College Football Playoff: Notre Dame AD's Idea Sounds Like Selection Theater

Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick is on the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, so he's got as good of an idea as anybody as to what the final structure of the playoffs will look like. That's not set in stone yet, so if the committee doesn't know then nobody else does either, but Swarbrick has some ideas.

Here's a portion of what Swarbrick said in a recent interview, per ESPN.com.

"We want it to be big enough so that every football team, all 121 FBS schools, are viewed," Swarbrick said on "The Carmen, Jurko & Harry Show" on ESPN 1000. "There's somebody who's actually spent the time having watched some games and understand them.

Much like the NCAA basketball tournament's selection committee, Swarbrick expected the football one to value a team's strength of schedule, especially its non-conference one.

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One of the things we like so much about that is as much as this happened in basketball in the past decade, the selection committee will send a real message about strength of schedule. If you choose not to challenge yourself, especially in the pre-conference games, it's going to impact your rating. That's another way we think we're contributing to the vibrancy of the regular season through this process.

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Is evaluating all 121 teams an ostensibly noble goal? Sure. Is it necessary for selecting the best four teams for a college playoff? Lord, no. It's kabuki theater, all in the pretense of thoroughness. It's the NFL draft combine—a largely worthless pursuit—all performed so those in charge can say they tried as hard as they could.

Here's all you need to know about just about every team outside the top, oh, 50 or so of college football (let's call this hypothetical team Tech State): For a championship team, Tech State is not serious competition. It is a cupcake. It is blowout city. As a matter of fact, the number of teams in FBS that are automatic wins for a title-contending team is probably way higher than 70, but we can at least start there.

So while it would be nice to see the strength of schedule play a serious factor in the selection process, let's not let this turn into trying to differentiate between a win over a 3-9 Sun Belt team and a 6-6 MAC team. They're both body bag games. There's nothing serious to be learned from them. And if you start assigning significance to any difference between the two, you're really starting to lose sight of what makes one playoff contender better than the other.

But hey, at least doing that will look like the committee is trying as hard as it can, so plan on seeing plenty of that come 2014 and beyond.