With an epic conclusion to the BCS College Football National Championship on Jan. 6 in a match-up that no one would have predicted at the beginning of the season, Florida State’s 34-31 victory over the Auburn Tigers marked the end of the existing BCS post-season format. The NCAA announced in June 2012 that beginning with the 2014-15 season the BCS would be replaced by a four-team playoff called the College Football Playoff (CFB Playoff).
The new format will retain six of the 35 bowl games from this past season—the four official BCS bowls (the Sugar, Rose, Orange, and Fiesta Bowls) as well as the Chick-fil-A (renamed Arizona) and Cotton Bowls. The top four teams will play in two semifinal games, with the winner of each game advancing to the national championship held in a different city each year.
The two semifinal games will be rotated through the six bowls, with the other four bowls hosting match-ups between other top teams that will not affect the playoffs in any way and will essentially continue the old tradition of bowl games. The semifinals will be held in the Sugar and Rose Bowls for 2014-15, the Orange and Cotton Bowls for 2015-16, and the Atlanta and Fiesta bowls for 2016-17.
Unlike the previous computerized AP rankings, there will now be a selection committee of 13 people who determine rankings. According to ESPN.com’s summary of the CFB Playoff, the committee will comprise of “a talented group of high-integrity individuals with experience as coaches, student-athletes, college administrators and journalists, along with sitting athletic directors” and will “choose the four teams for the playoff based on body of work, strength of schedule, head-head results, comparison of results against common opponents, championships won and other factors.”
The new format is aimed at heightening excitement for the College Football postseason, with back-to-back triple headers on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, followed by the championship game on “Championship Monday.”
This comes as a welcome change, as fans will no longer have to sift through over two weeks of bowl games to find intriguing match-ups, and will help eliminate anticlimactic championship games like last year’s blowout of Notre Dame by Alabama. The college football season always produces intriguing story-lines and it seems that the new playoff system is the right step in streamlining the drama of each season into a fitting ending.
