I appreciate those who take the stance of "just use the rankings", but a major problem I have is the rankings being veiled in secrecy and laden with subjectivity. If the rankings were by objective metrics and not seeming like decisions need to be repeatedly justified by determining sometimes one thing matters to the committee more than others but other times they don't, I would be okay with saying "just use the rankings."
The controversy also adds to intrigue and conversation, which leads to viewership and advertising dollars. There is an economic interest in perpetuating uncertainty and subjectivity.
Understanding that as a primary constraint or driver (depending on your perspective), I think the way the system currently is arranged where the top four conference champions receive byes as a prudent approach. I agree, it sucks there is an imbalance in conference strength, but it provides guardrails against what I feel happened often in the BCS and four-team playoff era where the metrics, polls, or committee would be setup to make sure the non-power conference members would fall just outside the main event(s). How many times did a Boise State, TCU, or Utah fall just outside the BCS title game or four-team CFP? Obviously two of those teams have moved to power conferences, but the current format prevents them from being locked out of the playoff and the byes.
I also carry the opinion there is not enough diversity in interconference matchups strictly due to the number of teams against the number of regular season games to make strict judgments for precise seeding; obviously knowing the implications of getting a bye or a home game are large, that makes the subjectivity much more frustrating, but I appreciate the structure/constraints the current format (specifically top four conference champs getting a bye) provides amidst all the other subjectivity.
The current format with automatic qualifying for the top five conference champs and byes for the top four also adds much more interest and intrigue to way more late regular season and CCG matchups which in the past had very little interest. That makes it better for fans... and better for advertisers.
To that end, I agree re-seeding after the first round should occur, but it does add challenges to the risk/uncertainty in quarterfinal travel destinations for first-round winners. But most revenue the NCAA/CFP/etc. care about is the TV/streaming ad revenue potential anyway.
////
What I would like to see is an objective ranking system similar to NCAA hockey. While there is a committee, the 16-team field is set strictly by the PairWise rankings. Qualifiers are the six conference champions plus ten at-large spots (the ten highest-ranked non-conference champions in PairWise). Then teams are placed on seed lines 1 through 4. The committee's job is then only to create regional assignments within a set of constraints such as if a team is officially the host of a regional site, they are placed in that regional; two teams from the same conference can't be placed in the same regional unless five teams from that conference qualify.
The PairWise for hockey has three components:
*1. RPI
2. Record Against Common Opponents
3. Head to Head
* RPI is the one which gets tweaked occasionally over the years, like how home/away gets weighted, throwing out wins which hurt your value, weighting of own record vs. opp. record vs. opp.'s opp. record, but it's established before the season, not adjusted during the season.
This is evaluated for a team against each other team in the group to be compared, and the number of comparisons "won" is the value used to rank the teams in more of an objective standings fashion than subjective ranking. If two teams have won the same number of comparisons, the tiebreaker is RPI. Here's a longer explanation:
The PairWise Rankings (PWR) are a statistical tool designed to approximate the process by which the NCAA selection committee decides which teams get
www.uscho.com
The way I could see that applied for the CFP is...
1. Take your qualifications to set the field: top five conference champions in the rankings, next seven non-champions.
2. Bin the qualifiers into groups:
- 4 Byes: top four champions
- 4 Hosts: top four remaining non-byes, indiscriminate of conference champion status
- 4 Travelers: last four qualifiers
3. Once you've "binned" the teams, deviate from strict seeding assignment by rankings only to prevent the following:
- First round in-conference matchups.
- Quarterfinal rematches from the regular season or CCG.
I'm mostly about getting a diversity in matchups because of the relatively small sample size of matchups from the first 12-13 games among 134 FBS teams (and add in many of those teams play a non-FBS opponent among those 12-13 games).
Of course, this leads to less perpetual controversy from projecting how the committee will view something, so it won't happen.
