PE EACH BOWL

o. 10 Florida vs. No. 7 Michigan, on Saturday, ESPN, ercedes-Benz Stadium

administrators, the CFP selection committee also assumed responsibility for selecting teams for the Peach, Cotton and Fiesta in the two years out of three that those bowls don’t host a semififinal.

This is how the 13-member co mmittee arrived at the Florida-Michigan pairing for the Dec. 29 game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium:

■ First, it ranked the Top 25 teams on the morning of Dec. 2, Select io n Sund ay, placing the top four in the playoff semifinals, which this season will be pl ayed in the Orange an d Cotton bowls. No. 1 Alabama will meet No. 4 Oklahoma in the Orange, and No. 2 Clemson will play No. 3 Notre Dame in the Cotton.

■ Next, the Rose and Sugar bowls, which have contracts directly with conferences, selected their matchups. The Rose Bowl chose the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions — No. 6 Ohio State and No. 9 Washington, respectively — under terms of the bowl’s contracts with those two leagues, both of which failed to place a team in the play-

offffffffffff. The Sugar Bowl took SEC runner-up and No. 5-ranked Georgia vs. Big 12 runner-up and No. 15-ranked Texas, the highest-ra nke d available team from each of those leagues after their champions reached the playoffffffffffff.

■ Then, the CFP committee sorted out the matchups for the Peach and Fiesta bowls from among the highest-ranked teams still available: No. 7 Michigan, No. 8 Central Florida, No. 10 Florida and No. 11 LSU. Central Florida played in the Peach Bowl last year, and the committee’s stated preference is to avoid placing a team in the same bowl in back-toback seasons. The committee also prefers to avoid a bowl rematch of teams that met in the regular season, as Florida and LSU did. And it generally prefers to plac e the highest-ranked team in a group (Mich ig an in this case ) in the location closest to its campus (Atlanta in this case). Those preferences left Michigan vs. either Florida or LSU as options for the Peach. The committee chose to send the Gators to Atlanta to play the Wolverines and LSU to the Fiesta Bowl to play Central Florida.

The committee controversially opted against a Florida-UCF game, which would have been more compelling for many fans in the Sunshine State.

Florida athletic direc tor Scott Stricklin, a member of the CFP selection committee, said he was recused from the discussion and decision on the Peach and Fiesta pairings.

“At that point, (other members) looked at me and said, ‘Scott, can you leave the room?’ ” Stricklin said at a Peach Bowl news conference. “Ten minutes later, they brought me back in, and I looked on the wall where they had the screen and the matchups, and that’s how I found out what happened.

“The bowls don’t get to politic. The schools don’t get to politic. It’s a very pure process from that standpoint,” Stricklin said. “The great beauty of it is that we get great matchups. … If it had been us against UCF, that’d have been a great matchup. We’re blessed that it ’s us against Michigan because that’s going to be a great matchup.”

With Michigan, the Peach Bowl gets a Big Ten team in its

No no Me