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COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 16, 2013Tom JernstedtArchie ManningTom OsborneMike TrangheseTHE MODERATOR: Good afternoon and welcome to our third teleconference this afternoon for the College Football Playoff Selection Committee. At this time, I will turn it over to executive director, Bill Hancock. BILL HANCOCK: Hello, everyone. We'd like to welcome Tom Jernstedt, Archie Manning, and Mike Tranghese to the line. We have 25 minutes for this call. We'll start by asking each of the three of them to comment on what being on this committee means to them. We'll start with Tom Jernstedt. TOM JERNSTEDT: Thank you, Bill, and good afternoon, folks. I'm very enthusiastic about the opportunity to serve as a member of the College Football Playoff Selection Committee. I owe my professional career to college football. I was recruited by the legendary coach Len Casanova at the University of Oregon, and I've spent the past 40‑plus years following all aspects of Division I, II, and III college football; and now I have a legitimate excuse for the four side‑by‑side television sets that I have tuned into college football over the past 15 years. So I'm excited about that as well, but I'm thrilled about the opportunity. BILL HANCOCK: Archie Manning? ARCHIE MANNING: Thank you, Bill. Hello, everyone. Like Tom, I'm honored to be part of this committee. I'm very impressed with the committee. It's certainly an all‑star group. My commitment is to be a good committee member, and I think like the other 12 people, I'm very passionate about college football and have been for a long time, so this is a real privilege for me. BILL HANCOCK: Mike Tranghese? MIKE TRANGHESE: I'm pretty passionate about the sport, and having been involved in it for a long time, having the chance to make the contribution is important to me. Plus when you're afforded an opportunity to join people like Archie and Tom and Tom Osborne and the others on the committee, it's pretty hard to say no. So I'm really excited about being part of this. Q. Mr.Manning, what was your thought process when approached to be a member of this committee? ARCHIE MANNING: I didn't have too many questions. I was a little bit curious how many people would be on the committee. Obviously, we all want to know about the time commitment. There will be a time commitment, but obviously we're all committed to doing that. I've had a lot of people just kind of mention this to me and wondered if you'd be in it. I had no idea. But, I guess, in thinking about it, it's kind of like I said before. I've been around college football a long, long time. I was fortunate enough to play. My children played. I love the game, and I want to give back and contribute. As I said before, I just took it as a real honor. So it wasn't a hard choice. I'm really excited to be part of it. Q. Tom, just wondering how similar or dissimilar you think this work will be than the Basketball Selection Committee, and what you might be able to bring from your experiences there to this committee? TOM JERNSTEDT: I think to me perhaps the best similarity is it's imperative for all committee members to check their loyalties and any affiliations at the door of the committee meeting room. I think the selection of the committee will be totally committed to selecting the best four teams for the College Football Playoff, similar to the manner in which the Basketball Committee over the years has spent five or six days sorting through all of the available teams and trying to determine the very best teams that deserve to be selected at large. From that standpoint, it will be very similar and primarily checking loyalties and all the affiliations that everybody has at the door and then we are going to work on the college football playoff and the management committee and make it the best they can possibly be. Q. Did you expect your personal experience that might be of use from this committee and people dealing with such a committee before? TOM JERNSTEDT: I hope so. Bill and I both work side‑by‑side for basketball; but between the two of us, if there are adding them up as we go through the process, and we think it might benefit the Selection Committee, I think we'd both be prepared and willing to offer this for consideration. But we are talking about football. My basketball friends would be surprised, I've kept it very confidential over the years, but I watch far more football than basketball games. I'm excited about this opportunity and to be working with all those folks. BILL HANCOCK: Hi, everybody. I wanted to welcome Tom Osborne to the call. Coach, we did with the others at the top of this, I'd like to ask you to take a minute and tell the group what does being on this committee mean to you? TOM OSBORNE: First of all, I'd like to say I was certainly very honored to be asked to be on the committee. I had some trepidation about it because it's not going to be easy. I think generally most years the top two teams are readily identifiable, identifying 3, 4, versus 5, 6, 7, 8, is going to be difficult. It looks like you have assembled a very fine committee. I look forward to working with them and doing the best I can, and it's going to require from my work and my film study, and I do have a pretty good network of coaches that I will be talking to that will have pretty intimate knowledge of some teams, and I think that will maybe help me a little bit as well. So glad to be on the committee and honored to be asked. Q. After the BCS meets in '08, you voted against the proposal for (No microphone) there. You said it looked like a playoff, smelled like a playoff, and we don't think a playoff is in the best interest of college football. So why are you involved in a playoff now? TOM OSBORNE: The people who