SEC: Selection committee needs an anchor

By Chris Low | ESPN.com

We know now that a playoff is coming to college football in 2014 and that the teams participating in that playoff will be chosen by a selection committee.

Already, my thoughts go out to those brave souls who will comprise that committee.

Talk about a no-win job.

No matter what they decide, they're going to be second-guessed, scrutinized and accused of being biased.

Here's the hard part with a selection committee: Just about everybody you put on there is going to inherently have some bias, whether it's a conference commissioner, athletic director or former coach.

Let's go ahead and eliminate one group. I've never thought that we in the media should be in the business of covering teams and then deciding which of those teams gets to play for a championship.

That's simply a line we should not cross.

The same goes for former coaches.

Some of those guys would be ideal and make every effort to get the best four teams in the playoff each year.

Others simply wouldn't be able to get past old rivalries and old grudges. The problem with former coaches isn't so much that they would be lobbying to get certain teams and certain coaches into the playoff. It's more who they might try to block because of past feuds.

Again, we're only talking about a minority of former head coaches who wouldn't be able to set aside past issues, but the problem is that you'd have to rotate these guys on and off the committee. Sooner or later, you can bet there would be a problem, or at the very least, a group of fans raising bloody hell that some former coach wasn't giving them a fair shake.

So let's not go down that road, either.

That pretty much leaves conference commissioners and athletic directors, and I think the key again is making sure the panel is large enough (12 to 15 members) to ensure that one or two people don't have too much power.

There needs to be representation from around the country, both smaller and larger conferences. The public needs to know what set of criteria they are basing their decisions on, and I'd like to see some type of formula out there that's front and center and measures strength of schedule.

Finally, and this is the most important part of getting the selection committee makeup right, there needs to be a sitting chairman that's not an athletic director or conference commissioner.

Maybe this guy is a former NFL executive or a high-ranking bowl executive who's stepped aside. It just has to be somebody who truly knows football and isn't aligned with any team or conference and is willing to sink his teeth into the season, travel around and see these teams and know who's playing the best football come late November.

He'll know who's healthy and who's not. He'll know which team is limping into the postseason and which team is motoring into the postseason. He'll know if a team is beating up on paper tigers.

It still won't be perfect, but it at least gives the selection committee an anchor and somebody to pilot the ship in these uncharted waters.

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Pac-12: How the selection committee should look

By Ted Miller | ESPN.com

The answer is "No."

No, I don't want to be on the selection committee for the four-team college football playoff coming in 2014.

Not interested in the least. ESPN probably wouldn't let me anyway, but I'd rather gulp down a cockroach smoothie than be publicly announced as a member of the selection committee.

Know how folks across our fine college football land have cast aspersions of all colorful and creative types toward the li'l ole BCS? That's coming for the selection committee. Only it will be people getting excoriated, not a system of charts and numbers with no feelings to hurt. Or limbs to threaten.

But this declaration, you might have guessed, won't stop me from suggesting not only how the committee should be put together, but the extraordinary degree of transparency it must offer.

First, the committee.

The critical element is the avoidance of bias or perceived agenda. Many are suggesting the committee should simply mimic the NCAA basketball tournament committee, but I don't think it should. This is far more serious business, selecting just four teams, not 68. The annual whining that comes from hoops teams 69 and 70 is easily written off -- as in, "Hey, stop being so mediocre!" That won't be the case if 11-1 Oregon and 11-1 Alabama are the coin flip for the No. 4 spot.

To me, that means no member of the committee can be a former AQ conference coach, no member of the committee can be a current or former AQ conference athletic director, and no member can be a representative of the Fourth Estate -- that's the media, by the way.

That means you plumb the ranks of college sports administrators at lower levels -- FCS, Division II, Division III and NAIA. You go for a wide and equally distributed regional cross section. You pay attention to where each member went to school. You try to avoid guys who graduated from Ohio State, Florida, USC, Texas, etc. The size of the committee should be as large as it can be but still be manageable. Ten to 20 folks seems about right.

You then supply it with every metric imaginable throughout the season. There should be weekly conference calls that focus the discussion on what teams have accomplished and what teams can do to move up. Attention must be paid to strength of schedule, with teams not only boosted for ambitious scheduling but also penalized for playing four directional schools.

This sort of statement needs to be made, if necessary: "It's great that Mississippi State has shocked everyone and won the SEC West. But its nonconference schedule means it can't be a final four team. This will be a hard lesson for the Bulldogs and, by extension, the SEC. But they surely will thank us for it later."

Word is the committee likely will publish a poll during the season. It should be wary of this. The effort behind a weekly top-20 ranking, even if it doesn't start until midseason, won't match the effort required to present a final four. What if the top four of the final poll is different than the ultimate final four? Not good.

A better idea would be to publish an alphabetical list of 10 teams in the running for the final four positions over the final two or three weeks of the season. That would feed the fires of interest while providing leeway for committee members who want to thoroughly review the totality of the season without getting tied into a ranking system that refers back to its previous iterations each week.

Finally, there needs to be unprecedented transparency.

What does that mean? It means each committee member's final four...