Well, today is the day college football kinda sorta changes forever. The College Football Playoff selection committee will unveil its first batch of rankings tonight, providing college football fans with our first collective look behind the metaphorical curtain to the selection committee’s operations and an idea on just how this committee might be evaluating teams this season.
Doug Flutie, a former Heisman Trophy winner at Boston College and currently an analyst for NBC, is here to give you the basics of the new system, in case you are still trying to figure things out.
The rankings released tonight may not necessarily suggest which teams have the best chance to be selected in the four-team playoff field. An emphasis on winning a conference championship is supposed to, in theory, be given some consideration from the committee. We’ll see. One thing the rankings will give us a more accurate barometer is just where the top teams in the Group of Five fall compared to each other. With one spot in the access bowl line-up reserved for the highest ranked conference champion form the American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West Conference and Sun Belt Conference, these rankings will be important to pay attention to. This will be of particular interest to fans of East Carolina, Marshall and Colorado State or Boise State. We’ll sort that out later.
OK, there are still a few hours to go, so feel free to share your predictions on which teams will be on top of the College Football Playoff selection committee rankings tonight.