Arkansas AD Jeff Long, the Chair of this year’s inaugural CFP selection committee, does not anticipate changes to the current format. Long spoke on a panel yesterday at the ’14 IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum alongside CFP Exec Dir Bill Hancock and ESPN Senior VP/Sports Management Rob Temple. Long said, “My initial impression is that I don’t think we recommend changes to it. But we want to give it some time and separation at the end of this process before we talk about it again. As a committee, we said we were going to let this process work all the way through, and when we get together in April as a committee, we’ll sit down and discuss the entire process and decide if there’s things that we’d recommend to the management committee.” Throughout the 30-minute conversation, Long discussed the experience of chairing the inaugural committee, working with different members and how the committee ended up with the four-team field of Alabama, Oregon, Florida State and Ohio State. “We start every week grabbing 30 teams from each committee member, and those teams come into our pool, and we start at the top, and we grab three teams,” Long said. “We discuss those three teams, we’d grab six more, discuss and debate, do that all the way through the Top 25. Each week when I talked about starting with a clean sheet of paper, that’s what we meant.” Hancock added that there are no immediate plans to expand the field to eight teams. He said. “That’s why we did the four-team field (deal) for 12 years, because we wanted folks to know that this is a stable event and is going to be with us for 12 years. People miss the connection between the postseason and the regular season. We know there’s a tipping point beyond where the postseason begins to erode the regular season. We just can’t have that happen in college football."
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Hancock said there are no immediate plans to
expand the field to eight teams |
DEFENDING THEIR RANKINGS: When it comes to the committee’s weekly rankings, which were heavily discussed and often criticized throughout the season, Long said that the management committee initially suggested releasing rankings earlier in the season, but only releasing them every other week. Long: “We as a committee felt that once we made a ranking, we needed to do that every week because that’s what college football fans have come to expect. And if we don’t do a ranking, then others will fill that space, whether it be the AP or Coaches' Poll. Other than the people on the committee needing to show up each and every week to do the rankings, I don’t know what issues it caused. I’m sure it caused lots of issues in the media, fan base, and certainly generated a tremendous amount of discussion about college football.” Said Hancock: “These weekly rankings are so good for the regular season. We saw that with the BCS standings and just didn’t want to give that up."
QUICK HITS
* Long, on whether Ohio State’s brand helped it into the playoff: “I never got that sense at all. We looked at Ohio State and their performance on the field, and that’s what led to their inclusion in the final four. The Ohio State brand had nothing to do with that. It had to do with that team and their performance on the field.”
* Temple, on how the CFP changed ESPN’s approach: “When this came along, we knew it was an entirely new reset, new concepts built around the national championship game. So we took a new approach and navigated through it. We had the World Cup earlier this summer, the launch of the SEC Network … It was extraordinarily complex. It was a lot, and we had our bandwidth full this year.”
