University of Wyoming Athletic Director Tom Burman was selected to attend a conference to go through a mock simulation of the College Football Playoff selection process.
Burman attended this conference Sept. 19 and Sept. 20 in Dallas, Texas. Also in attendance were 12 other athletic directors allowing for all 13 Division 1 Football Conferences to be represented.
Burman stated “how they selected you, I would guess they would leave it up to the Conference Commissioners. The commissioners probably select the Ads that they think have up and coming programs or high profile programs. The San Diego State Athletic Director has done it before, as well as the Boise State Athletic Director.”
With this logic, Wyoming is put in the conversation with the teams that have won the past three Mountain West Conference Champions for football.
While attending the Selection Committee Conference Burman got a first-hand look at how the actual CFP selection committee operates and the resources at their disposal.
According to Burman, during the selection process the committee looked at the 2012 college football season. It’s focus was on the final rankings of the year to “select the 4 teams for the playoffs and selecting the other 4, what they call the contracted bowls, that are the other bowl games the CFP assigns. Then selecting the one member of the Groups of five.”
The team chosen from the Group of five is a team from the lower conferences like the Mountain West Conference or the American Conference. The top voted team by the CFP gets to play in the Fiesta Bowl against a Power Five conference team. This is a team from the higher skilled conferences such as the South East Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big Ten Conference.
This allows a smaller team a chance to play in a big bowl game and prove themselves as a top team.
To vote these teams in, the CFP committee looks at records, strength of schedule, head to head matchups, similar opponents and if the team won their conference championship. Burman and fellow athletic directors had to consider the same aspects for 2012.
To help filter and stream line the information the CFP has a software system that allows the members to pull up team statistics. Not only that, but you had the option to pull up teams and view them side by side of each other. There was also the option to view multiple teams at once. This allows for thorough examination of teams.
Burman stated concerning the software package “it is pretty amazing. They spent a lot of money on these analysis tools.”
With these tools available the mock committee then moved forward with their selection of the teams.
The top 4 that would go in to the playoffs ended up being similar as the way BCS voted as the top four. The top three teams were the same. They included Notre Dame, No.1; Alabama, No.2 and Florida No.3.
After this the committee came up with different results than the BCS rankings. The difference in results were due to teams with lower rankings winning their conference title allowing them to place higher than other teams.
There are some key differences between the two systems. First, the CFP format has a 4 team playoffs while the BCS would only send the top two teams head to head.
For deciding rankings Burman said “the BCS relied on polls and computers, this [CFP] is more human, there is a committee, they try not to rely immensely or exclusively on the computer polling systems and computers systems. They use them so support, they are going to say who they believe based on eye test, based on opponents, based on common opponents, who is the best team.”
The human element teams will not be decided solely on how they look statistically but how they also look during a game. However, teams will still need to win games if they want to reach the playoffs.
The current committee is made up of people with a variety of background. Each of the power five conferences is represented by an athletic director from their conference and are joined by former coaches, NCAA executives and a former USA Today reporter.
With this combination of people, you get different point of views on statistics, and each person will have a different eye test result. This helps obtain a solid consensus of who the tops teams are from different points of view.
“I was very impressed [overall] with the way the CFP is run… they have their own operation and they take it very seriously, they are very good at it, they have done a lot of significant work into how to analyze teams against each other… I think they do a really good job,” Burman said.
From this experience Wyoming now knows more about the system and what they need to do if they want to reach a high-level bowl game.
