Is the College Football Playoff Going to Recreate the BCS' Formulaic Approach?

Everything old (and hated) could be new again (and hated).

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Like something out of the canon of H. P. Lovecraft, there is an ancient monstrosity stirring in the depths of college football — a long-forbidden formula that could someday emerge from its slumber to usher in another apocalyptic age.

It is said that in the early 2000s, this creature ruled the sport with a cold, mechanical logic — spitting out national title contenders based on computer rankings and strength-of-schedule adjustments. Then came the Playoff Committee, cloaking itself in the illusion of human wisdom. But now, as chaos spreads across the sport once again, whispers have returned:

What if... we brought the formula back?

Yes, emphasis must be placed on “whispers” for now. But this item in Heather Dinich’s story about a 16-team College Football Playoff caught my attention last week:

On Thursday afternoon, the SEC provided members of the media with a six-page packet that included color-coded charts using multiple metrics to illustrate the league's dominant schedule strength. [SEC commissioner Greg] Sankey said the task for determining the CFP's strength of schedule component is striking a balance "between human and machine," referring to the old BCS computer formula.

"Whether you agree or not, that's what we're looking at," Sankey said of the packet, which included ESPN's Strength of Record, Bill Connelly's SP+, Kenneth Massey's metric, ESPN's Football Power Index and ESPN's Strength of Schedule metric. "That doesn't mean every one of these should be inserted into the CFP, but I think you have to consider what it means, because there's other ratings and evaluation tools we've looked at that are much like these results."

It takes a bit of reading between the lines, but it sounds an awful lot like college football’s power brokers are entertaining the idea of a modernized take on the old BCS formula — or at least the spirit of it.¹

That would be a remarkably ironic twist, given that the College Football Playoff was supposed to be a corrective, replacing black-box computer formulae with the transparency and accountability of a human committee. But after a decade of increasingly murky selection logic from that process as well, the sport’s shot-callers may be at least pondering whether to re-animate a version of the very system fans spent nearly two decades trying to kill.