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There weren’t a ton of surprises with the College Football Playoff selection committee’s first in-season set of rankings. The top 10 teams matched the AP Top 25, and the only handwringing about the current 12-team CFP bracket came in the ordering of the teams seeded sixth through 10th. Oregon was a few spots lower than it has been in the AP poll, which was defensible because the Ducks have just one win over a team with a .500 or better record (Northwestern). Otherwise, everything that happened Tuesday night was about as expected. Ohio State was the committee’s top team, followed by Indiana, Texas A&M and Alabama (just as the AP poll had it). The bottom of the 12-team bracket also mirrored our expectations, with Virginia and Memphis sneaking into the fold as automatic qualifiers for the ACC and the American, the highest-ranked Group of 5 conference champion. Neither team would have made the field as an at-large, but the five highest-ranked conference champions make the bracket. And so, Texas and Oklahoma were bumped out in favor of the AQs. It wasn’t worth getting worked up over, especially considering how many meaningful SEC games there are still to play. But there were also some serious red flags raised, ones we can’t ignore over the final few weeks of the season. Based on the comments made by first-year CFP selection committee chair Mack Rhoades, it was clear that subjectivity ruled the day. Another way to put it: It was all about vibes. It was the eye test. It was whatever the committee wanted to do — and could justify by saying that there were a few former college football coaches who watched these teams, and the entire selection committee could rely on their film evaluation. Seriously. Rhoades said multiple times that Ohio State had better offensive line play than Indiana. That was one of the main reasons the Buckeyes were ranked ahead of the Hoosiers, apparently! Even though both were unbeaten and Indiana had a better win on its resume … but I digress. “We refer to it as art and science,” Rhoades said Tuesday night. “The art is watching the team on film and tape and how good they are, how physical they are up front, offensive line, defensive line play, how good are they up the middle, their quarterback play, their skill players — and then certainly contemplating and looking at metrics. “Not any one metric weighted heavier than the other. We use them all at our disposal to try to get the very best answer, and I think that’s where the public misses out a little bit; just the beauty in this is the actual debate and discussion and conversation in the room when we’re talking about all of those metrics.” OK, so … vibes it is! On two-loss Notre Dame, who was ranked six spots ahead of two-loss Miami (who beat the Irish back in Week 1): “Early on, defensively, maybe they weren’t as good as what we thought they would be, but certainly more recently, it seems like they’ve been much, much better defensively. Six straight wins. You look at their backfield — Jadarian Price, Jeremiyah Love — probably the best backfield in the country when you think about a one-two punch. … We think Notre Dame — when we look at the tape — we think Notre Dame is a really solid football team, both sides of the ball.” On one-loss Alabama, who has the worst loss of any CFP contender this year (to Florida State back in Week 1): “There were certainly discussion about the Florida State loss early on, but it just felt like that four-game stretch — which by the way, was historical in the SEC. Nobody has beaten four straight ranked teams without a bye. Then they also finish that out with a good win against South Carolina. That was the discussion. I think they’re getting elite quarterback play right now from (Ty) Simpson, so they’re a really, really good football team.” Both Notre Dame and Alabama have resumes that cannot and should not be explained with a simple of wave of the hand. But that’s essentially what this committee is doing. I had a feeling it might, because we’ve seen past committees do the same thing. They’ll trot out a chair who says Team X got better over the course of a season, or that the group thinks Team Y is simply better than Team Z. It happens because there is very little transparency in the selection process, and also because that’s the way the CFP creators wanted it to be. They wanted subjectivity after years of the objective Bowl Championship Series system. They wanted humans arguing after years of computers spitting out numbers. I get why. But now that we’re a decade and a half into the CFP era, it’s harder to stomach decisions based on those “in the room who are skilled at watching tape” and metrics that the committee uses but chooses not to release publicly (like its official strength of schedule data, and its new strength of record metric). And right now, we’re being told that a group that features six sitting athletic directors who have time-consuming day jobs — and make up exactly half of the selection committee — should be trusted without question. I take issue with that. Fans deserve better. We all do. We deserve comprehensive data, full transparency and consistency in evaluation. And, for as much as we love good vibes in this crazy sport, we won’t let vibes-based analysis stand. These teams deserve better, too.
