TCU Horned Frogs

Five committee truths that will decide who plays for the national title

Published Sep. 1, 2015 12:21 p.m. ET

Stewart Mandel

Jeff Long wants to clarify something once and for all about last season’s College Football Playoff rankings.

“Let me make it clear,” the Arkansas athletics director/selection committee chairman said in a recent interview. “We do NOT use ESPN’s ‘Game Control’ -- whatever that is. We do not consider it in the room.”

Long spent his Tuesday nights last fall explaining on national television why one-loss Alabama ranked higher than undefeated Florida State, or why TCU was higher than a Baylor team it lost to. Then he watched as the college football media and public parsed his every word in search of deeper revelations about the committee’s methodology.

The “Game Control” incident proved mostly a matter of misinformation. (He only said the committee looks at whether teams “controlled [their] game” -- a.k.a. won convincingly -- at which point everyone assumed he was referring to ESPN’s similarly named computer metric.) In general, though, millions of fans who spent last season weaning themselves off 16 years of the BCS standings should no longer view the selection committee as an entirely foreign concept.

“We make a clear distinction between, what we do is rankings, and what the others (AP, coaches, etc.) do is polls,” said Long. “What makes rankings unique is we’re debating in a room, as opposed to a poll where people might say, ‘This team was third, everyone above them won, everyone below them lost, so OK, they’re third this week.”

Since the end of last season I’ve spoken with several of the participants from last year’s selections and revisited the deliberations leading up to the committee’s all-important final rankings.

Though this season will inevitably play out differently than last, and though there are two new members on the committee (Texas Tech AD Kirby Hocutt and former Vanderbilt coach Bobby Johnson), it may be wise to remember the following lessons learned from 2014 while watching the 2015 playoff race play out.

Going undefeated is not the be-all, end-all. The AP and coaches polls, which date back to the first half of the 20th century, essentially followed one overriding rule: Don’t lose. The longer a team remained undefeated, the higher it rose, regardless of how it played or who it faced. By season’s end, any remaining undefeated power conference team would unquestionably top all off the one-loss teams, and even a weaker-conference team like 2007 Hawaii (which played the nation’s worst schedule) eventually rose into the top 10.

It only took the committee one season to render that mindset obsolete. Then-defending national champion Florida State completed its regular season 13-0 but did it in often underwhelming fashion. The ‘Noles fell as low as fourth -- behind three one-loss teams -- heading into the last weekend of the season.

According to one committee member, there were some in the room that felt FSU should be even lower, and they had the analytics to back them up. The ‘Noles did not even crack the top 10 in power ratings like Jeff Sagarin’s and Football Outsiders’ efficiency rankings. Ultimately they finished No. 3, behind 12-1 Alabama and Oregon.

Marshall ran into much the same roadblock. Despite starting 11-0, the Herd, having played a woefully weak schedule, never cracked the top 25. (They rose as high as 18th in the AP Poll.) And come season’s end, an 11-2 Boise State team earned the New Year’s Six bowl berth afforded to the committee’s highest-ranked Group of 5 champion over 12-1 Marshall.

Beating other top 25 teams is essential. As the weeks went on, Long increasingly answered questions about a particular team’s ranking by mentioning the number of top 25 teams it beat. That’s not a coincidence.

“It became more of a factor for some of the committee members’ evaluation,” he said. “And remember, that is a moving target. It’s not they played them and they were 15th-ranked in the second week of the season. I think fans need to understand that.”

A look at the final contenders shows a strong correlation between a team’s number of top 25 wins (as ranked by the committee) and where it finished.

Among the many factors that wound up hurting Big 12 contenders Baylor and TCU, one went largely unnoticed. When 5-6 Oklahoma State upset 8-3 Oklahoma the last night of the season, it knocked the Sooners out of the final top 25 and left both with one fewer such win than the four teams above it.

Good wins far outweigh bad losses. When Ohio State inexplicably fell at home to Virginia Tech in Week 2, many (myself included) wrote off the Buckeyes’ playoff chances right then. It only seemed more dire as the season progressed and the Hokies kept losing (eventually finishing 6-6). At least initially, the committee itself remained skeptical, putting Ohio State down at No. 16 in its first rankings in late October. But as the Buckeyes kept winning -- and kept putting up scores in the high 40s and 50s -- that Sept. 6 result carried less and less weight.

And by season’s end, the fact Ohio State beat a top 20 Wisconsin team 59-0 with its third-string quarterback made it abundantly clear the Buckeyes were a lot better team than they were three months earlier.

“The fans focus too much on that one loss,” one committee participant said.

Non-conference schedule strength does matter. In the weeks and months after finishing as the odd man out, Baylor coach Art Briles insinuated all sorts of conspiracies why the Bears got left behind, from the lack of a Texas representative on the committee to the fact Baylor is not an old-school brand name. But the Bears’ biggest downfall was one of their own doing -- scheduling three cupcakes (SMU, Northwestern State and Buffalo) out of conference.

Multiple committee participants affirmed that Baylor would have stood a better chance had it played even one nonconference foe on the level of TCU’s game against Minnesota. Though it still might not have been enough, it’s one of the few elements a school itself can control.

It only took one year in the new system for schools and conferences around the country to take the hint. Many have announced future schedule upgrades this offseason -- including Baylor, which added a home-and-home with Utah.

Only the last one counts. If there’s one lesson we certainly learned in Year 1, it’s that past weeks’ rankings are not a predictor of the final outcome. After weeks and weeks of arguments over the TCU-Baylor head-to-head conundrum, the committee in its final deliberations not only moved the Bears ahead of the Horned Frogs (whom they beat 61-58 in mid-October) for the first time but in fact “dropped” TCU from No. 3 to No. 6. All Gary Patterson’s team did the final weekend was beat Iowa State 55-3.

“If you look closely at the guidelines given to the selection committee by the (commissioners), we can’t factor in two critical pieces -- 1) championships won and 2) full body of work -- until the last week of the season,” said Long.

Of course, that won’t stop anyone from getting presumptively worked up about the five sets of rankings that lead up to the final version, but fans should try to remember that they’re basically glamorized space-fillers. After all, it would not be very entertaining to tune in to a show where all 25 spots say “TBD.”

“It might not be exactly where they end -- because the end isn’t the end until the end -- but it gives people an idea of where their team stands,” said Long. “If we’re not ranking them, someone else is going to be ranking them that people believe are the true rankings. If we woke up and only did one ranking (at the end), it might be massively different.”

One thing that will definitely be different this season: whatever controversy inevitably emerges. Last year’s overarching scenario -- one of the Power 5 conference champs being left out -- was about as clean a resolution as possible under the new system. This season could well involve multiple champs missing the cut, at which point we’d learn something entirely new from the committee.

“Certainly some years it may be that two from one conference might get into the final four,” said Long. “Going forward, we could have a group of two-loss teams and one undefeated team, or various other combinations. I think that’s far more likely than what we had last year.”

In the meantime, when the 2015 season kicks off Thursday night, start keeping an eye out for potential top 25 wins and impressive nonconference slates. And try not to freak out over one bad loss the second week of the season.

Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel and Facebook. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.