Update, April 2:
College Football Playoff doing regular rankings updates again for 2015
Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports
No major changes to playoff procedures. First 2015 rankings out Nov. 3
— Brian Bennett (@BennettESPN) April 2, 2015 Original, March 9: It doesn't sound like major changes are coming soon for the College Football Playoff, according to ESPN's Heather Dinich. Dinich spoke with with the 10 conference commissioners who make up the Playoff executive committee (along with Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick), and they seemed content to let things ride the way they are for now.
“You would hope we would learn from our history,” MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said. “In the case of the BCS, they started it from scratch, so they were building metrics as they went. To think that there wouldn’t be a time period of calibration, that’s just logical to think that’s going to occur. One of the big complaints about the BCS was the lack of the human element. Now we have a big dose of the human element. Some people like it, some people don’t. You don’t overreact. You let it play out a little bit to really get a sense of it.”
Notably, the commissioners seemed content with a four-team field for now, despite calls for expansion from within the sport.
The one change that seems likely for 2015, based on the report, is a decrease in the number of televised rankings shows. The playoff selection committee released new rankings every week in the seven weeks leading up to the end of the 2014 season. Those rankings could be released every other week going forward, according to the report. Regardless of the frequency, most would agree that less is more.
Those weekly rankings were the source of much agitation among the college football world. Some frequent causes of trepidation included:
- Florida State fans getting upset on a weekly basis when the Seminoles kept sliding despite going undefeated in the regular season.
- TCU slid from third to sixth in the final rankings, despite winning their regular season finale by 52 points, to lose their spot in the playoff.
- Marshall, which was the consensus best team from a mid-major conference for a large part of the season, couldn’t get a courtesy spot in the rankings until Week 14.
- Strength of schedule, which was used to hammer Baylor for woeful out-of-conference schedule, was not used against other teams with the same vigor. Mississippi State, for example, played nearly as bad an OOC schedule as Baylor, but it didn’t receive much mention until after the Bulldogs lost to Alabama.
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