College Football Playoff Selection Committee Will Release Only 4 Rankings

For the final time, the first BCS rankings of the season were released this week to much anticipation. But in the future, fans will have to wait a little longer to see the potential matchups in the College Football Playoff, which begins in the 2014-15 season.

Bill Hancock, executive director of both the BCS and the College Football Playoff, went on the Tim Brando Show Thursday and explained some of the particulars surrounding next year's change in postseason format, as reported by Chip Patterson of CBS Sports.

Hancock announced that there won't be weekly announcements of the four-team playoff standings and only four announcements in total will be made during the season:

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There will not be any master computer rankings. There will not be weekly announcements, like we have our BCS standings show, although the committee will be making about four announcements during the season—so that will be pretty close. We have seven BCS standings, so going to four in the future, I don't think folks will notice a lot of difference in that.

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As Hancock noted, while only four rankings may sound minimal, the difference between the future format and the current design won't be a drastic change. 

He went on to say that the public will still have access to the same computer rankings that playoff committee members will use to make their decisions:

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We think that every bit of info the committee has will be available to the public. They will be looking at computer rankings. They will be looking at every bit of statistics that you and I could ever imagine about every team—and our goal here is to make all of that available to the public.

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Hancock talked more specifics with Brando, including the similarities between the playoff committee and the committee that selects the 64-team NCAA basketball tournament field. Hancock confirmed that the committee's protocol would resemble the blueprint laid out in the basketball selection committee. 

He noted that committee members would be recused from the conversation when it was centered around teams they represented and that committee members would be in contact with experts from around the nation while ranking the conferences against one another.

The BCS director also admitted that many of the specifics regarding the committee are still in the works and that the new system will be determined over the coming months.

Hancock did not specify when the ranking announcements would be made by the committee, but with just four being made there are plenty of possibilities. 

In speculation, there could be one midseason ranking, one at Week 12, another at Week 14 and the final rankings after the conference championship games. Another possibility could be at weeks 10, 12, 14 and after the conference title week. Or finally, the rankings might just come in the last four weeks of the season.

Of course, this is all speculation which will be cleared up before the start of the 2014-15 season.

The first two College Football Playoff semifinal games will be hosted by the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, 2015. The first title game will be held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas—home of the Dallas Cowboys—on Jan. 12, 2015.