NC State AD Boo Corrigan ready for his turn in College Football Playoff spotlight
While the College Football Playoff continues to navigate very choppy waters in an attempt to accelerate its expansion to a 12-team field in 2024, Boo Corrigan is focused on the present. This season. This week. The now.
As chairman of the CFP’s selection committee, he’ll bring this year’s group together on Monday in Dallas to start putting together the first set of weekly rankings, released on ESPN on Tuesday night. Love them or hate them — and while they make for great television, the weekly updates probably do the game of college football a disservice by unduly twisting the debate — Corrigan’s face will be the one defending them, week after week after week.
And he’s fine with that. Just don’t ask the N.C. State athletic director about the much-bigger picture.
“Our committee just selects the teams,” Corrigan said last month on The N&O’s ACC Now podcast. “We’re not in charge of conference expansion or playoff expansion or anything else, or where they’re going to be or anything else. I’m excited to be a part of it. It’s a great 13-person committee where we have the opportunity to sit down and talk about something we all love.”
The Triangle’s seen a lot of this lately from its athletic directors. Duke’s Nina King served as chairperson of the NCAA women’s basketball selection committee last year, and North Carolina’s Bubba Cunningham is a current member of the men’s basketball committee, and could potentially serve as its chairman in 2025. But those positions are primarily in the spotlight only on Selection Sunday. Corrigan and the CFP face the slings and arrows every week through the fall.
So the public-facing part of it will be different, especially given the amount of enmity the committee’s interim decisions typically engender. But leading the group, Corrigan said, won’t make anything different from the thought process he’s used in the past.
“Every week that you go in there, you have a clean sheet,” Corrigan said. “You don’t go in there, you’re not relying on what you did the last week. You owe to college football fans, you owe to the coaches, you owe to the players, every single week you go in there with a new evaluation. So I think that part of it hasn’t changed a bit.”
Corrigan will obviously have to recuse himself when the Wolfpack comes up for discussion, although after losses at Clemson and Syracuse, that isn’t quite the issue it looked like it could be going into the season. It’ll be a little more like last season, when N.C. State ended up a fringe team in the rankings, trying to edge its way into a New Year’s Six bowl. In the end, only Pittsburgh, as the ACC champion, was selected, and the Wolfpack ended up in the ill-fated Holiday non-Bowl.
“You know what your job is, if you will, that when your team is mentioned you stand up and you leave the room and you’re nowhere near it,” Corrigan said. “When you come back in the room, what is interesting is, you talk about the other teams that are determined while you’re gone, because we do it in different (ways) — pick two out of six, four out of eight, that type of thing. So I am able to talk about the other ones as we go through it and leave N.C. State out of it and kind of keep going.”
Corrigan only has one other exclusion, which is a little crazy considering the number of stops on his resume. He has to leave the room when Notre Dame comes up, but not because it’s his alma mater — it’s because his brother Kevin is the men’s lacrosse coach in South Bend.
“The interesting thing is, I went to Notre Dame, that doesn’t eliminate me,” Corrigan said. “I worked at FSU, worked at Virginia, worked at Duke, worked at the Naval Academy, worked at West Point, none of those eliminate me. But the fact that I work at N.C. State now and the fact that I have a relative at Notre Dame, those are eliminators.”
There’s a little bit of an end of an era here. Corrigan may not have anything to do with making decisions about expansion, but a 12-team field is coming no later than 2026, making this one of the last four-team fields and one of the last times the committee will have to assess the finest of margins to get down to four. The team that finishes 13th in the rankings won’t have a lot to complain about. The teams that finish fifth or sixth often have as good a claim to be third or fourth.
At the moment, that’s a feature, not a bug — driving debate throughout the regular season. Corrigan will be riding that wave until December.
“It’s a dynamic time, clearly,” Corrigan said. “College football always delivers right? It always delivers, from big wins to upsets to everything else, so I’m excited about going in there.”
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This story was originally published October 30, 2022 at 7:10 AM.
