The College Football Playoff: History timeline and how it works

Bill Hancock, former BCS spokesperson and anti-Playoff crusader, is now the Playoff’s spokesperson.

His official title has long been “executive director” of whichever enterprise he’s fronting, but his contributions to public life have been (1.) sunny explanations of why things people want to happen cannot happen, followed by (2.) explanations of why those things just happened anyway.

Despite a long advertising campaign and optimism from network and Playoff executives (whom Spencer Hall refers to as LIARS above), the College Football Playoff on New Year’s Eve was a major flop. Who knew that people have things to do besides football on New Year’s Eve?

The semifinal ratings dropped by more than 36 percent from last year, falling short of the incredible ratings from last year’s Ohio State-Alabama and Florida State-Oregon Playoff games. The Bama-Clemson ratings were down from last year’s Championship as well, though not as badly.

It’s been just two years since the BCS transformed into the four-team Playoff, but some people are already pining for an eight-teamer. Stanford head coach David Shaw, whose team won the Pac-12, said as much after the Cardinal’s Rose Bowl rout of Iowa.

The problem with a four-team Playoff is that at least one of the power conference champions is always going to be left out. With an eight-team Playoff, every champion could be included, along with possibly the best non-power champion.

[This is an updated version of a story from 2013.]

The College Football Playoff committee’s first season was ... fine.

Now, Baylor AD Ian McCaw is the latest to predict the Playoff will expand to eight teams at some point, hopefully “within five years.” Baylor rival TCU has also proposed such a thing recently, as have dozens of coaches and the ACC commish.

McCaw also argues that there’s a significant difference in quality between teams that rank barely outside of No. 4 and teams that rank barely outside of No. 8:

Plenty of important college football people already want the four-team playoff to expand to eight teams after just one year of play. TCU head coach Gary Patterson has an idea of his own, via CBS’s Dennis Dodd -- one that would end conference title games.

Dodd says under Patterson’s system, the quarterfinals would take place on December 5, allowing time for finals (and recruiting, as the proposed early signing period would occur in mid-December) before the semifinals on Dec. 31-Jan. 1. Quarterfinal losers would still play in bowl games.

Seven cities have decided to bid for the 2018, 2019 or 2020 College Football Playoff championship games, while at least five more remain undecided, ESPN’s Brett McMurphy is reporting. Atlanta and Santa Clara (Calif.) were previously reported possible sites, while Charlotte, Jacksonville (Fla.), Miami, Minneapolis and San Antonio have also decided to bid.

McMurphy reports more cities are still deciding whether or not to bid. Arlington (Texas), Houston, Indianapolis, New Orleans and Pasadena (Calif.) could still make bids. New York/New Jersey and Orlando will not, after previously considering it.

After departing the inaugural College Football Playoff selection committee due to health issues in October, former Ole Miss and NFL quarterback Archie Manning will not rejoin the group, executive director Bill Hancock announced in a statement Friday. Former Vanderbilt and Furman head coach Bobby Johnson will take his place on the 13-member committee.

A former wide receiver and cornerback at Clemson, Johnson coached as an assistant at Furman from 1976-1992, departing to become the defensive coordinator for the Tigers in 1993. He was hired back the next year by Furman as the school’s head coach, leading the Paladins to a 60-36 record and three straight I-AA playoff appearances (including one appearance in the national title game). He was hired by Vanderbilt in 2002, making one bowl game (the program’s first since 1982) in eight years and retiring with a 29-66 record at the school after 2009.

Under Patterson’s model, the playoff would be expanded to six teams, with the top two seeds receiving byes. Each of the five power conferences would have at least one representative, with an at-large school filling out the field. The games would begin on the first weekend of December, with the semifinals on New Year’s Day again and the championship game 10 days later.

TCU happened to finish the season No. 6 in the final College Football Playoff rankings, and would have likely made Patterson’s six-team field along with fellow Big 12 team Baylor.

The College Football Playoff has no plans of expanding any time soon, executive director Bill Hancock told AL.com. The four-team tournament has 11 years remaining on its TV contract, and it looks likely it will stay at four teams for the duration of that time:

It seems likely the tournament field will expand at some point, however. This year’s Playoff brought in record TV numbers, coaches were calling for expansion as far back as November, and ACC commissioner John Swofford has spoken out in favor of an eight-team field.

The College Football Playoff is under pressure to rearrange its schedule, according to reports from Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand and Michael Smith and USA Today’s George Schroeder. ESPN is reportedly lobbying the CFP to move next season’s semifinals, which are currently scheduled for New Year’s Eve, to Jan. 2, with the rationale being they don’t want the games to compete against the New Year’s countdown shows on various TV networks.

The College Football Playoff contract stipulates that the title game will be played on a Monday night, a night free of other competition due to the NFL’s regular season being over and the lack of Monday night playoff games. Playoff executive director Bill Hancock said that the Playoff management committee -- the nine conference commissioners plus Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick -- are resistent to moving the 2015-16 games.

This will be the first season in which we see the College Football Playoff take place, pitting four teams against each other to determine one true champion. However, many coaches already feel the field is too small.

In most sports, a playoff takes place with anywhere between 12 teams (NFL) to 16 teams (NHL, NBA) to 24 (FCS football), but FBS football is only going with four, for now at least. If college coaches have their way, that may change in the future.

