How College Football Crowns Its Champ

The CFP is a four-team playoff that determines the de facto national champion. It took the sport a while to get to this point, from the dark ages when polls of sportswriters were the only ways to pick the champ, through various other stages (the Bowl Coalition, the Bowl Alliance) and, finally, into the oft-maligned, multiple poll-driven, statistics-overloaded Bowl Championship Series (BCS) era, which began in 1998.

Talk about disappointment and outrage. The BCS, designed to pick the two best teams in the nation to play for the championship, was pockmarked by controversy. Although, for all its detractors and missteps, the BCS got the final two teams right almost all the time and, in the end, laid the framework for the CFP.

"I think [the CFP is] working pretty well. I don't know that they've picked the wrong teams, ever, in three years previous," says Berry Tramel, a longtime columnist and reporter for The Oklahoman. "I like it better than the BCS."

The CFP, the brainstorm of a bunch of university administrators and television executives, finally came into being after the 2014 season, with its first title game played in January of 2015 between No. 4 Ohio State and No. 2 Oregon. The idea behind the playoff is — this is often the case, isn't it? — tantalizingly simple: Pick the four best college football teams in the country, put them in two well-established bowl games and have the winners play for a national championship trophy a week later.

Selecting the teams even seems straightforward enough. A dozen or so former college players, current school athletics directors and administrators, former coaches (and even journalists!) meld minds and rank the contending teams (all members of the Football Bowl Subdivision, formerly Division I-A, the top level of college football) on a variety of factors, such as:

Therein, of course, lies the potential for outrage. No matter how many games are watched, no matter how many statistics are digested, no matter how many votes are taken by smart people (and journalists!), ranking teams is, in the end, a matter of opinion.

It's subjective. Even the CFP admits it: "For purposes of any four-team playoff, the process will inevitably need to select the four best teams from among several with legitimate claims to participate."

The selection committee first assembles a few weeks into the season for its first rankings, then meets every weekend until the end of the season. Just after the conference championship games, everybody settles on the four teams to play in the CFP. The committee seeds and places the teams in the semifinals, and fills out the other major New Year's Day bowl games, too.

So far, so good.

"Computers, I'm not crazy about. Polls, I'm not crazy about. I think having sharp people to sit around and discuss it is the best way," Tramel says. "That's the way to arrive at a pretty good result no matter what you're doing, whether you're buying real estate or voting in a college football playoff."

As the 2021-2022 college football season entered its final weekend before the bowls, a weekend when conference championship games are played and the final rankings are announced, these four teams were on top (with win-loss records):

Of course, Alabama went on to beat Georgia in the SEC Championship, then win its way into its sixth appearance in seven years at the National Championship after a commanding 27-6 victory over No. 4 Cincinnati at the Cotton Bowl.

So where does that leave the No. 3 Bulldogs, which held the No. 1 spot all season long until its 41-24 loss to Alabama in the SEC Championship? The University of Georgia Bulldogs are also bound for Indy after a 34-11 win over No. 2 Michigan in the Orange Bowl.

So does that mean the 2022 College Football National Championship will be a replay of the 2021 SEC Championship? Not necessarily. Georgia has a big bone to pick with Alabama, not only because the Dawgs will be fighting for their first National Championship since 1980 (Alabama won in 2020), but also because these same two teams met here in 2018 for the National Championship — and Alabama beat Georgia 26-23 in overtime.

Talks of a six- or eight-team playoff to appease the unhappy already have been raised. Whatever happens, though, this much is certain: People will watch, the bean counters will be laughing all the way to the bank and someone, somewhere will be upset. That's the game.

"It's football. People just love the game of football. It's fast-paced. It's got speed and violence and all the things that attract people to a variety of athletics," says The Oklahoman's Tramel. "It's also partisan. It's easier to get behind a university than it is, say ... pro franchises. Everybody loves the NFL and everything else. But you can't always identify with them as much as you can, say, the University of Iowa. Or Arizona State University. Everybody can identify with a place.

"And it's got such tradition. It still does a good job of selling — it's not necessarily true — but they do a good job of selling itself as a bastion of raising up young men the right way and that kind of thing. That's what appeals to people."