Data analytics will play a roll in College Football Playoffs

The College Football Playoff (CFP) selection committee met recently in preparation for the upcoming season. Following the first year of the 12-team Playoff, the meeting marked the culmination of six months of offseason work reviewing the committee’s policies, procedures and data analytics to ensure the group is equipped with the best resources available when ranking the country’s top 25 college football teams.

As a part of these offseason efforts, the CFP convened two groups, a data analytics panel and a membership panel to assess these areas. Following months of work, these groups reviewed their proposed modifications with the CFP management committee and selection committee.

Changes for the upcoming season include enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule. The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents. An additional metric, record strength, has been added to the selection committee’s analysis to go beyond a team’s schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule. This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team.

Procedural changes for this year include an update to the recusal policy to establish two separate distinctions: a full recusal, consistent with the previous policy; and a partial recusal, which allows selection committee members to remain in the room for the discussion of teams they are partially recused from, but continue to prevent them from voting during those rounds.

At the direction of the CFP management committee, the membership panel also reviewed the movement of idle teams from the penultimate to final ranking. The selection committee reaffirmed that movement in the final week should be evidence-based and did not recommend creating a formal policy prohibiting such movement.

Finally, the selection committee will move its new member orientation session from September to October when all 13 members will convene to review the first eight weeks of the season and familiarize themselves with the computer systems they will use for the voting process beginning in November. No ranking or voting will be conducted during this meeting.

These changes follow the CFP management committee’s spring decision to modify the seeding and bye policies of the 12-team Playoff. The new policy will guarantee the five highest-ranked conference champions a place in the Playoff but will no longer include a bye for the four highest-ranked champions. Seeding will now be based directly on the final ranking of the CFP selection committee, with the four highest-ranked teams receiving a first-round bye.

“All of these modifications will help the selection committee as they rank the top 25 teams,” said Rich Clark, executive director of the College Football Playoff. “We feel these changes will help construct a postseason bracket that recognizes the best performances and teams on the field during the regular season, and I want to thank our veteran selection committee members and data analytics groups for helping implement these changes.”

The selection committee will announce its first of six rankings on November 4. The committee members will convene in person on Mondays and Tuesdays, revealing their rankings each week on ESPN.