Barry Alvarez discusses being on playoff selection committee

CEDAR RAPIDS - Why would Barry Alvarez put himself through it?

He's 67 years old and has a consuming job as the University of Wisconsin's director of athletics. He was a college football coach from 1979 to 2005, the last 16 as the Badgers' head coach. He has been the AD at UW-Madison since 2004. That's a full, demanding professional life.

So why tack on a lot more responsibility in the heart of football season? Which Alvarez has done as one of the 12 members of the College Football Playoff selection committee. It's required a lot of watching games, a lot of taking notes, a lot of examining statistics, and eight round-trips to Grapevine, Texas. The first seven are for assembling weekly Top 25 rankings. The final one is to determine the four teams in the playoff field.

He'll answer that later in this post. But no one was really surprised Alvarez would have happily signed on for this duty. Over the last several years, he's sort of been the self-appointed mouthpiece for the Big Ten whenever significant changes in the conference were approaching.

Few people are part of such weighty decisions with so much riding on the line for teams, schools and conferences. Alvarez's response to that was a shrug and 'It is what it is,” while he, his wife, and some friends were in Firehouse Subs in Cedar Rapids Friday night. The restaurant is owned by former UW director of football operations and assistant athletic director John Chadima, a Cedar Rapidian.

Friday night was the calm before another 4-day storm for Alvarez. Today, he'll keep his eye on some 11 a.m. games, then watch the Wisconsin-Iowa game from the Kinnick Stadium press box.

'My weekends are totally occupied by this,” Alvarez said. 'I'll do the game tomorrow, I'll get home, I'll watch games until I can't stay up anymore. I'll get up in the morning, I'll have things taped.

'I'll go into my office Sunday in midmorning. I'll meet a statistician, one of our guys that I have working with me. We'll put everything together that I think are important. I'll spend Sunday from 10 in the morning until probably 3 in the afternoon on this.

'Sunday, I'm watching games that I'd never watch, trying to familiarize myself. I'm looking at stats and games. I want to see how people play. I want to see if they're real or not, whether I think they're really a good team in my eyes.”

By Sunday night, Alvarez says he's spent.

'The other ADs (on the committee) would agree with me,” he said. 'I go to bed at 9:30 on Sunday night. Normally, I'm a midnight guy. I go to bed at 9:30 on Sunday because I know at 4:30 I'm getting up. I've got to catch a 6:25 flight to Dallas. That's six, seven weeks in a row.

'It's a grind. I'm not as fit as I used to be. At Iowa (when he was an assistant coach of Hayden Fry's), I was a lean, mean fighting machine.”

The fun part, he says, is once the committee meets on Monday until it releases its rankings early Tuesday night.

'When we get there, it's impressive,” said Alvarez. 'We're very organized, and everyone shows up prepared. We discuss and we all have our opinions. We respect each others' opinions. We agree to disagree. Quite frankly, it's been a great experience.”

Committee member Steve Wieberg, retired after a sportswriting career at USA TODAY, is a veritable statistics machine. Alvarez, however, used the human touch in a recent discussion.

'Everyone uses a different perspective,” Alvarez said. 'We had a situation last week where we had a hard time judging a team. I called a coach who had played them and Steve said ‘You know what, that may have been the best piece of information we had.' Because everyone had a hard time judging them. The information we got from a coach that played against them, who'd been with you, who had been around - that was very valuable.”

OK, but let's back to why Alvarez is doing this, spending all this time, travel and focus for a committee that could get a lot of criticism on Dec. 7.

'Before (the playoff) even started, my wife said to me ‘If they would ask you I would want you to be on that.'

'I told her ‘Do you realize the time commitment?' And she said ‘You know what? We owe it to college football. Everything you have is because of college football.' And it is.

'If I'm a person that can add something to this and be someone that as a coach and as a player and now as an administrator to have a vision to help make this work, I should be there. College football's been great to me. It gave me everything in my life.

'I went to Nebraska on a scholarship. I'm from a poor family in western Pennsylvania. I played there, got a degree there, met my wife there, got married there. My kids were born there. I have a degree, I have my vocation, I have my family. I owe everything to college football. If I can give a little back, that's the least I can do.”