are in charge made that decision, not me. That's what they're getting paid for. That's not my responsibility anymore. Q. But if you were against it, why did do you it? TOM OSBORNE: To vote on it and analyze it and I love the sport and the chance to serve with people who I respect and admire. Q. That didn't really answer the question. Did you change your mind about it? Is it not such a horrible thing anymore? TOM OSBORNE: It's fine. To be honest with you, haven't given it a lot of thought. The people above me made that decision, and I think the fans are genuinely excited about the idea of a four‑team playoff, so it's here. I can hopefully make a contribution to make it work. Q. Archie, you said people proposed to you, was that mainly from the SEC? Are you more or less the SEC representative on this committee? ARCHIE MANNING: No, I don't represent any conference or institution. I think somebody threw that out a while ago. We're checking our loyalties at the door. I think, obviously, when we accept that, we're doing that and that's fine. No, what I had mentioned was I presume‑‑ I don't really know how it worked. I presume they had conference meetings and things they asked people who do you think would be committee members, and some people mentioned to me that they threw my name out. So that's what I was referring to. But I think it's absolutely necessary that none of us‑‑ I know we have five athletic directors on the committee, but they've got that figured out. But just to reiterate again, we're not representing any institution, conference or anything. We're trying to find the best football teams each year? Q. Obviously over the years the BCS got a lot of criticism over the top and some may be warranted. Do you feel like someone who was outside the process of that and what went into the decision making, do you expect the same level of scrutiny as people try to pick this apart, or do you feel like it's going to go pretty well? ARCHIE MANNING: I think we all know, Coach Osborne just mentioned this, this is going to be hard. Every year there are some really great football teams out there. So our job is going to be over a full season, lot of work, and time commitment and things we do to rank these teams and certainly the top 5 will make the playoffs. I think we all understand it's going to take work. It's going to take commitment, and we've the guy big, tough job to do. I'm just impressed with the committee, with everybody's backgrounds. I just came from the airport, and I've already read some comments from people around the country, the things they said about the committee. Integrity was kind of a word that jumped out there. I'm just excited to be part of it and ready to get going. Q. Archie, there's been a lot of talk about from the SEC going from eight to nine conference games. Do you think that with one of your criteria being strength of schedule, do you think that's something the SEC might consider doing? How is this going to affect teams, especially in the BCS conferences right now whether it's scheduling going forward? ARCHIE MANNING: I'm not sure I really have answer for that. I know it is something‑‑ my understanding is it's being considered. They're only in a couple of conferences and it's being considered in others. It's good in a way, bad in a way. Certainly I know one of our criteria will be strength of schedule, one loss, head‑to‑head match‑ups, all those things. So that's a decision the conferences have to make. I've read various coaches opinions and everybody, a lot of coaches went through that and that's understandable. That will all shake out. I don't have a hard opinion one way or the other. Q. Everybody's mentioning the workload and time commitment. I was curious how it would work logistically assuming you can't watch 62 games every weekend. Will you split it up by region? Or how many games do you think you might watch over a weekend or before the next week's games? TOM OSBORNE: I'll take a crack at it. I served on the Legends coaches poll, and I still do. So we went through this procedure, and they would send out videos of maybe over the top six or eight games each week. I think we watched as much as we could on television. But I'd say I probably spent eight to ten hours looking at those films, and I'm sure each individual member of the committee will vary. Some maybe more, some much less. But I also think the committee will be somewhat focused on conferences, so maybe I would be looking more to the Big Ten or Big 12. So I think that will be excited later on. So it would narrow the workload a little bit. It's certainly going to be very difficult to examine 50‑some games. You just can't possibly do that. Q. Anybody else that would like to weigh in? TOM JERNSTEDT: I agree with Coach Osborne. I think the committee will benefit by the fact that I think we'll have our first in‑person meeting in November. That kind of question and a number of others we'll have an opportunity to sit and discuss eyeball to eyeball and come up with better answers then. But we all know what school we've committed to and being prepared to make a commitment with the amount of time we need to do too. So getting to the four best teams and then I think the details will be forthcoming. Q. A quick follow‑up, as far as the vetting process, did anybody catch anybody going through your garbage or talk to your kindergarten teacher or anything? Nobody? TOM JERNSTEDT: No, not here. Q. Coach Osborne, given the subjective nature of trying to look at the different teams, how will style of play figure into that? When you look at say like a Baylor and an Alabama, two completely different styles of play, two different statistics, two different measurements, how will you separate those when you're dealing with three, four, five and six which may come from