CFP committee chair Mack Rhoades during the CFP rankings reveal on ESPN. Credit: ESPN
By Sam Neumann on

The College Football Playoff committee released its first rankings of the 2025 season Tuesday night, and the talking points mostly wrote themselves: a top four of Ohio State, Indiana, Texas A&M and Alabama. The Big Ten took the top two spots, while the SEC stewed over disrespect.

But Mack Rhoades, the Baylor athletic director serving as committee chair this season, made what was clearly meant to be a tongue-in-cheek comment about the committee’s role in shaping ESPN’s programming, while explaining why BYU and Texas Tech both landed in the top 10.

“We tried to help ESPN out with their ratings getting BYU and Texas Tech together with GameDay in Lubbock, so enjoy that,” Rhoades said on the CFP conference call following the rankings reveal on Tuesday.

Rhoades was clearly being lighthearted, but as Sports Illustarted‘s Bryan Fischer noted, it didn’t come off the way he wanted it to because it only reinforces the very perception that’s dogged the relationship between ESPN and the CFP for years.

It probably shouldn’t matter. BYU is 8-0. Texas Tech is 8-1 with a road win at Utah. Both teams earned their rankings, and College GameDay going to Lubbock for Saturday’s matchup makes sense regardless of what the committee does. An undefeated Big 12 team visiting the conference’s one-loss darling is exactly the kind of game GameDay exists to cover.

But context matters here, and the context is nearly a decade of criticism about ESPN’s role in shaping college football narratives. The network pays the SEC $3 billion over 10 years. It owns the SEC Network. It owns the rights to broadcast the College Football Playoff. And every year, without fail, ESPN personalities spend November and December arguing that SEC teams with three losses deserve playoff spots over one-loss teams from other conferences.

It also doesn’t help that the Tuesday night rankings show exists solely to generate content for ESPN. Booger McFarland and Joey Galloway spent part of Tuesday’s broadcast arguing that Texas A&M should be ranked No. 1 based on analytics. At the same time, Greg McElroy found himself “baffled” that he actually agreed with the committee for once.

That’s the real issue underneath all of this. As long as college football decides champions partly in boardrooms rather than purely on the field, and as long as ESPN writes massive checks to conferences while also controlling the playoff broadcasts, there will be questions about bias. Fair or not, that’s the reality.

Rhoades probably meant nothing by his comment. But intentions don’t matter when perception already exists. Every offhand remark about ESPN and the committee working together, every joke about ratings and GameDay decisions, every instance where it looks like the business side influences the football side adds fuel to a fire that’s been burning for years.

The CFP expanded to 12 teams partly to reduce controversy. Instead, it just created more arguments about who belongs and which conferences deserve how many bids. And when the committee chair jokes about helping ESPN with ratings, even in passing, it doesn’t make anyone feel better about how this actually works.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann