Another reason to suspect the weekly reporting of selection committee rankings is likely to be an unnecessary distraction is because it invites this kind of lobbying:
The SEC announced on Sunday its decision to stick with an eight game conference schedule, turning down the option to join the Pac-12, Big 12 and Big Ten with a nine-game conference schedule. After the Big Ten makes the jump in 2016 it will just be the SEC and ACC, who has Notre Dame as a partial member playing five ACC teams per year, left at eight.
“I’ve been saying this for three years now: I think if we’re going to go into a playoff and feed into one playoff system, we all need to play by the same rules,” Stanford coach David Shaw said. “Play your conference. Don’t back down from playing your own conference. It’s one thing to back down from playing somebody else. But don’t back down from playing your own conference.”
The four-team playoff guarantees at least one of the five power conferences will be left out, so expect plenty of conference-against-conference comparisons in these first few years of the College Football Playoff era.
“There’s no taking away anything that LSU and Alabama and Auburn recently have accomplished,” Shaw said. “They’ve been phenomenal. My take is to say, ‘OK, the rest of us are playing our conference. We’re playing nine out of 12 teams in our conference. Why can’t you do the same thing?’
“You can’t color it. You can’t try to explain it away. You’re not doing what the rest of us are doing it. We’re doing it. The Big Ten is doing it. The Big 12 is doing it. Everybody is pushing toward a nine-game conference schedule.”
At least if you leave it at one vote at the end, it’s a fait accompli. Instead, they’re going out of their way to invite second-guessing and whining about conference scheduling on a weekly basis, all in the hope of swaying the selection committee’s evaluation process. And while that’s great for ESPN – the WWL could schedule a 30-minute bitchfest to run after The Jeff Long Show – I predict it’s going to be a turnoff for the rest of us who just want to see the selection committee cobble together a playoff group of the four best teams.
Gee, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think they were trying to encourage us to be dissatisfied with the new format.
Get The Picture 
That’s real nice Clark.
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“You can write that — cupcakes,” Shaw told CBSSports.com.
How dare he say that? The inflammatory word ‘cupcakes’ didn’t even appear in the other Pac-12 head coach talking points. Is he man enough to say damn the cupcakes, full speed ahead
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While I respect what he’s done at Stanford, and I want a 9-game conference schedule also, and the PAC-12 is tougher than it used to be, suggesting that teams in the SEC “man up”, as if all conferences are equivalent, is idiotic. His “logicking” is pretty pathetic for a coach at Stanford, too.
Especially since SEC teams are already voluntarily playing 9th and 10th games like Michigan, Clemson (UGA and SC), Florida State, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Boise State, etc.
He’s acting like the SEC is running away from the other conferences, when in fact we’re just trying to avoid ourselves.
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That SEC schools prefer the 9th game be OOC rather than playing another SEC team is pretty telling.
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The 9th game being OOC allows the bottom of the conference, traditionally Missy State, Ole Miss, Kentucky and Vandy, plus now Arky, FU (hee, hee) and UT (double hee, hee) to have a chance to become bowl eligible. If the 9th conference game is Vandy against Missy State, Kentucky against Arky, UT against Ole Miss (you get the idea) the loser may very well get knocked out with only 5 wins and be ineligible for a bowl.
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