It’s Unpleasant to Hear, But the Committee Should Stay

In the state of Florida’s upcoming 2024 budget proposal, Governor Ron DeSantis has promised to include an interesting provision: $1 million to sue the committee that selects the teams to compete in the College Football Playoff (CFP) for not including the Florida State University (FSU) Seminoles. While his anger is understandable, his threat of legal action is a step too far, as are calls by others to disband the committee. The CFP committee is frustrating, but I don’t know if there’s a much better system out there.

The committee announced this year’s CFP’s four participants on December 3, chosen from 133 Division I teams: first seed Michigan Wolverines (13-0), second seed Washington Huskies (13-0), third seed Texas Longhorns (12-1), and fourth seed Alabama Crimson Tide (12-1). This seems like a fair ranking, with the two undefeated teams nabbing the top two spots.

However, controversially missing from the competition is FSU, who also went 13-0 and won their conference, the ACC. Even though the Seminoles fit the usual criteria for a playoff team—having one or fewer losses and being from a Power 5 school (a school within one of the five best conferences)—they were unceremoniously dumped for one reason: their star quarterback is out for the season.

After senior quarterback Jordan Travis suffered a left leg injury in Week 12, backup Tate Rodemaker led them to a victory over North Alabama. The next week, FSU defeated their rivals, the Florida Gators, but Rodemaker also went down with an injury, forcing untested freshman Brock Glenn into the lineup. The gutsy performance nevertheless pushed them up to fourth in that week’s committee rankings. Because the top four teams make the playoffs every year, seemingly all the Seminoles needed to do was beat the 14th-seeded Louisville Cardinals in their last game of the season. They did just that, holding Louisville to just six points, their fewest in 70 games. But as a reward for this defensive masterclass, they got a fifth-seed ranking and no playoff appearance.

The committee’s explanation for this snub was that with Travis injured, the Seminoles weren’t one of the four best teams in the country. While that is true, they also weren’t the week before, when they were seeded fourth even after both Travis and Rodemaker’s injuries, so why did they get demoted after an impressive win? Additionally, if the decision is solely based on which teams are currently the best, the Seminoles without Travis should be lower on the list, behind the sixth- and seventh-seeded Georgia Bulldogs and Ohio State Buckeyes. The actual guideline is likely some combination of performance and ability, but it’s all very vague.

This isn’t normal for most sports. Professional leagues have clearly defined systems that impartially determine placing. The CFP doesn’t, relying on the judgments of its 13 committee members, made up of former players and even current athletic directors at universities. But that subjectivity is because college sports are fundamentally different. Another omission from the CFP—one that went completely unnoticed—was the 13-0 Liberty Flames, who finished as only the 23rd seed despite winning every single game. Where is the outrage for that? Well, the explanation behind this seemingly heinous ranking is simple: they played far inferior teams.

Unlike in the NFL, where most teams are roughly equal in strength, there are massive disparities at the collegiate level. As a result, the National Collegiate Athletic Association creates schedules to ensure that, overall, better teams play better teams and worse teams play worse teams more often. While Liberty had an undefeated record, they did not play a single top-60 team and had the easiest schedule of all 133 teams. It would be madness to claim that they should make the playoffs simply by virtue of beating some of the worst teams in the country.

In fact, Liberty’s ranking has led to backlash in the other direction; their procurement of a bowl game on New Year’s Day over the 11-2 but vastly superior SMU Mustangs has led to complaints over inconsistencies. After all, a system that prioritizes one feature is frustrating, but at least it’s constant. However, when it wildly shifts back and forth between rewarding winning versus being the best, it can appear biased for or against certain teams.

As a fan, any time your favorite team gets wronged by a subjective party, it’s easy and satisfying to accuse them of bias. This is an experience that every referee knows far too well. On the other hand, it’s much harder to claim that an objective entity with preset conditions for its decisions is conspiring to “take down” your team. The problem with the CFP committee is that by choosing a playoff bracket in a secret meeting, it leaves itself open to allegations of rigging in a way that professional sports just don’t do. So should college football—and basketball, which selects half of March Madness by committee—adopt objective ranking schemes? No, probably not.

As mentioned above, college sports are distinctly different from sports at the professional level in many important ways. Take college football. With 133 teams, it’s challenging to create a single system that accounts for every irregularity present in the schedule, such as some teams playing more games than others. There’s no way to determine which teams are the “best” without using statistics, which are obviously flawed. Moreover, as seen with 13-0 Liberty, the difficulty of each team’s schedule varies greatly, so you also can’t just pick playoff teams by descending record. Even if you did that, tiebreakers would be a nightmare. Overall, it would simply be impossible to replicate a system used for much fewer teams in a much more standardized league.

The other issue with neutral ranking structures is evident in professional leagues that use them. While they may seem like a meritocratic system promoting only the best, most deserving teams, that is not at all true. Last year, in the NFL, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers made the playoffs with an 8-9 record, while Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Washington—none of whom had losing records—all missed out. Not only that, Tampa Bay got to host a playoff game against the 12-5 Dallas Cowboys, who promptly steamrolled them. This year, in the MLB, the Minnesota Twins made the playoffs despite having a worse record than the Seattle Mariners.

These two examples occurred because Tampa Bay and Minnesota reside in the two worst divisions in their respective leagues. While other teams around their skill level have to compete in fierce wild-card races, they both coasted to wins in divisions where the second-place finishers were, respectively, the Carolina Panthers and Detroit Tigers. Yuck. Even systems that appear devoid of luck inevitably favor some teams unfairly.

Of course, that’s not to say that I’m advocating for professional leagues to adopt the collegiate structure of decisions by committee. Those would generate far more controversy, and draft lotteries and referees already do an excellent job of convincing people that sports are rigged. Playoffs aren’t perfectly equal, but there’s a reason that leagues separate teams into conferences and divisions rather than just rewarding the teams with the best records: it’s more exciting, and rivalries can more easily form. That said, neither is the professional system transposable onto the collegiate scene, which is simply too disorganized.

This is the last year of the CFP as we know it. Next year, for the first time, 12 teams will make the CFP, which should be a huge improvement. While usually half of the teams in most professional leagues make the playoffs, only three percent do so in college football, so this tripling is sorely needed. FSU absolutely deserved to make the CFP, and Georgia and Ohio State should have too.

However, the teams will still be decided subjectively. The top six teams will be the highest-ranked conference winners (according to the committee), with the rest being the top teams remaining (also according to the committee). Disputes will likely persist, with some teams unfairly losing out on the 12th seed, though they will be lower-profile.

The biggest need for this sport is thus not a big retooling of the entire structure that determines the CFP, but more modest reforms, most obviously transparency and accountability. The criteria for making the CFP must be made clear and applied consistently so that the controversy surrounding FSU never happens again.