When we talk about how need to “impress” the committee, we are displaying our adorable naïveté. This is about the Big10 and the SEC keeping money and attention in their own conferences. And ESPN and Fox want it that way because they’ve just paid $70-75M per team per year to lock in the inventory for those teams.

The committee is told explicitly and implicitly to get as many power 2 teams as possible. They’ll rank a team like Miami highly to give the impression that they aren’t biased, but in the end only one ACC team will get in so who cares?!

This is about money, not respect. When we debate ad nauseam about how we could get the committee to treat us better, it’s like debating how we could get better Christmas presents if we had just impressed Santa more. The whole premise of the argument is flawed.

The only thing the ACC and Big12 teams can do to get at-large bids is be so good that the committee doesn’t have the necessary cover to keep us out. In most years going forward that will likely mean to be undefeated, save for a CCG loss. This system sucks, but it provides infinitely more access than we’ve had at any time since the initiation of the BCS. But let’s stop with the whole “impressing the committee” nonsense. It should be - how can we back the committee into a corner so they can’t screw us as hard as they’d like?