Rece Davis calls out critics of College Football Playoff selection committee

Whether it’s in his host role on Saturday morning’s ESPN College GameDay or the weekly College Football Playoff Top 25 Rankings Show on Tuesday evenings, Rece Davis has heard all the CFP complaints from disgruntled fans. And, frankly, he’s fed up with it.

Especially when fans — or coaches for that matter — question how much actual football the College Football Playoff selection committee members watch prior to gathering inside a Grapevine, Texas hotel conference room and ranking the Top 25 teams in college football.

The first College Football Playoff Top 25 ranking of the 2025 season will be unveiled at 8 pm ET Tuesday on ESPN. The ranking reveal will come three days after the CFP’s 12-member selection committee — minus former Arizona State guard Randall McDaniel, who stepped away earlier this month to address a personal matter — congregates for the first time this season on Saturday in Texas.

Rece Davis: ‘It drives me nuts when people say they don’t watch the games’

“These people on this (selection) committee — 12 of them this year with Randall McDaniel stepping away — they’re diligent, they watch the games – it drives me nuts when people say they don’t watch the games,” Davis said during Wednesday’s episode of the College GameDay Podcast with co-host Pete Thamel. “Just because they don’t agree with someone else’s evaluation of what happened does not mean they don’t watch the games. Yes, they watch the games, they dive into the numbers. They’re diligent and they come up with conclusions. And I don’t think for a second they say, … ‘We better rank Memphis because we’re going to use that as a Top 25 win for somebody else.’

“I don’t think they do that, but when they use that as the rationale, it is a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re using your own evaluation to validate it, and there is some merit in that, I guess. But you’d like something a little more objective. Like looking at the enhanced metrics they have – you know, X number of wins they performed at this level relative to the metrics, therefore they’re ranked ahead of this other team.”

The CFP selection committee has come under fire nearly every season since its first iteration in 2014, so much so that it was forced to expand from four teams to 12 prior to the 2024 season. And, after last year’s initial 12-team field stirred up even more controversy when a three-loss Alabama was bumped in favor of two-loss ACC runner-up SMU and lower-ranked champions from the ACC and Big 12, the expectation is the Playoff will expand once again before 2026. The leading proposals at the moment range from 16- to 24-team formats, though nothing has been finalized yet.