GRAPEVINE, Texas — It was between 1:30 and 2 a.m. Sunday after the conference championship games when the 13 members of the College Football Playoff selection committee finally left their meeting room. They were held up for hours as they determined the top four teams in the country.
They knew what they could potentially end up with — and it didn’t feel good.
As hard as it was for them to remove their emotions from the process, the sinking feeling about eliminating an undefeated Power 5 conference champion was tempered by the belief that they did what they were tasked to do — vote for the four best teams.
“We all had an emotional bond, like, ‘Holy s—, this is really going to suck to do this,'” one committee member told ESPN. [to] Are they good enough to win a national championship, and it’s just coming back [to] We didn’t think they could.”
There was no discussion of dropping the SEC because the committee maintains it talks about teams, not conferences. There was no serious consideration to include Alabama without Texas because there was so much respect at home for the Longhorns’ Week 2 win in Tuscaloosa. There wasn’t enough support in the room to consider Georgia “unequivocally” one of the four best teams in the country — typical of teams that don’t win their conference titles.
Instead, the crux of Sunday morning’s wee debate centered on how to evaluate Florida State, which beat Louisville with a third-string quarterback after both. Jordan Travis and its backup, Tate Roadmaker, was away by injury. While the Seminoles’ defense impressed the committee — and has all year — there were significant concerns about FSU’s offense.
Undefeated Michigan won the Big Ten. Undefeated Washington won the Pac-12. Alabama knocked off the No. 1 team, Georgia, to win the SEC and one-loss Texas, which easily won the Big 12, knocked off the SEC champion in September.
And now Florida State has found a way to win — again.
It was the final layer of complexity in what was already the toughest, most controversial decision any CFP committee has had to make in a decade of four-team playoffs. Never before has an undefeated Power 5 conference champion been eliminated from the CFP — but never before have seven Power 5 teams finished the regular season with one loss or fewer. “We’ve never had such a good year with eight teams, and five conference champions 1 through 5, we’ve never come out like that,” CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. “My feeling is that it was probably the hardest.”
For two and a half days During the conference championship game weekend, the CFP’s selection committee was hiding in plain sight.
As families dressed in Christmas-themed costumes infiltrated the sprawling Gaylord Texan resort for its annual ice sculpture exhibit, college football’s most powerful men went almost unnoticed, save for a cardboard sign bearing the CFP logo that some fans paused to look at. Get out of the elevator and go to their room.
“Is Bama in there?!” a man asked a security guard sitting on a stool outside a meeting room Saturday night after the Tide’s SEC championship win over No. 1 Georgia.
The guard just shrugged.
As it turned out, Bama was in for a loss — at the expense of undefeated ACC champion Florida State. It was an unprecedented decision that sparked outrage across the sport. FSU coach Mike Norvell said he was “disgusted and angry.” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said it was unimaginable. Travis, the Seminoles’ injured quarterback, said he wished he had broken his leg earlier in the season so the committee could see the team was still great without him.
The committee stands by its decision.
“At the end of the day, everyone had the same goal in mind — do we have the best four teams?” A member of the committee. “And we all felt pretty good that we did.”
Although the ACC Championship Game had not yet begun to unfold, members’ opinions were beginning to truly take shape. The team became concerned as it watched the Noles struggle for first downs in the first half. The committee’s protocol includes a section that specifically addresses “unavailability of key players … that may affect a team’s performance during the season or may affect its postseason performance.” It allows the committee to do something it deliberately avoids every week: look ahead.
“People really wanted to talk about it,” said one committee member. “We don’t really have that conversation when we’re watching games. But we have to talk about the elephant in the room. What exactly happened? We talked about going 13-0. We talked about the teams they beat. And they were conference champs. . That’s all. It took a while.”
Hancock rarely, if ever, shared the results of the vote with those in the room, though sometimes he would mention if they were nearby. Voting is done in person on each committee member’s laptop. Committee members simply hover their mouse over a group and click to vote. If a committee member is withdrawn from voting for a particular party, it is grayed out on his laptop, impossible to click on.
They vote in groups in small batches and continue the process of voting and debating in groups until a complete list of 25 is compiled. So it’s not like they start talking about Texas and Alabama and vote them around to make it fit.