different regions and different styles and different statistical measures? TOM OSBORNE: Obviously, this is going to be more of an art than a science. I imagine it will be a little bit of intuition involved. But one of the major parameters will be effectiveness. In other words, not only how many yards do you accumulate, but how consistent are you? If you're looking at the offense, do they keep the defense off the field? Do they score a high percentage of the time? Third down conversion, is that good? The offensive line, so there are lots of things. But certainly style of play will be different in different parts of the country and different styles of play. One thing that I think will be interesting is everybody tends to focus on offense, and sometimes on defense; but there is very little commentary on the kicking game. When we sat down to evaluate our film, one‑third of the game is kicking, kicking has so much to do with field position and field position has so much to do with scoring or lack there of. I think that's something that shouldn't be neglected. So there are a lot of us at the game, and there probably isn't going to be a perfect formula for evaluation. Q. Tom, in basketball when you were trying to get the last team or couple of teams, did you have to look at them and say I would rather play this team than that team? I wouldn't want to play this team and go and put them head‑to‑head and play a game between them in your mind's eye. If it comes down to trying to pick number four over number five. TOM JERNSTEDT: I think I can remember any number of individuals on the NCAA Basketball Committee over the years winning games down to the real net cutting, and we had 16 or 10 teams left for four or five at large spots. Committee members, different committee members would say, okay, if you were coaching, who would you rather play or who would you rather not play? So on that committee over a period of time, there were individuals that would raise that question, and I think other committee members found it of value as well. This committee is going to have the benefit of Coach Osborne and others that have coached over time, Coach Alvarez and so on. I think any committee member will come up with the way that they work best and identify their study habits and what helps me the most. But they're also going to be eager to have our in‑person meetings and benefit by the knowledge and vast experience of some of the fellow committee members have and their evaluation of teams. We'll all learn from one another. Q. The SEC has so many teams in the top 25. They've won seven straight titles. People around the country assume them to be the number one conference. How do you check that kind of bias at the door when it's in your face every day? TOM JERNSTEDT: I think the committee chair and the staff will remind all the committee members that, again, when you walk through the door you're representing the College Football Playoffs and check your loyalties. We've got one mission in mind, and I don't think with the integrity and individuals that are going to be around that table that we'll have any difficulty sorting through that. It will be difficult. It will be a challenge, but I think we've got the right people there that have made the commitment; and we'll get it done. Q. Tom, has this become the main difference between your duties on the basketball committee and the duties on the football committee? TOM JERNSTEDT: I think the primary objective is to select the very best teams available in the respective fields that are under consideration, and a couple committee members on this call have talked about the difficulty that we're all going to have trying to separate third and fourth teams, five, six, seven and eight, and you just sit and talk, talk, talk, and bring forth all the available information. That is really the same type of difficulty that the Men's Basketball Committee had over the years when you get down to those last teams, and we've all signed up to do it because we believe in college football and we're excited aboutwhere we think the College Football Playoff is going to take the game, so we're prepared to do the job. Q. Archie, Jeff Long said it earlier today that the recusal policy has not been set for all of you. Have you given any thought to your reaction to discussing Ole Miss or Tennessee? ARCHIE MANNING: Sure, I thought about that when I was asked to be part of the committee. I think that word out there is integrity, and I'm all for that. I can do it. I love college football. I'm honored to be on this committee. If our objective is to rate the ones before us, I'm going to do that to the best of my ability, no matter what part of the country they play in and what conference they play in. I know I believe we're still talking about recusal. I know we've got athletics directors and that's difficult there. But I think there's going to be a policy there. So it's not going to be a problem. Q. Tom, 19 years ago when the College Football Playoff and the NCAA began to look into it blew up, what were the odds that you thought we'd be sitting here today talking about this? TOM JERNSTEDT: I really had not given it a thought. That was an interesting study way back when. The committee was chaired by the chancellor at UCLA. And I got an email from John Sandbrook who was one of the staff members that worked with that committee years ago. He was surprised and excited that there's going to be a College Football Playoff. He commented who would have thought 19 years ago when we're going through this study with a totally different committee that the game would end up where it's going to be in 2014. So I think football fans are very, very excited about it. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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