Joel Klatts 5 Takeaways From The 1st CFP Rankings: Is The Process Broken?

Joel Klatt has a problem with the College Football Playoff committees first top 25 of the season, and it has little to do with any one team.

The committee unveiled its rankings Tuesday night, with Miami at No. 1, followed by Georgia, Utah and Indiana, and Ohio State at No. 12 as the first team out of the 12-team field. 

On the latest episode of "The Joel Klatt Show," Klatt said the process behind those rankings is the issue and pushed back on the idea that the first top 25 ranking doesnt matter.

Here are Joel Klatt's takeaways:

Klatts thoughts: "Theyre left to their own accord to rank teams based on any criteria they want. What you see generally — and weve seen this all the way back to 2014 when we started this exercise in the playoff era — is that you see certain criteria used at certain points and other criteria used at others. Record has an influence, obviously. Who you beat has an influence. Sometimes who you lost to, your strength of schedule — thats been more of a common theme this year — your personnel, whos injured, whos not injured.

"Theres all these different criteria, and none of them are valued over any other criteria. Well, thats impossible. So, good people in that room, trustworthy people in that room, but that doesnt make up for the fact that the process is broken."

Klatts thoughts: "What is one of the things that is broken in the process? The fact that theres only 13 inputs, that theres only 13 individuals that have an opinion on something that is so important in college football. In fact, the most important thing in college football. Thats wild.

"We have to increase the number of inputs into this data set. Thats the process. Thats not their fault. Theyre doing the best they can with the criteria that theyre given. Theyre building a house with no blueprints."

Klatts thoughts: "I know not everybody has a math background or a statistics background. … But we all kind of understand numbers, right? I mean, we have to balance our budgets. We've got to pay bills. We got to do all those things at home. So you kind of understand numbers, and you understand when something is an outlier. 

"You're going through your personal budget, and you know the month that you take a vacation, and you're like, 'well, our expenditures that month that's an outlier because we went on vacation,' and you understand that, so you don't base your entire yearly budget based on the amount of money you spent in the month that you went on vacation.

"Well, I would argue that what they gave us on Tuesday night is about as big of an outlier as you can possibly get in a top 25. I dont think that you could put 50 committees together and they would produce something that is this wild. 

"What do we do in statistics when we get a body of data? We throw out the edges and then evaluate the middle. Its like a bell curve. Well, this top 25 is on the edge. Its the very outskirts, and yet its the one that were going to use to represent all of college football and crown a champion."

Klatts thoughts: "The process of ranking teams this way, and having that process be the most meaningful thing in college football, is actively hurting the sport, and thats the tough part. None of them are intending that, but thats the truth.

"Based on the top 25 that they gave us — and candidly, they have given us over the last two or three years, maybe even all the way back to 2014 in the playoff era — there is zero, and I mean zero reason to schedule a tough non-conference game. Seeing Texas and Ohio