Mock CFP selection process highlights Indiana football's improved position for 2025
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GRAPEVINE, Texas — When the College Football Playoff committee meets this week, the group will be hard-pressed to find any faults in Indiana football’s 2025 resume.
That wasn’t necessarily the case last year, as evidenced by the mock selection process The Herald-Times participated in earlier this fall.
The CFP has hosted a mock selection exercise for journalists on an annual basis going back to the organization’s first year in existence. Each of the invited outlets is asked to take on the role of a current committee member and go through an identical process the real group did last year, albeit in a condensed fashion.
Indiana was the most hotly debated team in the field during the mock selection exercise with some “committee members” unable to get past the team’s weaker strength of schedule — they ranked No. 90 out of 134 FBS teams, according to the CFP’s metrics — and lack of quality wins.
The peek behind the curtain at the selection process highlighted why IU won’t run into those same kinds of problems this year.
How the College Football Playoff selection process works
The CFP committee operates out of a series of connected meeting rooms in the expansive Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center outside of Dallas. It’s where they share meals, watch games during conference championship weekend and deliberate over the rankings.
The 13-member committee — there will be 12 members this year after Randall McDaniel stepped away from his role for personal reasons — is made up of former players and coaches, standing athletic directors and journalists.
CFP executive director Rich Clark, a retired lieutenant general who spent 38 years in the Air Force, acts as a referee of sorts, keeping the discussion on track and making sure the committee follows their established guidelines.
He stepped into the role for Bill Hancock in 2023, and it’s easy to see his influence on the process.
When the group reconvenes each year, Clark gives a PowerPoint presentation that includes a “Selection Committee Creed” that defines their core values — integrity, humility and excellence — and hands out a specially designed challenge coin to each member. The medallions are often handed out by unit commanders in the military.
Before entering the CFP’s makeshift nerve center, the room specifically set aside for deliberations, each committee member is asked to take their “hat” off and leave any and all ties they have to a specific university at the door.
To make it more than just a symbolic gesture, former Kansas athletic director Jeff Long, had a custom hat rack built in the Ozarks that features footballs at the end of each hook that members place actual CFP hats on.
Long was the first committee chair back in 2012 and rejoined the group for a one-year term for 2025.
Clark’s introduction during the mock selection process underlined parts of the process that get lost in much of the discussion surrounding the rankings. The committee’s end goal is always to simply rank the 25 best teams.
“The goal isn’t to just fill the bracket,” Clark said.
There’s no discussion of potential matchups in the room, and filling out the bracket is a very mechanical process based simply on the seeding rules — last year, the four highest-ranked conference champions received a first-round bye — that season.
While the CFP guidelines detail key criteria for the committee members to consider, including strength of schedule, head-to-head competition, common opponents and player availability, none of those are weighted.
The committee members are armed with a binder full of key metrics along with iPads featuring three different versions of every game (full broadcast, edited without commercials and the coaches film), but how they use all that information is up to each individual.
“We want them to use their expertise and best judgement, bring that into the room, have a great discussion and vote the way they see it,” Clark told The Herald-Times. “There is not one silver bullet that helps them to come to the magic ranking. They have to do a lot of work and watch a lot of games and use the data to support what they’ve seen.”
With strength of schedule specifically, committee members are encouraged to go beyond the data.
“It’s more than a number,” Clark said. “It’s a story.”
The deliberations themselves are a very segmented process that starts with each member ranking their top 30 teams on a weekly basis. That becomes the pool of teams used to determine the top 25 through seven rounds of balloting.
They don’t just compare and debate 25 teams. To make it more manageable, they break each round up into a smaller pool of six teams with the goal of ranking a top four in each group until they get a top 25.
If there’s a tie, more deliberations ensue within that round of balloting.
Indiana football has impeccable College Football Playoff resume
Indiana’s resume was of two extremes in 2024.
In the committee’s “top 12” metrics — stats that historically correlate to winning championships, including relative scoring defense and offense, relative total offense and defense, relative scoring differential and points per possession (offense and defense) — the Hoosiers ranked in the top 10 nationally in all but two of them and ranked in the top five in half the categories.
The statistics all painted a clear picture of IU’s dominance, but the program’s ugly strength of schedule metrics detracted from that success.
According to CFP’s metrics, Indiana had the lowest strength of schedule in the field (No. 90) behind Boise State (No. 88). Their opponents’ cumulative record at 57-83 (No. 130) and their all-conference opponents’ record at 48-60 (No. 114) was also the lowest in the field.
They were one of only two teams in both categories with an opponent win percentage below .500.
In the mock selection process, the Hoosiers were at the center of the most spirited debates and a clear split emerged with a small yet vocal group pushing to potentially move them out of the field altogether in favor of SEC teams like Alabama during the scrubbing phase that comes at the end of the process.
The CFP committee reevaluates the entire board and re-opens debate on specific teams if there are enough votes.
Arguments against Indiana were the same ones pundits made while analyzing the field last year — the team lacked a top 25 win, didn’t beat an opponent with a winning record on the road and got blown out when facing a playoff-caliber opponent.
Indiana won’t have to relitigate any of those issues this season.
The Hoosiers’ much-talked about non-conference scheduling strategy won’t hurt them as much with Old Dominion and Kennesaw State both qualifying for bowl games. They have two wins over top-10 opponents with a victory over then-No. 2 Oregon at Autzen Stadium, one of the more challenging environments in college football.
They also beat an Iowa team that’s rising in the polls at Kinnick Stadium.
All those metrics that IU made stand out in 2024 should remain in its favor as well. The Hoosiers rank No. 1 in scoring offense (46.4 points per game), No. 3 in total offense (504.9 yards), No. 3 in scoring defense (10.8 points allowed) and No. 7 in total defense (248.3 yards allowed).
Indiana also has six wins by the max scoring differential (24 points) that the committee takes into consideration with three games left to play. The Hoosiers won seven games by 24 points or more last year.
The formula tweak the CFP made to the strength of scheduling metric during the offseason will likely benefit IU this year.
“This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team,” the CFP release stated.
That means a potential matchup in the Big Ten title game against No. 1 Ohio State might not even push IU out of getting a first-round bye if they remain undefeated in the regular season, and fans around the country will have a hard time questioning that ranking this year.
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: IU football has flipped the script in CFP debate ahead of first rankings
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