Steve Sarkisian lambasts the CFP: "There’s no transparency on what exactly the committee is doing"

Steve Sarkisian didn’t hold back in his interview with USA Today’s Matt Hayes, released earlier this morning.

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Among the many issues he identified, including academic expectations and future expansion, it felt like Sarkisian’s most brazen take concerned the CFP selection committee.

It’s not the first time Sarkisian has called out the board of 13 committee members, as his questioning of their tactics in deciding the right combination of 12 teams has been questioned by Texas head man throughout the 2025 season.

Are they really looking at the resumes of the team?” Sarkisian said in November. “Are they really watching people play? Are they really watching head-to-head matchups? What happened when people played each other? How did games go? It’s interesting. It’s an interesting process that the College Football (Playoff) committee has to go through.”

Sarkisian’s Texas team was left out of the 12-team race last year with a 9-3 record, placing three teams behind the last at-large spot handed out to the national runner-up Miami Hurricanes. Sarkisian’s Longhorns were one of two teams with three losses in the hunt, having dropped games to No. 2 Ohio State, No. 3 Georgia and unranked Florida. But Texas also had wins against two qualifying teams in Oklahoma and Texas A&M, as well as likely bouncing Vanderbilt out of the discussion in the Commodores’ second loss of the season.

Sarkisian has clearly moved on from that individual moment, now turning his attention toward where the future may lie with a committee potentially tasked with choosing 24 teams as soon as the 2027 season, were the now popular proposition to come into effect.

“The committee doesn’t have the bandwidth to watch that many games,” Sarkisian told Hayes. “They see the media and coaches polls, and they copy them. You’ve got a 12-team playoff, and that means there are at least 30 teams that impact it. Now all of a sudden, you want to go to 24? Now the polls become an even greater factor, because now you’re asking (the committee) to watch 40 teams a week — if not 50.”

The 13-person committee is made up of four former head coaches, two former players, a journalist, but most importantly, six active athletic directors.

This creates a clear conflict of interest. For one, these sitting directors, including Arkansas AD and Chairman Hunter Yurachek, have inherent biases, even if the expectation is for them to remain as neutral as possible. It’s just human nature.

But past that, there isn’t enough time in the day to be able to observe all of these important football games, week-in and week-out.

Take Texas’s own athletic director, Chris Del Conte, as an example.

On gamedays, you can see Del Conte active on Twitter and around Darrel K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium from dusk till dawn. His entire Saturday is focused on his own team and the millions of moving parts that go into hosting or travelling for a college football game.

Where does he have the time to watch Louisville vs. Virginia, or USC vs. Oregon or the top G5 contenders?

On September 27th last year, there were multiple playoff-defining games that occurred early in the conference slate. Alabama taking down Georgia, Indiana escaping Iowa, Ole Miss toppling LSU. Was Yurachek locked in on those games, or was he knee-deep in the process of firing then head coach Sam Pittman after an embarrassing loss to Notre Dame?

Almost half of the most important group of decision makers in the sport’s regular season cannot realistically do their job properly, especially for the final Sunday Selection show that took place just 16 hours after the end of Georgia’s win over Alabama, forcing the Crimson Tide into a bubble scenario with three losses. Was Utah AD Mark Harlan focused on that game, or the expected retirement of longtime coach Kyle Whittingham, who made his decision public just days later?

“I’m a football junkie,” Sarkisian added to Hayes. “When we don’t play, I’m watching quad-box because it’s what I love. But I can’t keep up. I don’t vote anymore in the coaches poll, because it’s not fair for me to vote. I couldn’t tell you how NC State played against Wake Forest. How could I know?”

It begs the question: how can the committee actually weigh the strength of schedule, as they promised after the 2024 season, if they aren’t actually seeing the strength of each team?

It’s part of why these committees have felt so skewed in recent years. Texas and Notre Dame played a combined eight opponents who finished in the Top 25 of the final CFP Rankings. Texas played five, and went 3-2 in those games. Notre Dame played just three, going 1-2.

Even with adding Texas’ loss to Florida onto their loss column, they still hold a better record against real competition than Notre Dame, even with a larger sample. When Texas was playing Oklahoma, Georgia and Texas A&M in SEC play, Notre Dame was playing NC State, Pitt and Stanford. The Fighting Irish ranked ahead of the Longhorns in the final CFP rankings.

“Everyone talks about NIL. But my biggest gripe is the selection committee,” Sarkisian said. “There’s no transparency on what exactly the committee is doing. We have to figure that out.”

He would also add that Miami, the final team added to the playoff, lost to two unranked teams and faced just one team that would end up in that final CFP ranking.

Sarkisian finished with his thoughts on the College Football Playoff process as a whole and what he believes to be the best format in the current era.

“I’d go back to a four-team playoff, and have your own conference playoff to get the four teams if you want more inventory for your television partners,” Sarkisian said. “We have to think outside the box. Just adding teams and going to 24, that’s a very spastic view, thinking that’s going to solve the problem. Forever in college athletics, we don’t think about the unintended consequences of decisions we make. It’s all knee-jerk reactions. Look where it has gotten us.”