CFP selection committee to use enhanced metrics - ESPN

The College Football Playoff selection committee will announce its first of six rankings on Nov. 4 using enhanced metrics to help evaluate schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule, the CFP announced Wednesday.

In the current schedule strength metric, more weight will be applied to games against strong opponents. The new metric of «record strength» will help the committee determine how teams performed against their schedule, rewarding those that beat high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty of losing to one. These changes will also provide minimal reward for beating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing.

Historically, the selection committee typically has evaluated in this manner, but adding it to a computer metric should help codify their process publicly. It could also incentivize athletic directors to continue to schedule marquee matchups between blueblood programs without fear of being penalized for a loss in the committee meeting room. This is something some FBS commissioners have been publicly pushing for and the CFP has been working on over the past six months.

Still, it remains a subjective system and none of the major components in the protocol — strength of schedule, common opponents, head-to-head results and other circumstances like injuries to key players — are weighted.

«All of these modifications will help the selection committee as they rank the top 25 teams,» CFP executive director Rich Clark said in a statement. «We feel these changes will help construct a postseason bracket that recognizes the best performances and teams on the field during the regular season, and I want to thank our veteran selection committee members and data analytics