Joel Klatt accuses College Football Playoff committee of manipulating selection process

Joel Klatt thinks the selection committee set a poor model in how they seeded the College Football Playoff.

On his show on Monday, Klatt went in on how the CFP Selection Committee put the bracket together. That started with the precedent they set with this field, and then had to follow throughout with that thinking, in keeping SMU in despite their loss in the ACC Championship.

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“I believe that what the committee gave us sounds really good in theory. You can defend it in theory and it sounds good on social media. In a lot of ways, they kind of played to the masses. Let them eat cake because the sentiment was on SMU’s side. It really was,” said Klatt. “Again, I don’t disagree with that – other than the factor that you have to manipulate it to make it happen.”

“Once they wanted to keep SMU in? I think they wanted to value conference championships games. One of the reasons that they wanted to value conference championships games was to keep SMU in the College Football Playoff,” Klatt said. “I believe that they were swayed by sentiment. I believe they were swayed by the fact that the ACC got absolutely jobbed last year with Florida State being undefeated and left out. They thought to themselves, like, ‘We can’t do that again for the same team that we did it for last year in Alabama‘. I do believe that they manipulated what their process actually is to get SMU in this playoff. They put them in at 11, which is one spot higher than the team that actually beat them which also doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But that’s what they gave us.”

Again, it’s not that Klatt has an issue with the Mustangs being the final at-large in the CFP. It’s that the justification for it, which is that they appeared, although losing, in their conference championship, affected how the rest of seeding for the bracket, which puts too much emphasis on those games, when the concern was there wouldn’t be enough, as compared to the regular season’s results.

“I think, again, it’s obvious but let’s move through it. When you artificially weight those games, those conference championship games, even though, now more than ever, it really matters more what your schedule is rather than if you’re actually the better team or not? You’re going down a precarious road. You really are,” Klatt said. “When you pull those levers and you get into this language of ‘deserving’ rather than ‘best’? There is a cost and there is a deep cost. It might be unintended but it is an unintended cost. The cost of that is put onto the shoulders of the teams that actually earned their way to the top.”

So, what does Klatt mean? Here’s the example he laid out in relation to No. 1 Oregon. Rather than playing an easier path as the top-ranked team in the playoff, they’ll play a more difficult one instead because of how much that he thinks they preserved the resumés of teams that were conference-title losers with Texas, Penn State, and SMU.

“This is how it happens. The better-resumé teams are artificially shoved down in the seeding. The teams at the top earned their spot. Oregon earns their spot – they had the best regular season of anybody in college football…They did it, they did it all and they’re the No. 1 team in the country. Yet you’re trying to manipulate seeding and pull the levers of power here in order to try to put an artificial floor under the conference championship game participants,” Klatt explained. “In order to do that, get SMU in, you have to value Texas and Penn State. Once you do that, you’ve got to somehow keep them above Ohio State, maybe even Notre Dame, and maybe even Tennessee. So, at that point, what do you have to do? Value it over everything! – ‘Nope, they played in that game! They’re not moving down!’. That’s artificial.”

“Once that happens, the better resumés and teams get shoved down in the bracket. When they get shoved down, who bears the brunt of that? Oregon, who earned their spot at the top. So now it’s not a true meritocracy. Now it’s not a true playoff. It’s not a true bracket,” continued Klatt. “You set out to do something like value the conference championship game. In doing so, you devalued the conference championship game. That’s the unintended consequence. The cost of the artificial manipulation of seeds will be bore by Oregon, the exact team that should have earned every right to have the easiest path to a national championship. That’s what we do in every other sport because it’s a true meritocracy in those sports and we don’t artificially pull the levers of power to bump teams up based on sentiment! We let it be.”

It’s clear that a lot with this playoff format needs work after how this first bracket came to be. However, this has more to do with the subjective view of the committee, rather than the actual layout, and Klatt is concerned with that.

“It’s an artificial floor. They’re pulling the levers, here, of power in order to create something that probably wasn’t going to be created if they did it right,” said Klatt. “That’s their prerogative, totally their prerogative. It sounds good in theory but it hurts the playoff overall and it hurts the integrity of the playoff.”