Stop blaming ESPN's College Football Playoff rankings show for last year's issues

IRVING, Texas — The leaders of the College Football Playoff met here at the Ritz-Carlton Las Colinas in the Dallas area on Tuesday, focused on the future of the CFP and whether it will eventually expand to 24 teams. That’s the pressing issue, one that has started to gain more steam behind the scenes as these meetings continue into Wednesday and beyond.

While conference commissioners and CFP personnel wandered the halls of this swanky hotel, jazz music playing lightly and the future hanging in the balance, the pros and cons of potentially doubling the field and the implications it would have on our game loomed large.

But there has been a major offseason discussion about what’s broken in the current system and what can be fixed as soon as the 2026 season begins. That talking point? ESPN’s CFP rankings television program, which has become a cornerstone of Tuesday night five weeks a year in the late fall. That’s the weekly show where the rankings are revealed, on-air analysts react to them, and the CFP Committee Chair gives a rarely relevant interview in a tired attempt to explain the committee’s process.

Newsflash: The rankings show isn’t the problem. It certainly wasn’t last year. The rankings were.

Let’s get this out of the way. Notre Dame and its fans (rightfully) felt blindsided last year when the final CFP rankings revealed Miami was ahead and in. While the Committee may have arrived at the right decision at the end — Miami beat Notre Dame head-to-head and had the same record — it wrongfully ranked the Irish ahead of the Hurricanes in the first four rankings reveals. That created a false sense of security for Notre Dame, leaving it feeling as if the rug had been pulled out from under it at the end of the season. It went from a CFP team to having its season over in the blink of an eye.

“This committee did things that varied differently from others from the past,” ESPN senior writer Heather Dinich, who appears on the weekly reveal show in the fall, told On3.

As a result, unfair ire has been directed at the rankings reveal show rather than at the CFP Committee itself. Dinich and the other analysts on the show are simply reacting to what the CFP Committee does. They don’t influence the rankings or change any of the dynamics. They are reporting the news. That’s it.

Question: If the CFP Committee had just properly ranked Miami and Notre Dame from the jump, would the Irish have been blindsided? Would we even be having this conversation right now? No.

So, the solution to all of college football’s issues from 2025?

Make. Better. Rankings.

Don’t rank the teams like a lazy Associated Press voter in the middle of the season after covering a night game. You can’t assume things will work themselves out later to excuse inconsistent thinking at the end of October. Every ranking should be released as if the CFP were starting tomorrow. Period. It may not be how they ultimately feel things will play out, but no conscious — or even subconscious — prognostication. Ever.

Maybe the CFP Committee felt comfortable putting Notre Dame of Miami for the first reveal, assuming — like most of the general public — that the Hurricanes would lose again. Guess what? Miami didn’t lose again, which put the CFP Committee in a bind in December and confused the general public about what it was thinking. It was nonsense.

There’s always going to be a show. The CFP is contractually obligated to produce five rankings shows before the final reveal, which is obviously good for ratings. ESPN could decide to nix it, but why? It offers free ratings and is often used to drive viewership for college basketball games. We also know television executives aren’t too keen on giving up inventory in exchange for nothing.

Even if ESPN and the CFP agreed to cancel the show, who really wants that? Our entire lives are about tracking progress. When you order an Uber, you see how far the driver is away from picking you up. When you update your iPhone, there is a progress bar for how long it’ll take to complete. Heck, you can’t even order Domino’s Pizza for delivery without the Pizza Tracker. That’s who we are. We, as a society, need to know how things are going during life and college football season isn’t an exception. It would be insane to go into December blind, knowing nothing. Psychotic, even.

But what can be better about the show? There are suggestions for making things more functional: start releasing rankings later in the season, remove the rankings right before the conference championship games or remove the committee chair from the show/interview process.

Starting the rankings later in the season only delays the issue, and removing them the week before the conference championship games will lead people to refer back to the most recent release. As far as the committee chair? That person faces inherent challenges, like speaking for a room full of people on decisions he may not even agree with.

The main issue with the CFP Committee chair is the typical communication style. It doesn’t matter which year, but he tends to be defensive and rarely discusses what happens behind closed doors, as if he is protecting the Pentagon. There is no candor, no acknowledging some of the challenges the committee faces, and certainly no revelatory information. It’s all canned, basic information that always contradicts itself, making for a frustrating — and cloudy — experience for the fan.

More transparency. Highlight where the disagreement was, reveal the ballots, and show the metrics everyone favors. Bring us into the room, don’t keep us out of it. Even if you’re protecting individual committee members from scrutiny, you can still anonymously reveal thoughts and points of contention. And in the end? It may even produce more content.

Even if we get none of that, please produce better, more defensive rankings during that five-week preiod in the fall.

You’re mad at ESPN’s show? That’s the problem in your mind?

No, it isn’t.

It was the deeply flawed rankings we got every single week before the final reveal that was the real issue.