MADISON, Wis. -- Barry Alvarez has spent nearly 40 years around college football as a player, coach and athletic director. He has won Rose Bowls, earned millions and been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
The sport has no doubt been good to Alvarez, he acknowledged Wednesday. That is why he ultimately decided to serve on the first-ever 13-person College Football Playoff committee, which was announced Wednesday by executive director Bill Hancock.
"I've been committed to college football my entire adult life and really felt it was important for me to give something back," Alvarez said during a news conference.
"There will be long hours involved. Obviously criticism will be a part of it. The one person I wanted to go to to get permission to do this was my wife, Cindy. I explained to her it's going to take time. We've got meetings. There's going to be a lot of time with film study and studying statistics. She said, 'You have to do this. College football has been too good to you and you owe it to college football.' And I agreed with her and I appreciated her support."
Alvarez, 66, will be involved in selecting the four teams to compete in the first playoff at the end of the 2014 season. He compared the model to the way the NCAA basketball tournament selection committee picked its 68 teams.
Of course, the decisions for college football could prove to be much more difficult given the possible narrow margins of difference between the fourth-, fifth-, sixth- and even seventh-best teams.
"I think in the jobs that I've had, I'd like to say you get used to criticism, although you don't," Alvarez said. 'But you get used to making decisions. I think if you look at the people on that committee, they've all been decision makers. Once you've made decisions, you understand that if they were easy, any one can make them. But you're not always going to have 100 percent of the people support the decision. You're always going to have critics, so you just live with it."
Along with Alvarez, playoff selection members are: Jeff Long (Arkansas athletics director), Lieutenant General Mike Gould (former superintendent of the United States Air Force Academy), Pat Haden (USC athletics director), Tom Jernstedt (former NCAA executive vice president), Oliver Luck (West Virginia athletics director), Archie Manning (former University of Mississippi quarterback and all-pro NFL quarterback), Tom Osborne (former Nebraska head coach and athletics director), Dan Radakovich (Clemson athletics director), Condoleezza Rice (former United States Secretary of State), Mike Tranghese (former Big East commissioner), Steve Wieberg (former USA Today college football reporter) and Tyrone Willingham (former head coach of three FBS schools).
The five major Bowl Championship Series conferences each have an athletics director on the committee, with Alvarez representing the Big Ten. It will mark the first significant change since the BCS was first introduced in 1998.
Alvarez said there was no animosity between he and Long, the selection committee chairman, even though Arkansas hired former Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema in December without contacting Alvarez first.
"Normally when you talk to another coach, an athletic director has to contact the other athletic director," Alvarez said. "But I know that Bret told him not to contact me, that he wanted to contact me personally. So I have no problems with Jeff. And I've known Jeff. I got to know Jeff when he as at Pitt."
Alvarez also addressed the notion that one had to have played football in order to serve on the committee -- a refrain that caused quite a stir in the past couple weeks as it pertained to former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
"I think some people were entitled to that opinion," Alvarez said. "I respect a lot of national sports writers who over the years have ranked teams and named national champions and I would guess many of them never got down in a stance before or played football.
"I'm excited that she's on the committee: Someone that's intelligent, someone who has integrity. Someone who obviously understands how to make decisions and has made decisions under scrutiny. I understand also that her father was a football coach. That is very important. When you grow up in a household where there's competition, you understand how important that game is and how it affects your next week. You lose and there's a dark cloud around your house all week. You lose and you get that drilled in. Ask my kids. I'm vulnerable the week after a win, but I'm not very nice the week after a loss."
Alvarez's time in college football began in 1966 when he played as a linebacker at Nebraska under coach Bob Devaney. He later coached high school football in Nebraska and Iowa before earning his first college coaching gig in 1979 as a linebackers coach at Iowa under Hayden Fry.
Alvarez took over as Wisconsin's football coach in 1990 and guided the program to three Rose Bowl victories and a record of 118-74-4. He replaced Pat Richter as the school's athletic director in 2004 -- a position he has held ever since. He stepped down as head coach following the 2005 season and has remained close to the sport through his athletic director duties.
According to Alvarez, there will be four or five meetings among committee members to discuss the rankings. He said the committee would then release four or five sets of rankings, beginning at mid-season, which was approximately the same time the BCS rankings came out.
Alvarez said he considered himself to be a pioneer of sorts.
"I think this is very unique," he said. "It's a change. We're breaking away from tradition of the polls. Breaking away from the tradition of the BCS where it was computers and polls. A combination. Taking a little from basketball. The human element will be involved in taking a look at everything and making a wise decision, making a decision that we think is best."
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