PLAYOFF PRIMER
What: A four-team playoff to determine college football's national championship.
How the teams are chosen: A 12-member selection committee will rank the nation's Top 25 teams on a weekly basis beginning Tuesday night. The top four teams in the committee's final ranking on Dec. 4 will be placed in the playoff, with the Nos. 1 and 4 teams meeting in one semifinal and the Nos. 2 and 3 teams in the other.
Selection committee members: Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt (chairman), Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez, former Southern Mississippi coach Jeff Bower, former Central Michigan coach Herb Deromedi, former NCAA executive Tom Jernstedt, former Vanderbilt coach Bobby Johnson, Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long, Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens, Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich, former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former USA Today college football reporter Steve Wieberg and former Stanford, Notre Dame and Washington coach Tyrone Willingham.
Rankings show on TV: The committee's first rankings of the season will be unveiled Tuesday in an hour-long show that begins at 7 p.m. on ESPN. The show will be hosted by Rece Davis, joined in the studio by analysts David Pollack and Joey Galloway.
This season's semifinal sites: The Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl in Atlanta and the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz., both on Dec. 31. The No. 1 seed generally is assigned to the semifinal closest to its campus.
National championship game: The semifinal winners will meet on Jan. 9 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla.
While media and coaches’ polls have been ranking college football teams since August, this season’s first rankings that matter will be released Tuesday night.
The College Football Playoff selection committee, a 12-member group that ultimately will choose the four teams to compete for the national championship, will complete a two-day meeting near Dallas by unveiling its first Top 25 of the season.
The committee will re-rank the teams each week until its top four are placed in the playoff bracket on Dec. 4.
The committee’s weekly work will be of particular interest to Atlanta’s Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, which will host the biggest game in its 49-year history on Dec. 31: one of the playoff semifinals, matching either the Nos. 1 and 4 teams or the Nos. 2 and 3 teams.
The Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl’s 78-member board of advisers will gather in a large board room, which will be set up theater-style, at the bowl’s Buckhead offices each Tuesday in November to watch the selection committee reveal its rankings live on ESPN.
“We’ll meet from 6 to 7 (p.m.), then we’ll turn on the TV and enjoy watching the selection show every Tuesday night to see what the committee rankings look like,” Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl Inc. president and CEO Gary Stokan said.
“Our people, our volunteers, are so excited because, knowing the work we all have put in for so long, to finally reach the pinnacle of having the most important college football game ever in Atlanta is so rewarding. This is a special year.”
This season’s other semifinal will be played in the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz.
The Associated Press and coaches’ polls, which have been released weekly since the start of the season but have no bearing on the playoff, agree this week on the top four teams, all undefeated: No. 1 Alabama, No. 2 Michigan, No. 3 Clemson and No. 4 Washington.
The selection committee’s initial rankings are expected to have the same top four teams as those polls — there are no other unbeaten teams from the five power conferences — but Michigan and Clemson could be flip-flopped. That would make the teams from last season’s national championship game, Alabama and Clemson, Nos. 1 and 2.
Clemson’s victories this season over Louisville, Auburn and Florida State — ranked Nos. 5, 11 and 19, respectively, in this week’s AP poll — should resonate with a committee that values victories over highly regarded opponents.
But however the committee, which includes current athletic directors, former coaches and others, sees the pecking order this week, key games loom that could test and potentially shuffle the rankings, including Alabama at LSU (No. 15 in the AP poll) on Saturday night.
One thing already clear is the wisdom of the committee’s decision not to rank teams until two months into the season. Of the 25 teams ranked in the preseason AP media poll, 12 are unranked this week.
In the past two weeks, Stokan has attended games involving teams that could be Atlanta-bound for a playoff semifinal in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl if they keep winning. He was in Tuscaloosa, Ala., for Alabama’s victory over Texas A&M and in Salt Lake City for Washington’s win over Utah.
If Alabama or Clemson is the selection committee’s No. 1-ranked team on Dec. 4, it would face the No. 4 team in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. That is because the top seed generally is assigned to the semifinal nearest its campus.
One exception to that rule: If the No. 1 seed would have a crowd disadvantage at the nearest semifinal site, it might be sent elsewhere. For example, if Michigan were the No. 1 seed and Alabama or Clemson the No. 4 seed, the committee would consider assigning that semifinal matchup to the Fiesta Bowl rather than the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.
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