The College Football Playoff’s field of four was unveiled Sunday. 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.
Full 2016 College Football Playoff bracket and schedule revealed
Here are the four teams who’ll be playing in college football’s top-level semifinals and where they’re headed.
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Peach Bowl semifinal, Atlanta: No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 4 Washington
Fiesta Bowl semifinal, Glendale, Arizona: No. 2 Clemson vs. No. 3 Ohio State
Both games will be on Dec. 31, the Peach at 3 p.m. ET and the Fiesta at 7 p.m. ET.
Both will be on ESPN and WatchESPN.
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.
SEC champion Alabama will enter as the favorite, the defending national champion, and season-long No. 1 team. The Tide emphatically held that status by crushing Florida in Saturday’s SEC Championship.
This year’s biggest controversy came down to Ohio State vs. Penn State vs. Washington for two of the four spots. Here’s a basic breakdown of their resumes.
How were 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 other four major bowls (and the other 34 in general) will also be announced throughout Sunday.
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