has been in place since 1981 to help select and seed
basketball teams, has no relevancy to football, he
said.
"College football is bigger than that," Hancock
went on. "Even in basketball, the RPI is so misleading. There were years when the basketball committee never looked at the RPI, literally, never looked at
it. The RPI helps in one sense; it helps you to group
teams.
"But as far as some difference between Team No.
31 and Team No. 41, it's not a valid tool and that's
why the committee doesn't use it. That's why we
didn't want a single metric (for football). We have
all these brilliant people and they're capable of discerning information and making a decision."
The College Football Playoff committee members will have everything that they need, including
game tape, to evaluate and differentiate between
the top teams to the extent that Hancock joked that
they would even know if the left tackle's girlfriend
passed or failed an exam.
The committee chairman is Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long. Besides Long and Alvarez, the other
current ADs are Clemson's Dan Radakovich, USC's
Pat Haden and West Virginia's Oliver Luck, the father of former Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck,
now the starting QB of the Indianapolis Colts.
"There will be levels of recusal on the committee,"
Hancock said. "We know Barry will be recused on
voting on Wisconsin. We know Dr. Rice, a president
at Stanford, will be recused when Stanford is under discussion. The question will be, 'Do we go any
deeper than that?"'
That will be resolved over the next few months,
he said.
Asked if there's the potential for any semantical
confusion on whether the committee is choosing
the best teams or the most deserving teams, Hancock said, "People will nuance that over time. But
the answer is we want the best teams. Who are the
four best teams in the country?
"We know it's going to be hard. We know Team 5
is going to be really close and there are going to be
years when Teams 6, 7 and 8 are close. But, at the
end of the day, we have a four-team tournament and
we're going to have the best four teams in it."
Upon reflection, Hancock derived some great satisfaction from the BCS era.
"We wouldn't have it any
other way," insisted Hancock.
"We have a sport that people
love and I wouldn't change
that for anything."
A
41
