In just over a week, the top flight of college football will enter a new era under the rule of the College Football Playoff, a four-team playoff designed to put the four best college football teams on three separate fields at the end of the season to decide the national champion.
Gone are the computer selections, the Harris Interactive poll and automatic qualifiers. The AP Poll and the USA Today Coaches’ Poll will both crown a champion, but will have no bearing on the College Football Playoff.
In this new world of college football, a 13-member panel is made up of current and former university officials, former coaches and players, members of the media and one athletic director from each “Power 5” conference. These panel members will select, in order, the top four teams in the FBS at the end of the season. The committee, chaired by Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long, will release weekly top 25 rankings every Tuesday beginning Oct. 28.
The national semifinals will rotate between the six major bowls: the Sugar Bowl and the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl and the Orange Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl and the Peach Bowl. Each of the six bowls will be played on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.
After the final rankings are released on Selection Sunday, Dec. 7, the committee will select the teams for the six bowls, based on rankings and the conference affiliations of each. At each instance, the committee will seek to create the closest matchup in each bowl while avoiding season rematches and intra-conference contests in the non-semifinal bowls.
Without variance, the No. 1 team will play the No. 4 team in the national semifinal closest to the No. 1 team’s campus. The No. 2 and No. 3 teams will play in the remaining semifinal. The winner of each game will go on to the National Championship game, played every year on a Monday in January.
This season, the Sugar Bowl and Rose Bowl will be the national semifinals, and the National Championship will be claimed at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Jan. 12.
Rematches won’t be avoided in the national semifinals. At the end of the 2013 season, had the Playoff been in effect, No. 3 Alabama would have played No. 2 Auburn in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California – a playoff Iron Bowl.
If Alabama should finish as the top-ranked team in the nation, it will contest at the national semifinal in the Sugar Bowl, where the Crimson Tide is 0-2 in recent years, with losses to Utah and Oklahoma.
