The participants for the first Rose Bowl Game to be chosen by the College Football Playoff Selection Committee will be announced today.
The College Football Playoff announced in January 2013 that the Rose Bowl Game and Sugar Bowl would serve as the two semifinals for the first year of the four-team playoff.
A 12-person committee with experience as coaches, college athletes, college administrators and journalists along with current athletic directors has issued rankings of the top 25 teams for each of the past six Tuesdays.
The top four teams in the rankings released today will play in the College Football Playoff.
The top-ranked team will play the fourth-ranked team and the second-ranked team will play the third-ranked team. The first- and second-ranked teams will be placed “at the most advantageous sites, weighing criteria such as convenience of travel for its fans, home-crowd advantage or general familiarity with the host city and its stadium,” according to information post on the College Football Playoff website.
The Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl matchups will be announced live on ESPN during the College Football Playoff Selection Show at 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time.
The semifinal winners will advance to the College Football Playoff National Championship, which will be played Jan. 12 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
In the rankings released Tuesday, Alabama was ranked first, Oregon second, Texas Christian third and Florida State fourth.
Reflecting results of games played Friday and Saturday, Oregon has a 96.9 percent chance of being ranked second in the final rankings released today and Texas Christian a 64 percent chance of being ranked third, meaning they would play in the Rose Bowl, according to 20,000 simulations conducted by FiveThirtyEight.com, the ESPN-owned website that analyzes data related to politics, economics, science, life and sports.
The committee includes USC Athletic Director Pat Haden, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Nebraska coach and Athletic Director Tom Osborne and Tyrone Willingham, a former coach at Stanford, Notre Dame and Washington. Committee members are barred from participating in votes regarding schools they or immediate family members have ties to.
“We start from scratch each week and evaluate small groups of teams against one another and create the rankings through seven rounds of voting,” said College Football Playoff Selection Committee Jeff Long, the vice chancellor and director of athletics at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville.
“The committee is a group of college football experts whose task each week is to take a fresh look at the rankings 1-25.”
The Rose Bowl and the five other participating bowls — the Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Peach Bowl — will be the site of a semifinal game once every three years. During the years it does not host a semifinal, the Rose Bowl game will have its traditional matchup between teams from the Pacific-12 and Big Ten conferences.
