Projected final 2020 College Football Playoff Top 25 rankings after Week 16

Selection Sunday is near as the College Football Playoff selection committee prepares to release the final Top 25 for 2020. Here are our latest projections.

Having projected the College Football Playoff rankings from week to week for several years now at Saturday Blitz, the 2020 season has provided the perfect opportunity to finally talk about this process. The one constant that has emerged from taking on this project for the website is that the selection committee will basically make up whatever justifications it can find to put whatever teams they ultimately want together in a given bowl game.

The Top 25 rankings released weekly during the back half of each season by the committee are effectively a commedia dell’arte, where the mask is worn collectively by a group of selectors meeting behind closed doors. Then they send forth the short straw from their ranks to don the mask with the biggest nose and improvise his way through a series of talking points that often contradict one another and rely upon convoluted circular logic at every turn.

The funny thing about all this is that, in shifting from the Bowl Championship Series to the College Football Playoff after the 2013 season, we too quickly threw away everything from the BCS era in the zeal to start framing out brackets. Once the BCS formula was locked into its final formula after the controversy of yet another split national championship in 2003 initiated a lasting tweak, it proved relatively effective at tabbing the top teams in the country.

There were controversies still, but that centered on the restrictive nature of a system that only allowed in two teams to play for a championship. The problem with cases like the 2011 season, when Alabama got in ahead of Big 12 champion Oklahoma State, was not with the formula that determined that result but a system that didn’t just pair the Tide against the Cowboys in a semifinal matchup.

We have that now, but the tradeoff was throwing away a perfectly solid formula in exchange for the doublespeak of a group accountable only to their paymasters. What results is a national championship as mythical as any since college football first came into existence a century and a half ago. The BCS formula wasn’t perfect, but no system of selection will ever be perfect. What the BCS did have going in its favor is that it was transparent and replicable.

Anyone with a spreadsheet and a basic knowledge of setting up formulas could easily plug in poll and computer ranking data and confirm the BCS calculations with a few minutes of data entry each week. Now we are left to parse out what the committee says from week to week, knowing that the justifications for ranking one team a certain way won’t always be applied equally to every team or even apply from week to week.

Other teams considered by the committee

• 6-1 Ball State
• 9-1 Liberty
• 9-2 Army

What that means is that projecting the committee’s mindset is largely an exercise in futility. Yet that is the main purpose of these rankings.

Would I rank these teams differently than the list that follows this introduction? There is no doubt in my mind that the committee is making decisions based on factors other than what we have actually seen on the football field this season. They are applying strictures on how high some teams can climb, justifying that through logic that doesn’t carry across the board.

But the goal here is to get into the mindset of the committee, so let’s do that once again. Keep reading as we project the final College Football Playoff Top 25 of the 2020 season here at Saturday Blitz.