An inside look at the College Football Playoff selection process at the Texas hotel where it all goes down

GRAPEVINE, Texas — The grandiose display at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center just north of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport is practically an embodiment of what the hype building up to the final ranking of the College Football Playoff looks like.

The entrance of the hotel has a golden hue to it. The real prize is beyond the lobby and leads you into a sky-high enclosed glass ceiling with a big yellow star in the middle of it. A sign of promising things to come, that the journey is truly beginning after the anticipation of arriving.

The hotel, which opened in 2004, has hosted the CFP committee for the last 11 years, a fitting spot for the fate of college football teams to be decided by 13 members. The key players in college football are represented in the Primrose Room on the fourth floor, deep inside the hotel, tucked away out of the public eye.

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Built on three core principles — integrity, humility, and excellence — the CFP committee has five Tuesdays and one Sunday to rank the 25 best teams in the sport each year. On the surface, it sounds simple enough. Win enough games and you have nothing to worry about. Drop games to inferior foes and your season is in jeopardy. But on that final Sunday, one that determines the 12 best teams with the best resumés, the 12 teams whose hope is kept alive for a national title, the process is anything but simple.

What happens inside the room leading up to the December selection Sunday? The Inquirer was invited to participate in a mock exercise last week, led by CFP executive director Rich Clark, to give insight into what happens in the weeks leading up to ranking reveal day, which sets up the playoff matchups.

“I think the transparency is really important, and that people understand what the process is,” Clark said. “Even though we may not talk directly about the decisions of individual committee members, we do want people to understand how they arrive at those decisions and what the process is. And I think that’s important, because people want to know why the teams that were selected are in the playoff, and for them to have some idea about how this process works is really important. And there’s no better people to sort of translate what happened here out to the public than our media partners.”

The 13 members of the CFP selection committee are not compensated. Among the volunteers are former college coaches, athletic directors, players, and journalists, and they serve three-year terms on the committee. This year’s selection committee includes Chris Ault, Mike Riley, Troy Dannen, Wesley Walls, David Salyer, Ivan Maisel, Hunter Yurachek, Jeff Long, Carla Williams, Chris Massaro, Randall McDaniel, Mack Rhoades, and Mark Dantonio.

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Because of the diversity of the committee, there are recusals in place to prevent potential conflicts of interest. There are full recusals if a member is receiving direct compensation from a school or has an immediate family member who is part of the football program in some capacity.

Some examples of full recusals on this year’s committee: former coach Dantonio still has ties to Michigan State, Williams is the athletic director at Virginia, and Ault has ties to Nevada, where he was the longtime coach. Because of their relationships with those schools, each cannot participate in discussions and voting surrounding those programs if they qualify to be ranked or to be in the playoff bracket.

There are also partial recusals involving teams on which the committee member may have been a former coach, player, or administrator. In such cases, those committee members can participate in discussions but are not permitted to vote on ranking that school. Riley, a former coach at Oregon State, has a partial recusal because he still takes his grandson to Beavers practices.

To start the weekly CFP ranking process, all committee members are asked to rate their top 30 teams. Once the meeting begins, each committee member votes electronically on a laptop at a three-sided table facing one another. Each ballot is kept secret.

When ranking the 25 best teams each week out of the 30 teams in the pool, the committee considers the following factors: strength of schedule, head-to-head competition, outcomes of common opponents, and unavailability of key players and coaches that could affect a team’s performance in the postseason.

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The committee has more than 1,000 data points to derive its rankings and justifications. The process involves seven rounds of voting. First is the initial pool, which has 30 teams and each team needs only three votes to be included. Next committee members list the six best teams from the initial pool, then rank those six teams in order.

The process is repeated seven times. The first four rounds rank teams from 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, and 13-16. The final three rounds determine the order for the top 16 and the remaining spots in the top 25.

In between, though, those ranking pools could last an extended amount of time. Debates and discussion drive these conversations, with each committee member having his or her own unique rankings and opinion on the order of teams. As the debates happen, Wes Gentry, CFP’s director of administration and technology, will project a four-team comparative analysis tool in the front of the room to show teams’ resumés side by side.

While data analytics play a role in the discussions, the driving force is what happens on the field. Each committee member watches 12-18 games in the lead-up to the voting process, Clark estimates.

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“In the end, it’s got to be a human decision, and they have to have looked at the games,” Clark explained. “They have to have the perspective of what they saw happen on the field. That is key, and then the data supports that.”

During the mock exercise last week, media members were much higher on Ohio State (ranked third in the exercise) than the committee was last season, when the Buckeyes were ranked No. 8 and hosted a first-round playoff game. Unsurprisingly, Indiana and Southern Methodist were points of dissension, as several media panelists believed Alabama and Mississippi had better resumés even though they had more losses than the Mustangs and Hoosiers. Ultimately, SMU was ranked ahead of Ole Miss for the final spot in the top 12, and Indiana was ranked No. 9, two spots ahead of Alabama.

When ranking teams, the committee does not factor in preseason rankings or recruiting rankings, nor does it factor in previous seasons, especially when it comes to setting the playoff bracket.

Once the top 25 rankings are set, there is still an opportunity to change them through a scrubbing process, which allows each member to bring up one last issue. If three others agree, rankings can be voted on again, which could shift the entire order.

“I think that the way that this process works and the way that we drive the discussion, it helps to eliminate the bias, because you can’t hide in the room and everybody sees the discussion that everyone has,” Clark said. “And I believe that the way the voting occurs and the way that the discussions happen, and the opportunity to re-vote if something doesn’t look right, really helps us to eliminate some of that bias.

“Seeing the game is critical for us.”

The committee will meet weekly beginning Nov. 3-4, culminating in this year’s selection day on Dec. 7 when the 12-team playoff is set, as well as the remaining non-playoff bowl games.