The announcement of the four teams selected to the College Football Playoff later this season will undoubtedly elicit the outrage that it always does.
Many will voice their disenchanted opinions as to why their team deserved one of those four spots, and others will lament the convoluted premise of it all.
The pleas from college football analysts and fans alike to expand the CFP format has been at the forefront of the playoff discussion since its inception in 2014.
But to the chagrin of most college football fans, the system works.
Everything from the grandiose setting in which the 13-person committee makes its final picks, to the hours of passionate debates over who gets those four coveted spots.
It’s all very meticulous, and it works.
I say this because I recently spent two days sitting in the shoes of one of those CFP committee members engaging in the process of choosing the nation’s top-25 teams.
The committee works out of a spacious meeting room at the Gaylord Texan Hotel in Dallas, Texas. A long rectangular table with a marker of each participant’s name fills the space. Each member sits in front of a flat-screen TV with a Dell computer given to them to make their choices.
As “committee members” we spent five hours going through several rounds of selection until we had successfully picked our top-25 programs from the 2013 season. It mirrored the exact procedure that the committee follows down to the recusal from an argument if the team that a committee member represents is being discussed.
That was an extremely condensed version of the long process the committee goes through to actually make those selections.
But if there’s one thing I took away from the mock selection exercise, it’s that the college football playoff format won’t be expanding any time soon. And it shouldn’t.
According to CFP executive director Bill Hancock, the committee approaches each round with the same level of importance, ranking teams 22-25 just as carefully as teams 1-4.
The members relish in the drama and heated moments of discussion that the process brings from the start to finish.
And so did I.
It amazed me how long it took us to decide whether Alabama or Ohio State deserved that No. 4 spot in the CFP.
We compared every statistic, every game, every scenario, and after hours of shuffling back and forth, we finally made the decision to give Alabama that slot. And that was just one single spot.
Imagine how long of a process this would be with an eight or even six-team playoff.
It makes a laborious system even more laborious. And let’s face it, that’s what bowl games are for.
Someone’s always going to have an issue with it no matter the system, and the committee has chosen the most efficient way to filter the best teams in the nation.
Yeah, some teams that made a convincing case during the season for a top-four spot end up not making the cut.
And yeah, it makes the decision extremely hard.
But life is about making tough choices and living with the consequences, and aren’t we all better off down the road because of it?
Alanis Thames is a football writer for The Alligator. Follow her on Twitter @alanisthames and contact her at athames@alligator.org.
