Brian Kelly advocates for more data-driven approach to College Football Playoff

As talks about the future of the College Football Playoff remain ongoing during league spring meetings, everyone is pitching in their ideas for how to make the system better. LSU coach Brian Kelly has a few.

The former Notre Dame coach has played for a national championship before. And he’s advocating for a system more similar to the one that got him there.

“To me when I was at Notre Dame we played for the national championship and it was the old system, it was done by a computer,” Kelly said on The Paul Finebaum Show on Wednesday. “Today it’s very subjective.”

The BCS incorporated a lot of analytics and metrics to rank teams, though it also incorporated the use of some human polling. Still, the human element was just a small subset of the entire system.

It certainly wasn’t the full-blown College Football Playoff selection committee the sport has today. And there’s been more and more pushback against using a selection committee in recent weeks.

“What we’d like to see is maybe a combination of some of the analytics, some of the strength of schedule components,” Kelly said, summarizing the position of his SEC coaching peers at large. “I know a lot of people use RPI. We probably couldn’t use an RPI because we just don’t have enough body of work in terms of games. But if we can blend those two together so the selection process is a lot cleaner relative to who should be in and who shouldn’t be in…”

So where will the College Football Playoff turn? That remains to be seen.

It’s clear, though, that the sport remains in a state of flux. Already there have been some minor changes.

“I think we started that with straight seeding,” Kelly said. “I think that that was the first iteration of where we need to be. I think we can streamline it a little bit more with more data. And I think the more data we have so you’re not just looking at the right-hand column, it can’t just be about that. It’s got to be about the best football teams.”

How many teams, where games will be played, seeding… those are all questions the College Football Playoff will have to answer going forward. Kelly, for one, though, wants to see more of an analytic and data-driven process.