“People may not believe it, but we don’t say, ‘Oh my God, if we vote this way, the SEC is going to go away,'” said one source. “It never came up. Ever. We literally look at teams, pit them against each other and say, ‘Who did they beat? Who didn’t they beat? Who did they beat on the road? What’s their strength of schedule? ‘ Look at the matrix and all the data.”
Committee members know to vote when it’s tied, because they have to vote again. There was an idea in the room Saturday night, though, as they voted more, the group agreed Florida State should be No. 5.
Committee chairman and NC State athletic director Boo Corrigan said the group voted on the top four six to eight times and “there was never a moment to rush it.” A source said the conversations were “tense” at times. Another said it was “never hot, never ugly” but that it was “a lot more complicated and a lot more painful than some people think.”
On Sunday at 8:30 am, the committee meeting at the City Corporation again started discussion and voting.
Because the selection committee is made up of people from different backgrounds — former coaches, players, sitting athletic directors and a former sports reporter — there are different perspectives in the room.
Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart is one of them, and had the unique experience of seeing FSU’s title game opponents Alabama, Georgia and Louisville in person as his Wildcats also faced them. He was given the opportunity to share his thoughts with the group on each of those groups. Corrigan said the conversation among the coaches was: “Who do they want to play? Who do they not want to play?”
“They’ve got a significant voice in the room,” he said.
Ultimately, though, the difference between Alabama and Florida State boiled down to the committee’s written protocol, particularly the emphasis on strength of schedule — which gave Alabama the edge — and the section that allowed committee members to project what Florida State could become. It looks like a semifinal without their star quarterback.
Not having Heisman hopeful starter Travis “completely changes their offense,” Corrigan said, “and that was a really big factor with the committee as we went through everything.”
So was the Longhorns’ double-digit win at Alabama in Week 2. The committee has been consistent in honoring head-to-head results throughout the season and felt it was important to be consistent on Selection Day — however they believed. Alabama has improved since that September loss.
“It’s something you can’t ignore,” one person said. “At the end of the day, they played their schedule, they played them at home, they won and they beat them — and that was big.”
The committee’s decision to drop Florida State on Sunday afternoon wasn’t the only one that drew criticism.
The team awarded undefeated No. 23 Liberty a New Year’s Six bowl bid instead of two-loss No. 24 SMU, which defeated a ranked team in its AAC title game. In addition to voting multiple times at the top of the rankings, the committee also voted repeatedly at the bottom, pushing the morning meeting to the 11 a.m. city cutoff time. The results kept going back and forth between Liberty and SMU, but in the end, the group found Liberty to be better.
American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco fumed.
“For a decade, that committee used an unfair strength of schedule argument against our great undefeated teams at UCF, Cincinnati and Houston, who played really tough schedules with P5 opponents,” he told ESPN, “and then they put a clear double standard on it. Applies. Condition.”
A former selection committee member was shocked and said the inconsistencies in this year’s rankings were “shocking”.
“It may need a complete restoration before next year,” said the former committee member. “If the Liberty are a Group of 5 playoff team compared to others, that’s a problem. There are no Power 5 opponents on the schedule, and the teams they beat have poor records.”
Not since 2014, in the inaugural season of the CFP, the committee produced something close to so much controversy. That year, the committee dropped TCU from No. 3 to No. 6 in the final rankings because there was no conference championship game in the Big 12 at the time.
Now, in the final season of a four-team system, an entirely different group of 13 committee members has robbed an undefeated team of its conference title. In addition to the vitriol from Florida State fans, the reaction was remarkable, according to multiple sources, including some from colleagues, friends and peers.
This would be the perfect season for the new 12-team playoff format to begin. Next year, the CFP will include the five highest-ranked conference champions and the next seven highest-ranked teams, assuming the proposed new format is rubber-stamped by presidents and chancellors at their annual meeting before the national championship game in Houston. It guarantees a spot for each power-conference champ and a group of 5 conference champions. As excited as fans may be for a more inclusive system, Hancock cautioned that it won’t solve the problem of leaving out a talented team.
“People look for perfection, and there are going to be teams that don’t quite make it to 12 who are going to ask some serious questions,” said Hancock, who will retire after this season. “I laugh because the simple answer is, ‘Yes, I wish we had 12 years.’ But some of us may think that this is not going to be such a drug.
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