As we approach the end of the 2014 calendar year, we’re looking back at the top 50 stories in college football for the year. Today, we continue on with the top 10 with our No. 3 story of 2014.

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No. 3 — The Selection Committee & Playoff

In the first year of a new era, we were left with nearly as many questions at the end of the year as we had at the beginning. The College Football Playoff selection committee came in with a blank slate, and what we got is still an incomplete picture.

Even with the lingering question marks, we finally have a chance to do what fans have wanted for years, let the nation’s best settle it on the field. Is Alabama the benefit of “SEC Bias” or truly the best team out there? Does Florida State deserve more respect for their winning ways? Instead of letting the computers decide it, we got a 12-person committee to give us some answers.

The SEC was the conference everyone thought would end up testing the selection committee the most. As the conference crammed more and more teams into the top 10 of the Associated Press and coaches polls every week, the question was about how many teams the SEC could get into the initial tournament.

The conference ended up with just one representative, Alabama, in in inaugural field, and it was actually the Big 12 that presented the committee with its biggest test. TCU and Baylor were neck and neck all season, playing the same round-robin conference schedule. The only differences between the two: a stronger out-of-conference schedule for TCU and a head-to-head win over the Horned Frogs for Baylor to point to.

With TCU ranked No. 3 and Baylor No. 6 heading into the final set of rankings, the committee decided to take a pass on a difficult decision, slotting the teams fifth and sixth, respectively, in the final committee poll. That left us hanging with two major questions: Does the head-to-head matchup still matter? How much does strength of schedule play into the selection process?

Each week, we learned something new about the process. Committee chairman Jeff Long would say that each set of rankings was completely new, which the committee would back up by moving Florida State around the top four without the Seminoles losing a game, but would also contradict in instances like keeping Mississippi State at No. 4 after losing to Alabama in a game that didn’t seem as close as the final score indicated.

The committee also gave us a new way to measure a team’s performance: “game control,” a phrase Long dropped in his post-rankings comments during the season that stuck. It was why Florida State fluctuated weekly and why Alabama jumped to No. 1, but it wasn’t the end-all-be-all factor.

The selection process sometimes stayed true to valuing each week on its own, which makes you wonder what the point of issuing multiple sets of rankings was. It let teams know where they stood, but in the end that didn’t matter. TCU did everything in its power to remain among the top four teams in the country in the final week of the season with a 55-3 win in the finale, but in the end fell behind Baylor in the rankings despite running ahead of them all season.

With the playoff field ready to kick off in just a few days, the only questions that remain unanswered for this year are on the field. We’ll find out next fall how much remains the same from this year. We don’t know if the committee will revert to its original 13-person group, which was reduced to 12 when Archie Manning stepped down early in the year. Nor do we know what kind of impact the committee’s Big 12 decision will have on the college football landscape.

We do know that we get four teams with a chance to play for the title. But for how long will that be enough?