Before we start, you need to understand something. I am not Ryan McGee. At least, I wasn't on Tuesday. No, I was Steve Wieberg. And Desmond Howard was Tyrone Willingham, Chris Spielman was Barry Alvarez and Mack Brown was Tom Osborne.
No, it wasn't an early college football Halloween party. It was a College Football Playoff mock selection committee exercise; with fifteen ESPN employees sitting in for the thirteen member of the actual selection committee (we made the TV suits share the role of former Air Force Academy superintendent Mike Gould).
We sat in the same swanky Grapevine, Texas, conference room that they did during the inaugural 2014 College Football Playoff and will again six times this fall, beginning a little less than a month from now, on November 2-3. We used their computers, pored over their data, and even ate turkey wraps at the same lunch tables. At the head table was the Playoff staff, headed by executive director Bill Hancock and committee chair Jeff Long (sitting along his stand-in for the day, Heather Dinich).
The idea was to educate us all on the intricacies of the process that not only determines the four teams that will play for the national championship, beginning with the semifinals -- Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic and Capital One Orange Bowl -- but also the teams that will participate in the other New Years Six bowl games, the Rose Bowl Game Presented by Northwestern Mutual and Allstate Sugar Bowl (selected by the bowls themselves from the teams remaining) and the Fiesta and Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, selected by the committee itself.
Tuesday's exercise was based on the 2011 college football season. It's the year that LSU and Alabama played a rematch in the national championship game, much to chagrin of the non-SEC world, especially the 11-1 squads of Oklahoma State, and Stanford. Would-be BCS busters Boise State and Houston also finished 11-1, but were staggered by late stumbles against TCU and Southern Miss.
After six hours of deliberation (the real committee meets much longer) and nine rounds of voting, this is what we came up with, compared to how the BCS formulas sorted it out for real back in 2011.
In 2011 there wasn't much of a question about who the best three teams were. But you can see a clear difference in the weight of a conference championship when it came to ranking teams, certainly among the Power 5 schools (keep in mind that in '11 TCU was in the Mountain West and West Virginia was in the shrinking Big East).
As for our bowl assignments, it went like this:
CFP Semifinals
Cotton Bowl: 1. LSU vs. 4. Oregon Orange Bowl: 2. Alabama vs. 3. Oklahoma State
New Year's Six bowls selected by bowl committee (our best guess)
Rose: 5. Wisconsin vs. 8. Stanford Sugar: 7. Arkansas vs. 10. Kansas State
New Year's Six bowls selected by us
Fiesta: 9. South Carolina vs. 6. Boise State Peach: 12. Clemson vs. 13. TCU
The semifinal assignments are easy. The top seed plays the fourth, the second plays the third. The sites of the matchups are picked to be as beneficial to the higher-seeded team when possible.
College Football Playoff executive director Hancock has never been shy about the criteria when it comes to the other bowls. We were supposed to find the best matchups, avoid regular-season rematches whenever possible, pick a site that is beneficial for the higher-seeded team, a site that won't be too taxing on fans, and not sending a team to a game they've been to several times recently.
That's why you don't see Clemson and South Carolina playing in Atlanta. They would have just played at the end of the regular season. We actually flip-flopped these pairings a couple of times before ultimately going with the best seeding matchups.
So, what about the mock selection committee experience as a whole? This was Year 2 for me, though last year's setup was at ESPN HQ in Connecticut. This felt much more authentic. To explain it all would take up entirely too many words, so here's the four-point version.
1. Strength of schedule REALLY matters
In the official Playoff "Federalist Papers" as Hancock calls them, there are only four main criteria listed when it comes to selecting teams: Championships won, strength of schedule, head-to-head competition (if it occurred) and comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory). They aren't ranked. But if they were, strength of schedule might be ranked first through fifth. A tricked-out computer data system pops any numbers that any committee member needs at any moment. It's a mountain of information. There is no single metric for strength of schedule; instead the members are expected to sort it out on their own looking at all those numbers. In the two years I've done this there is no single point of debate that has lasted longer or ultimately made more decisions. Each member is encouraged to bring their own research material (a bit of a change for 2014) and on Tuesday, Long had a gorgeous color-coded chart. He (and an intern) take multiple strength of schedule rankings, average them out, and list them on his chart. Every single round of our mock, the group asked him to shout out that number and all six of our tiebreaker votes were pretty clearly tilted by those rankings. So, Baylor ... we're looking at you.
2. This isn't as simple as you think it is
This isn't a group of people showing up with a top 25 ballot, throwing it down, tallying up the votes, and then going to play golf. When members arrive for the meetings, they are to have their lists of the 30 best teams in the nation, unranked, and all of those teams are thrown into the hopper. The 30-ish teams receiving the most votes are then posted and the remainder of the day is spent culling that down to the final 25. At any time a ranking can be challenged by committee member and a revote takes place. On Tuesday we had three challenges, both received the three endorsements needed to start the revote, and two resulted in swapping a couple of teams.
3. They are super-serious about recusing people
To avoid conflicts of interest, members of the committee have to sit out votes and discussions concerning schools where they are employed (ex. Arkansas athletic director Long), were employed for a long time (Nebraska and Osborne), or even where they have had children attend. "No one is happy about having to leave the room," Hancock admitted, reflecting back on his decades with similar (but softer) rules working on the NCAA basketball tournament selection committee. "But everyone understands. Honestly, it hurts us all when a guy like Tom Osborne has to leave the discussion, but it's also a compliment. It means his team is doing really well."
4. Humans = context
The computers of the BCS never accounted for rain, injuries, or extenuating circumstances. A human committee does. There will never be a better example than the 2011 Oklahoma State team. The BCS computer didn't take into account that the Cowboys' lone loss, to a so-so Iowa State squad on the road, came the day after a horrible plane crash that killed four, including the women's head and assistant basketball coaches. Our committee remembered that. So that Iowa State loss wasn't held against them and they received much consideration for the No. 2 spot.