"Take it out of a committee's hand" - Amid USC-Notre Dame rivalry drama, Lincoln Riley proposes bold idea to fix College Football Playoff format

The selection of teams for the College Football Playoff has always been a controversial topic. Much of the conversation in the offseason has been surrounding what a 14- or 16-team playoff would look like, and how each team makes the playoff. Currently, this is done by the CFP committee, a structure that some coaches do not like.

One coach is USC's Lincoln Riley. On the "Cover 3 Podcast," he proposed an idea to help the CFP select who makes it in.

Riley believes this group of people needs to be taken out of the decision-making and the CFP should move to award automatic spots to the top teams from the SEC and Big Ten. It's a sentiment echoed by many other Big Ten coaches.

"It's always going to be subjective," Riley said (Timestamp: 8:35). "You've got to take it out of the committee's hands."

The College Football Playoff committee is comprised of 13 people, all of whom have a strong connection to college football (normally current or former athletic directors of programs). Their sole job is to select the 12 (formerly four) teams that will play in the playoffs.

This format of selecting teams is unique to college sports.

In professional leagues, playoff spots are given to the best-performing teams in a conference or division, as decided by their ranking in the standings.

However, this does not happen in college football, partly due to the large number of programs in Division I, alongside the massive differences in strength between some conferences. The imbalance of power means that a committee decides the best 12 teams.

But it is not as easy as picking the 12 teams with the best record. For those that have lost a game, one needs to consider who they lost to and by how much. Then, there is when a top SEC or Big Ten team beats an FCS program by 70 points. How should that highly expected win be rewarded by the committee? In the end, some high-performing teams miss out due to the judgment of the committee.

Could the reforms affect the USC-Notre Dame rivalry game?

However, if the proposal of automatic qualifiers from the Big Ten comes into play, there will be no incentive for these teams to face those from outside the conference. This is because these games will have no impact on their playoff hopes (whereas in the current format, all games count).

The proposal puts the future of an important rivalry game at risk.

The game between USC and Notre Dame has been a yearly affair since 1926, but the game's future is in doubt. Both programs want the game to continue to be an annual clash, but a potential change in CFP qualification could put it at risk.

As USC and Notre Dame are not conference opponents, there would be no playoff benefit for the Trojans to play this game, and the Big Ten may want its teams to play a schedule filled with conference members to make every game important.

This would be an unfortunate end to a rivalry game that is nearly 100 years old and a hallmark of college football.