Change certainly coming to College Football Playoff, but how much and when? ‘Too soon to say it’s broken’

Change is inevitable for the College Football Playoff, but just how drastic those tweaks could be after just one year in a new, 12-team format is uncertain. 

Conference commissioners are developing campaigns for changes as soon as the 2025 season, but others have asked for patience, including the CFP’s outgoing selection committee chairman.

“It’s too soon to say it’s broken,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel told CBS Sports.

The crux of the issue is transparency with the process, most notably the decisions and criteria followed by the 13-person committee, and seeding within the bracket. Those points also bleed into the selection process, including the number of automatic bids in a system that was built during an already-expired timeline, when five power conferences ruled the landscape before the dissolution of the Pac-12.

The big discussion points:

• Should the four highest-ranked conference champions receive first-round byes if they’re ranked outside the top four in the committee’s top 25?

• Should the field expand to 14 teams?

Changes can be made as soon as the 2025 season, but it will require unanimity among the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame — which means, say, the Big 12 would have to volunteer away its best shot at a first-round bye. That will not be the case in 2026 with a new agreement, which provides more weight to the voices of the Big Ten and SEC through at least 2031.

The devil is in the details. A year after the controversial decision to bump undefeated Florida State out of the four-team playoff, the committee faced another difficult task in the first iteration of the 12-team format: whether to include a three-loss SEC team (Alabama) or a two-loss ACC runner-up (SMU). 

Fueling the frustration on Selection Sunday was a directive from Manuel, the chairman, when he stated idle teams would not jump other idle teams in the rankings.

That left programs like Miami, South Carolina and Ole Miss on the outside of the discussion as Alabama received the benefit of the doubt following the release of the committee’s penultimate rankings. Manuel’s explanation baffled the industry. Miami athletics director Dan Radakovich, who was on the CFP committee in 2014, said no such protocol was utilized by the committee a decade ago.

The strive for perfection in college football’s postseason is nothing new, whether it was the bowl system and crowning a champion in the AP poll, the creation (and tweaks) of the Bowl Championship Series and now the expanded CFP, ideas to fix the process are seemingly endless.

“Everybody wants their day in the sun in trying to figure out perfection, and none of it is,” Manuel said.

One way to curb the controversy and stop pinning the committee in a corner? Shrink the release schedule, said Radakovich. The CFP committee is tasked with unveiling a top 25 during the final five weeks of the regular season before the final rankings are released following conference championships in December. It’s a made-for-TV event on ESPN that can attract more than one million viewers, according to Nielsen data.

“One of the things that I’ve talked to a couple of the commissioners about is the ranking that was done prior to Thanksgiving, that should be it until the final ranking,” Radakovich told CBS Sports last week outside the Sports Business Journal’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Las Vegas. “All the data points matter, the conference championship games, everything through the rivalry weekend. Get that all done, get that all taken care of. Then the committee has everything to look at when they make their selection.”

CFP executive director Rich Clark believes the frequency of rankings releases will be discussed in the coming weeks.

“It didn’t feel like too many to me, but that’s another thing that we’ll have to discuss,” he said last week at the SBJ’s forum. “But if we take it away and we just put one ranking out there with the seeding and the brackets, I think that’s a big mistake, because it does take away the transparency of the process.”

The problem with transparency is it opens the door for questions, and in a CFP system that requires subjectivity based on objective data points that are not readily available to the public, the committee is placed in a difficult position each week when its chairman is forced to answer seemingly unanswerable questions for five straight weeks on television.

“It does start to frame certain arguments and debates or mindsets about certain teams when, each week, things change across the entire map,” said Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione, who served on the CFP selection committee from 2018-20.

The question: is the TV money worth the controversy?

“Certainly it has value from a television standpoint, and certainly intrigue within the industry. Does it complicate how the rankings change week over week?” Clemson athletics director Graham Neff said. “‘Complicates’ is probably a strong word, but it certainly adds complexity to it.”

Take for example the data the CFP utilizes. The committee pulls data from SportSource Analytics, an analytics company that develops data for strength of schedule and other metrics utilizing statistics and sabermetrics. It’s a robust database, but there’s one problem — the data is not readily available to the public. 

When ESPN displays such metrics as “strength of schedule” on the screen during its CFP shows, it’s utilizing its own in-house metrics instead of those used by the CFP committee from SportSource Analytics, Manuel confirmed to CBS Sports. For the casual viewer, the broadcast inadvertently places a veil on the presentation of transparency.

One way to fix that is to make the analytics available to the public.

“I’ll leave that up to the commissioners to determine,” Manuel said.

While the CFP preaches transparency but fails to deliver the data behind their reasoning, another postseason tournament has at least shown their work. For the NCAA’s basketball tournament, NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) ratings are readily available for the public to study starting in December, providing fans plenty of fodder as they argue the value of “Quad 1” and “Quad 2” wins. 

The NCAA’s selection committee also waits until Selection Sunday in March before releasing their bracket, although they do provide a tease in mid-February when they unveil their top 16 teams at that point in the season. After that, it’s radio silence from the committee until March. No top 25 rankings, no chairman answering questions every week on TV. 

The NCAA has no involvement in the CFP.

“The whole idea about doing something on a rolling basis, I mean, the basketball tournament typically doesn’t say anything until the end,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said. “Having watched this play out, what I can’t figure out in my own head is if that generates excitement and is interesting to people, or if it just makes people crazy to have — as this thing goes on — this thing constantly moving. That is probably one of the biggest differences between that process and the way that basketball works.”

One potential move that is gaining steam in the CFP mirrors the NCAA’s practices: reward five conference champions with automatic berths, but do not allow them to supersede others in the rankings for a first-round bye.

This year, No. 12 Arizona State was slotted at No. 4 as the fourth-highest rated conference champion and No. 9 Boise State was bumped up to No. 3 as the third-highest rated champion. No. 11 Alabama was bumped out of the CFP with No. 16 Clemson winning the ACC championship. 

The makeup of the committee will be studied as well in the coming months. Still, no matter what, the selection process will always be a subjective practice based on objective data. After all, it is a system designed by the same FBS commissioners who oversee a time of immense change and confusion in college athletics. 

“We did what we were asked to do by the commissioners and now it’s up to the people who are in [the playoff],” Manuel said. “But I think, let’s not rush it. Let’s see how this goes and let’s see how another iteration goes, and if the commissioners decide to change, then that’s up to them.”