rankings until that last week in October,” and how the committee handles these two teams will help illustrate how valuable that blank slate is.
By Dec. 7, the committee’s tabula will no longer be rasa, and the committee’s rankings will be scrutinized against its past ones.
“I think the fact that it trickles out week by week by week will educate the public as to what kind of direction we’re headed in,” Wieberg said.
And, as Oliver Luck, West Virginia’s athletic director and a committee member, told a reporter last month, “you can skewer us.”