Texas Tech University Athletics
Welcome to the New Era
August 29, 2014 | Football
The College Football Playoff replaces the Bowl Championship Series which was in place from 1998-2013.
BY NICK KOSMIDER
Special to TexasTech.com
The bracket is soothing in its simplicity. Its straight lines and tidy boxes paint a perfect picture of college football's new math. Four teams will enter the tournament to crown the sport's ultimate champion. Two will advance to the title game. One will be left standing to hoist the trophy.
Welcome to the College Football Playoff. Now strap in. It's going to be a wild ride.
The new format debuts this season, replacing the Bowl Championship Series system that existed for 16 seasons and paved the way for the first-ever postseason tournament in major college football.
"It's going to continue to elevate the interest and popularity of college football," Texas Tech Director of Athletics Kirby Hocutt said of the new playoff format. "It's the appropriate step in the evolution of the game."
At the end of the regular season, the top four teams in the country, as determined by a 13-member selection committee using a key set of criteria, will be chosen to play in a pair of national semifinal games. (The No. 1 team will play the No. 4 team and No. 2 will play No. 3.) The two winners will then meet in the national championship game, which this season will be played on Monday, Jan. 12, at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.
"I can't think of a better place for it," Bill Hancock, Executive Director of the College Football Playoff, said at Big 12 Conference media days this summer. "Folks in Texas love their football."
Having the top four teams in the country square off to determine a champion is only part of the allure of the new playoff format.
The rich traditions of bowl games aren't going anywhere with the arrival of the College Football Playoff. In fact, those experiences will only be heightened when the curtain rises on the new postseason.
The two national semifinal games will rotate yearly throughout a lineup of six prominent bowls: Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Peach and Fiesta. This season, the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl will play host to the semifinal games and will be played on New Year's Day. The Cotton Bowl will also be played on New Year's Day, with the Orange, Peach and Fiesta Bowls taking place on Dec. 31.
It all equates to triple-headers on back-to-back days that feature the best football programs in the country. How about that for a holiday celebration?
"It's the best of both worlds," Hocutt said. "It preserves the best regular season in all of sports. It creates this new playoff structure that is going to create excitement, and at the same time it is going to allow college football to reclaim New Year's Eve and New Year's Day."
The members of the selection committee are experienced men and women who have played different roles in the world of college football. They'll judge teams in the running for the College Football Playoff on strength of schedule, head-to-head results, results against common opponents and conference championships won, among other factors.
In addition to choosing the four teams to play in the semifinal bowls, the committee is also tasked with ranking the top 25 teams beginning at the midway point of the season and choosing teams for the remaining New Year's Day bowl(s) after the semifinal bowls have been filled.
Any FBS school has a chance to earn its way into the College Football Playoff, and Hocutt believes the Big 12 Conference has a great chance of seeing one of its member institutions in the tournament every season.
"We believe that our champion is crowned on the field," Hocutt said of the Big 12 Conference, the only one of college football's Power 5 conferences in which each team plays every other team each season. "We do play everybody every single year, and we build those traditions and have those marquee games and match-ups. If you were to look at it historically from that lens, you would see that the Big 12 in recent years would be positioned very well to have a team in that four-team playoff on an annual basis."
Let the race to the bracket begin.
