College Basketball's Selection Sunday shows exactly how the playoff committee should handle the College Football Playoff rankings. The College Basketball committee never shows their hand prior to the actual bracket being released, further showing that an official weekly college football playoff ranking from the committee picking the final 12 teams is completely unnecessary.
Sure, ESPN can have their weekly Tuesday show and the pundits can debate all they want to the entire show without any official playoff rankings being released. I am sure ESPN will get the same if not similar ratings either way.
Of course, this would have alleviated a lot of the issues that came from Miami jumping Notre Dame in the final playoff rankings. There were so many opinions and anger after the official rankings came out because of the weekly ranking show. People were so upset that they had seen Notre Dame above Miami all season until the very end. Had there not been a weekly ranking show than there would not have been an expectation of Notre Drame being in, and when the committee can just point to head to head and not have questions abaout why Notre Dame was above them for six weeks.
During the college basketball season there are several Bracketolgists who update their brackets weekly and even more so as we get closer to Selection Sunday. Their work gives the people an idea of how things will go even though none of their brackets are official.
There are plenty of football analysts on every sports site and social media site that can do exactly what Joey Brackets does throughout the season so the average football fan has a pretty good idea of what the playoff will look like before actual bracket is released. Not having a weekly playoff ranking show also keeps the AP and Coaches poll relevant in November.