The College Football Playoff’s field of four will be unveiled shortly after noon ET on Sunday during a special on ESPN. Those teams will meet in semifinals on New Year’s Eve, and the winners will play for the national championship in Tampa on Jan. 9.
How the 2016 College Football Playoff works: a 2-minute read
A quick guide on what to know about college football’s biggest event — except who’s in and who will win.
Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
How are the participants picked?
All 128 teams in Division I’s FBS are technically eligible to make the Playoff. Starting at the beginning of November, the Playoff’s selection committee ranks the country’s teams from one through 25 each week, focusing on the teams it thinks are the best, rather than the most deserving. At the end of the season, the four highest-ranked teams fill out the four Playoff spots.
The committee has 12 members. These are mostly athletic administrators and former coaches, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is there, too.
“Ranking football teams is an art, not a science,” the committee says. But it has a few criteria it uses to differentiate teams that it thinks are of similar quality:
- Conference titles. This year’s race presents some interesting questions about how much conference titles matter.
- Strength of schedule. You can measure schedule strength in a bunch of ways. The committee has cited wins against .500-plus teams and wins against ranked teams, in the few times members have actually discussed their metrics.
- Head-to-head results.
- Games against common opponents (“without incenting margin of victory”). The committee claims it otherwise doesn’t pay much attention to raw scoring margins, believe it or not, making it sort of like the BCS’s formulas.
Which bowl games are part of the Playoff?
They rotate every year. The six top-tier bowl games are known as the New Year’s Six. (In another era, these used to be most of the BCS bowls.) The NY6 is made up of the Fiesta, Peach, Rose, Sugar, Orange, and Cotton.
Every year, two of the New Year’s games become Playoff semifinals. This year, they’re the Peach (in Atlanta) and Fiesta (in Glendale, Ariz.) The committee keeps the top seed closer to home for its semifinal, so expect to see likely No. 1 seed Alabama in the Peach.
The National Championship awaits the semifinal winners. This year, that’s at Raymond James Stadium, the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, at 8:30 p.m. ET on Jan. 9.
How can I watch the Playoff?
The semifinals are on ESPN and WatchESPN on New Year’s Eve at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. ET, stretching into your New Year’s party. (Soon, we won’t have Playoff semifinals on New Year’s, thankfully.)
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