

The College Football Playoff announced Wednesday revisions to its selection process, including new metrics to help the committee weigh strength of schedule and a tweak to the recusal policy for the 13-member panel.
The CFP also unveiled the schedule for this year’s committee rankings release. As usual, they will come out every Tuesday night during the final month of the season, starting Nov. 4. Selection Sunday for the 12-team Playoff will be Dec. 7.
As the season kicks off this week, check out the schedule for the CFP selection committee to announce its 2025 rankings live on @ESPN this fall!
More details from their recent meeting in preparation for the season » https://t.co/iWl35SFzUB#CFBPlayoff 🏈🏆 pic.twitter.com/YrDuw1Uwg9
— College Football Playoff (@CFBPlayoff) August 20, 2025
The 12-team playoff is in its second year and already has one major change. This year the final committee rankings will be used to seed the field, unlike in 2024, when top-four seeds and first-round byes were reserved for conference champions.
There has been much discussion this offseason among the conference commissioners who manage the CFP about the format beyond this season and the role of the selection committee. More expansion — a lot more, maybe — and minimizing the role of the committee through increased automatic qualifying bids has been debated privately and publicly.
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The SEC has been especially vocal about the committee putting more emphasis on strength of schedule. CFP staff tried to address that through working with its data partners on a new strength of record metric for the committee to use.
“This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team,” the CFP release said.
Also, after there was some controversy last year about whether teams that did not play on championship weekend should be locked into their placements relative to teams that did, a clarification of the committee’s procedure was made. During last season’s penultimate selection show, chairman Warde Manuel said the committee would not re-order teams excluded from conference title games based on the results of those games.
Notable from the CFP release after there was much discussion about rankings for teams that did and did not play championship weekend. pic.twitter.com/SCww8J2YBS
— Ralph D. Russo (@ralphDrussoATH) August 20, 2025
“At the direction of the CFP management committee, the membership panel also reviewed the movement of idle teams from the penultimate to final ranking,” the release said. “The selection committee reaffirmed that movement in the final week should be evidence-based and did not recommend creating a formal policy prohibiting such movement.”
The 13-member panel is made up of current athletic directors, former coaches and players and a media member no longer actively covering the sport. Committee members have in the past been recused from discussions about and voting on schools they receive direct compensation from. Also, committee members are recused from weighing in on teams that have an immediate family member playing or coaching on them.
Here is the recusal list for CFP selection committee members. pic.twitter.com/woHJLJ66N1
— Ralph D. Russo (@ralphDrussoATH) August 20, 2025
This year a partial recusal will be used if the member has a secondary relationship with a school, such as an immediate family member employed by the institution but outside of the football program. Partial recusal allows the member to participate in discussions related to the team but not vote.
(Photo: Jason Mowry / Getty Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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