Joel Klatt’s 5 Takeaways From The 1st CFP Rankings: Is The Process Broken?

Joel Klatt has a problem with the College Football Playoff committee’s first top 25 of the season, and it has little to do with any one team.

The committee unveiled its rankings Tuesday night, with Miami at No. 1, followed by Georgia, Utah and Indiana, and Ohio State at No. 12 as the first team out of the 12-team field. 

On the latest episode of “The Joel Klatt Show,” Klatt said the process behind those rankings is the issue and pushed back on the idea that the first top 25 ranking doesn’t matter.

Here are Joel Klatt’s takeaways:

Klatt’s thoughts: “They’re left to their own accord to rank teams based on any criteria they want. What you see generally — and we’ve seen this all the way back to 2014 when we started this exercise in the playoff era — is that you see certain criteria used at certain points and other criteria used at others. Record has an influence, obviously. Who you beat has an influence. Sometimes who you lost to, your strength of schedule — that’s been more of a common theme this year — your personnel, who’s injured, who’s not injured.

“There’s all these different criteria, and none of them are valued over any other criteria. Well, that’s impossible. So, good people in that room, trustworthy people in that room, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that the process is broken.”

Klatt’s thoughts: “What is one of the things that is broken in the process? The fact that there’s only 13 inputs, that there’s only 13 individuals that have an opinion on something that is so important in college football. In fact, the most important thing in college football. That’s wild.

“We have to increase the number of inputs into this data set. That’s the process. That’s not their fault. They’re doing the best they can with the criteria that they’re given. They’re building a house with no blueprints.”

Klatt’s thoughts: “I know not everybody has a math background or a statistics background. … But we all kind of understand numbers, right? I mean, we have to balance our budgets. We’ve got to pay bills. We got to do all those things at home. So you kind of understand numbers, and you understand when something is an outlier. 

“You’re going through your personal budget, and you know the month that you take a vacation, and you’re like, ‘well, our expenditures that month that’s an outlier because we went on vacation,’ and you understand that, so you don’t base your entire yearly budget based on the amount of money you spent in the month that you went on vacation.

“Well, I would argue that what they gave us on Tuesday night is about as big of an outlier as you can possibly get in a top 25. I don’t think that you could put 50 committees together and they would produce something that is this wild. 

“What do we do in statistics when we get a body of data? We throw out the edges and then evaluate the middle. It’s like a bell curve. Well, this top 25 is on the edge. It’s the very outskirts, and yet it’s the one that we’re going to use to represent all of college football and crown a champion.”

Klatt’s thoughts: “The process of ranking teams this way, and having that process be the most meaningful thing in college football, is actively hurting the sport, and that’s the tough part. None of them are intending that, but that’s the truth.

“Based on the top 25 that they gave us — and candidly, they have given us over the last two or three years, maybe even all the way back to 2014 in the playoff era — there is zero, and I mean zero reason to schedule a tough non-conference game. Seeing Texas and Ohio State play Week 2, Michigan and Oklahoma — these are great for the sport, and yet these games are dying. They are going extinct. And why? Because the committee is actively hunting them and shooting them out in the wild. There’s no other way to explain it, because they’re not valuing non-conference opponents.”

Klatt’s thoughts: “You heard a lot during the ranking show, ‘Slow down. This is only the beginning. Don’t overreact.’ No, these do matter, and they matter a great deal. In fact, the only ranking that is more important than the first ranking is the last one. 

“College football is a race. It’s a race to those 12 spots. And the top 25 that they gave us is the starting grid. We have NASCAR here on FOX. We have IndyCar here on FOX, and everybody qualifies, and the best cars get to start up front. They don’t have the burden of proof like the cars behind them. The cars behind them, they’ve got to pass them. If you ask any race car driver, would you rather start 12th or first, what do you think the answer is going to be?

“Every game from this point forward has a value, and that value is attached to what they just gave us on Tuesday night.”