The first four-team College Football Playoff hasn’t even happened yet, and one of the most influential people in college sports has already decided he wants a different system. ACC commissioner John Swofford said on Wednesday that he prefers an eight-team playoff in order to take some of the controversy out of the decision:

At least one of the power five conferences will be left out of this year’s Playoff, and as one of the weaker power conferences, the ACC could be in trouble if its only undefeated team, Florida State, loses. The Seminoles have already been punished for having a weak strength-of-schedule, and with one loss, they would almost certainly be on the outside looking in.

College Football Playoff season is officially here. From here on out, the selection committee’s 12 members will release a weekly top 25 on an ESPN channel every Tuesday night, after meeting to discuss the teams each Monday. Expect chairman Jeff Long, the Arkansas athletic director, to represent the committee on camera each week and answer a few questions about tougher decisions.

A final show on December 7 will announce the four teams selected for the Playoff’s semifinal games, the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, and the eight teams that make the rest of the so-called New Year’s Six bowls, the Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, and Peach.

Former Clemson coach Tommy Bowden is the latest person to publicly oppose Condoleezza Rice’s position on the College Football Playoff selection committee, saying that he doesn’t think she knows the game well enough because she hasn’t played or coached.

Former Auburn coach Pat Dye has disagreed with Rice’s inclusion. So has ESPN analyst and former Georgia defensive end David Pollack, who said he doesn’t think any woman should be on the committee because they haven’t played the game. However, there are others on the committee who have never played at the collegiate level, including former USA Today reporter Steve Wieberg and former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese.

With the College Football Playoff 2014 selection committy about to do its selections for the first time, the question has to be asked by man, woman, and child: what is the selection committy. It is an important question for our times. College football 2014 will never be the same because of selection, and it’s either get with the future or get stuck in the past! Here is an insider look at the inner workings of these mysterious people as well as a few comparisons and contrastisons so you can really see what is what.

My dad says it is spelled “committee” and that contrastisons is not a word, but I’m still mad at him because he won’t let me bring a chainsaw to school. It’s just for showing off! If you bring a chainsaw to school you are basically the raddest kid of all time and I bet you don’t have to do homework.

The committee will release its first top 25 on October 28, with a new list weekly thereafter. The final one, the only one that decides the Playoff and the New Year’s bowls, arrives December 7. So why create all the ones before it?

The answer’s simple. ESPN owns the broadcast rights to the College Football Playoff and the four other major bowls selected by the committee. The network will reveal those top 25s on air each Tuesday night. A weekly top 25 is good business for all, including SB Nation, which will happily cover those rankings.

Former Ole Miss and NFL quarterback Archie Manning will not take place in the inaugural College Football Playoff selection committee due to health issues, the playoff announced in a Monday release.

This leaves the committee down to 12 members, and the committee’s release says they will not be bringing in a replacement for this season. Executive Director Bill Hancock said they expect him to return to the committee in 2015.

On average, up to three College Football Playoff teams will be painfully obvious. I wrote as much a year ago, and it’s been worth repeating, mantra-style, almost every day since then.

To maintain faith in the Playoff selection committee, you might occasionally need to remind yourself that its job is relatively easy. Because every time we learn more about the process, the more we learn about the flaws of the process.

A group of media members posed as playoff selection committee judges, taking on the complicated 2008 college football season to try and figure out how the new system might react to difficult end-of-season scenarios.

That 2008 year, you may recall, included a three-way tie for the Big 12 title between Texas, Oklahoma and Texas Tech, as well as a pair of undefeated non-BCS schools in Boise State and TCU. The 11-1 Longhorns and 12-1 Sooners made the cut for the media playoff, along with 12-1 Florida and 11-1 USC. The BCS standings had the same top three (albeit in a different order), with 12-1 Alabama at No. 4 instead of the Trojans.

How the College Football Playoff will work has been the subject of many an explainer this offseason. There’s a reason for that: it’s about as complicated a process as a four-team pool could ever possibly have.

The absolute basics are that 13 Extremely Important Types will rank teams every week, beginning in October, with the top four in the country at the end of the season going to the tournament. The No. 1 seed will go to its closest of the two available bowl semifinal sites -- this year, the Rose and Sugar.

Remember how excited the college football community was at the announcement of a simple, exciting four-team playoff?

Never fear! College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock was on hand at SEC Media Days to outline the multiple layers of unnecessary excess confusion created by individual bowl mandates for the games just below the Nos. 1-4 Playoff seeds.

This is the inaugural year for the College Football Playoff, and with the season just over a month away, most of the logistics have been announced. The games will take place in New Orleans, Pasadena and Arlington, and there’s a new logo for the event.

On Monday, we got the final missing piece ... the trophy.

Second-year Arkansas head coach Bret Bielema left behind one of the stablest jobs in college football to take on a rebuild in the SEC West. Why’d he do that?

One explanation:

College Football Playoff executive director (and former BCS head) Bill Hancock met with gathered journalists Saturday morning at the annual Association for Women in Sports Media convention. Hancock appeared to provide a glimpse into the relative transparency of the new Playoff selection process.

We already had a pretty good idea of what the selection process will look like, but only from a high level. The Playoff committee members will meet on Mondays and Tuesdays to produce weekly rankings, beginning October 28, which will decide both the two Playoff games and the four other New Year’s bowls.