A Selection Committee is an ad hoc group that assesses applicants for specific honors, prizes and fellowships. Members are appointed by the unit, committee or body that oversees the prize and must be free from conflicts of interest. Selection Committees must adhere to SIAM’s conflict of interest guidelines, and any apparent or potential conflicts should be reported to the appropriate party.
The management committee appoints a chair for each Selection Committee. The chair is responsible for the overall process and ensuring all members are engaged in the committee activities. It is also the chair’s responsibility to make sure that the Selection Committee has all of the resources it needs to perform its work. Whether this means scheduling meetings with outside consultants, providing budgetary support and other administrative functions or conducting interviews and assessing work samples, the chair is responsible for establishing a process that will help the committee reach its desired outcomes.
Selection Committee members are not compensated, but they are expected to dedicate a substantial amount of time and effort into the process. Committee members spend hours watching live televised games and video replays, interviewing coaches and directors of athletics, discussing the teams with colleagues, evaluating various data sources and making qualitative assessments and judgment calls on their own to decide how to rank and seed teams. In the end, it is the individual committee member’s unique evaluation of a vast amount of information that makes up the final rankings and decisions.
As the number of conferences grew and the power conference champions ballooned into the top 25 in recent years, it became more difficult to ensure the committee was unbiased in its rankings and in its decisions. With traditional contract bowl relationships still playing a role in how teams are slotted for the Playoff Quarterfinals and other factors such as geographic proximity, it’s never been more challenging for the committee to maintain impartiality and fairness.
The Selection Committee is responsible for identifying the best teams in college football and determining which of them should play for the CFP championship game. They use a variety of data sources and criteria to make their decisions, including the NET (Network Efficiency) ranking system and their own rankings and observations based on hundreds of hours of observation, discussions with coaches, directors of athletics and commissioners, and reviews and comparisons of various data.
The Selection Committee is also charged with assigning teams to the New Year’s Six bowl games, which include the Rose, Orange, Sugar, Cotton and Fiesta. The committee gives higher priority to traditional contract bowl relationships over other criteria, such as geographic proximity, but it’s always possible that a team could be sent to a bowl with which it doesn’t have a contract or historic relationship. Despite this, the committee remains committed to maintaining the integrity of its system by not arbitrarily assigning teams to bowls.