The College Football Playoff selection committee enters its final two weeks of deliberation with a host of consequential decisions thrust on the 13 members.
(1) Who are the final at-large selections into the field?
(2) Which teams receive a first-round game at home?
(3) Which four conference champions receive a first-round bye?
The first two are causing plenty of angst. But it is the third stress point that, perhaps, offers the most intriguing debate. The five highest-ranked conference champions earn a bid into the 12-team field, and the top four champions are seeded Nos. 1-4 and receive a bye into the quarterfinals.
Many presumed that the champions of the four power leagues would annually get those first-round byes.
The CFP selection committee's last rankings paint a different picture. In its rankings released last week, Boise State (10-1) was ahead of all Big 12 teams, paving the way for the Broncos to receive the No. 4 seed and the first-round bye in a Group of Five-over-Power Four leap.
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said such a decision would be the wrong one.
“Based on where we sit today, I see no rationale for the Big 12’s champion not getting a first-round bye,” Yormark told Yahoo Sports. “The winner of our championship should receive a bye. I have a lot of trust in the selection committee and I’m sure they’ll see it that way. Just look at the data. The data doesn’t lie. From a strength-of-schedule standpoint, all four of our schools at the top of the standings are ranked ahead of Boise State.”
At the center of the debate is a comparison not only of the individual teams but of the two leagues. The argument is fascinating in an era of college football where the power leagues continue to separate themselves from the five others: the Mountain West, Sun Belt, Conference USA, American and Mid-American.
Yormark is loaded with Big 12 data points. His league has 42 wins over teams with a winning record. The Mountain West has 11 (five of those from Boise and UNLV). Nine Big 12 teams are bowl eligible. The Mountain West has five.
Boise’s strength of schedule is ranked 81st, 12 spots behind the worst of the Big 12’s top four teams (Iowa State at 69). The two leagues have actually met on the field eight times this season. The Big 12 is 6-2 with an average margin of victory of more than three touchdowns. UNLV holds both of the Mountain West wins (at Houston and Kansas).
“Arizona State defeated Wyoming by 41 points. BYU beat them by 20. Boise struggled against Wyoming in a four-point win,” Yormark said. “There is no rationale for us not getting the bye.”
In an interview Monday with Yahoo Sports, Boise State coach Spencer Danielson isn’t looking that far ahead — a message he hammers home to his team.
"We still have two more games to even continue this conversation,” he said. "That’s where I am with it. We’ve been playing playoff football since the Oregon game. I believe in our schedule. We’ve played well. We played well against Orgon. Are we suited for a bye? That’s up to the committee."
Seven of Boise State’s 10 wins have come by at least two scores, including a 21-point victory over a Washington State team that beat Texas Tech by three touchdowns in Week 2 of the season.
But Boise State’s strongest arguments are, perhaps, its one loss and its best player. The Broncos led No. 1 Oregon for much of their game on Sept. 7, eventually losing on a last-second field goal. Boise State has the nation’s leading rusher, Heisman Trophy candidate Ashton Jeanty, who has run for nearly 600 yards more than the next best rusher.
"There have been multiple teams in the rankings that are no longer in the rankings because they got caught up in this stuff,” Danielson said. “It’s hard for me to lobby on things with two games left. You control what you can control."
Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez declined comment aside from gesturing to similar data points for the Broncos, most notably that three-point loss in Eugene.
The CFP selection committee meets again early this week before its rankings are revealed Tuesday night on ESPN. Over the weekend, the Big 12's two highest-ranked teams, No. 14 BYU and No. 16 Colorado, lost. Boise State, ranked No. 12 last week, survived that scare from Wyoming.
In the updated AP poll released Sunday, Arizona State was the highest-ranked Big 12 team at No. 14. Boise was No. 11.
“What's going on right now isn't fair to the Big 12,” Kansas State coach Chris Klieman told reporters on Monday. “Other teams can lose in other leagues and it’s ‘That league is really good!’ We lose in this league and it’s ‘This league stinks!’ I don’t understand that. As a conference, we need to get together and figure some things out. For a bunch of teams to be 9-2 and we can’t get any (benefits) in the College Football Playoff, then we need to cancel one of these (conference) games and then go to eight games.”
The decision from the selection committee related to the first-round bye is not insignificant. The fourth highest-ranked conference champion, the No. 4 seed in the bracket, gets an additional week to rest. The team would play the No. 5-12 seed winner in a bowl site quarterfinal matchup.
The fifth highest-ranked conference champion, at least according to how the rankings project, is likely to be seeded No. 12. That means playing a first-round game at the No. 5 seed on the road. The No. 5 seed, for now, projects to be the Big Ten championship game loser, likely Oregon or Ohio State, the two top-ranked teams in the nation.
Before any decision from the committee, though, the remaining schedules must be played out.
Boise State hosts Oregon State (5-6) and then meets Colorado State or UNLV in the Mountain West championship game, played in Boise.
The Big 12, meanwhile, is a lot less certain. Billed as having the most parity of any power league, the 16-team conference is certainly delivering.
Nine teams remain eligible for the conference championship game, with four of them in the best position. BYU (9-2), Iowa State (9-2), Arizona State (9-2) and Colorado (8-3) are tied at 6-2 in the conference atop the standings. All four are favored to win their regular season finale, a result that would put Arizona State and Iowa State in the title game.
“I said in July we have great depth and parity and I thought it would play out and it has,” Yormark said. “I said that the month of November would be magical and it has. It’s been made-for-TV viewing.”
The debate over the CFP’s final first-round bye is an extension of a long-running tussle between the power leagues and those from the lower-resourced level of the Football Bowl Subdivision. The gaps between the two continue to grow, both from decisions made by power leaders and from the courts.
The decisions have accelerated the concept of schools directly compensating athletes — a much more difficult endeavor for Group of Five programs. Their budgets are normally fractions of those schools in power conferences that reap more lucrative television contracts and generate more internal revenue through donations and ticket sales.
In fact, the Group of Five is having its most difficulty winning games against the power leagues this season, according to data from ESPN. Group of Five programs - including independents UMass and UConn, as well as Oregon State and Washington State — are 8-87 against power teams. The winning percentage of .084 is believed to be the worst in modern history.
The decision to incorporate a fifth conference champion into the field — assuring a Group of Five spot — is a subject that has drawn heated debate and scrutiny over the years from leaders of the power leagues. Craig Thompson, the former Mountain West commissioner, was part of a four-man working group that originally created the current 12-team format. He was the only representative from the G5 ranks.
“What’s happening with Boise State possibly getting a bye is not surprising,” Thompson said in a recent interview with Yahoo Sports. “The Group of Five champion, if they have a big year, gets rewarded in the system.”
The five auto-bids and the first-round byes were not designated to specific conferences to avoid the scrutiny of congressional lawmakers, who, in the past, skewered the old BCS concept for creating a caste system.
This past spring, CFP leaders — the 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director — re-evaluated the format when they agreed on a new six-year extension that begins with the 2026 playoff. They didn’t settle on a format, instead only agreeing to protections that guarantee (1) the five highest-ranked champions an automatic berth, (2) the field to be 12 or 14 teams in size and (3) Notre Dame to receive an at-large bid if it is ranked inside the top 12 or 14, depending on the field size.
During discussions, debate raged over whether to keep the Group of Five’s access spot. Speaking to Yahoo Sports from her conference football media days in July, Nevarez said that power conference leaders “threatened” to remove the G5’s bid in the spring. But, “to their credit, it never came off the table.”