This is an opinion column.

Damaged, not broken.

Flawed but fixable.

The first year of college football’s expanded playoff has its bracket — no longer hypothetical but a real-world schedule of games.

And it’s ugly.

You could say it’s wrong but this is the system constructed by the powers that be so you just have to live with its results. For now.

Remember, this current format and selection process has just one more season and it should be fired into the sun at the first opportunity.

Now this isn’t about SMU getting picked for the final at-large spot over Alabama.

Under the current melting Jell-O mold of a selection process, it wasn’t the wrong pick.

It wasn’t the right pick, either.

Just the pick of the committee that was given the freedom to pick it however they wanted. No decimal points.

No numbers at all, just a top-25 ranking from a room of 13 people who can decide which set of data or argument they want.

It swings the door wide open for anger, resentment and justifiable arguments.

Let’s be totally clear: They were going to get it wrong no matter what they decided because the structure they were provided to make that decision stinks.

Put Alabama in over SMU and it’s the SEC and money talking louder than a 21-point loss at Oklahoma or the loss at Vanderbilt.

Flip it like the committee did, and you include a team devoid of quality wins of any kind and losses against the two quality opponents.

Power is too concentrated. It should be decentralized moving forward.

Dilute the control and make it quantifiable so it’s based on more than one board room and the honor system.

Maybe … something … like we already had.

Let’s rank teams like the BCS did with a combination of human polls and computer rankings. Ask your parents about the BCS, youths. They’ll tell you about how the coaches poll and something called the Harris Interactive Poll made up two-thirds of a formula with a composite of six computer rankings eating the other third of the pie.

Now, the Harris poll died with the CFP but they can scare up a representative group of experts who can rank teams. Before the Harris poll, the AP’s ranking was part of the formula but the organization rightly opted out since our role is to cover the sport, not decide how it crowns a champion.

For the sake of argument, a social media account recreated the BCS rankings with the AP poll standing in for the departed Harris. BCSKnowHow.com has been doing this for a decade and it cranked out a simulation Sunday morning.

It had Alabama over SMU by one-hundredth of a point.

That’s quantifiable with the decision-making power spread between more than 100 people and a few algorithms. You can point to the ratings next to the names — ratings that go to four numbers past the decimal.

You can circle the number. Underline it. Memorize it because it exists and its based a diversified group of decision makers.

You can point to nothing with the committee’s rankings. Nothing beyond the interviews and teleconferences with the committee chair that satisfies nobody. There are contradictions layered on top of groupthink logic then filtered through its own vocabulary of clichés.

How undefinable is it? ESPN’s Rece Davis asked committee chair Warde Manuel how close it was between SMU and Alabama and this is what he said on national television.

“Here’s the beauty of the process,” Manuel said. “I don’t know.”

Oh yeah?

“My assumption is that it would be really close,” he said later.

When even the committee chair doesn’t know how close the decision was, it’s a farce.

Again, not his fault because he’s only doing as instructed.

But if the idea is to pick the 12 best teams and seed them fairly, this isn’t it. You have teams like Boise State and Arizona State getting byes ranked ninth and 12th, respectively. Reward conference champs with a spot in the dance, not an artificially manufactured advantage.

Because not all conferences are the same. They’re simply not, no matter how much commissioners and ADs and coaches try to sell their own self-interest. The depth of talent in the SEC makes the competition level unmistakably better than even its top competition.

The Big Ten is up there but top-heavy with only a few legitimate contenders. That waters down the competition and inflates the resumé of a team like Indiana but that’s another argument for another day.

So, let’s put a bow on this and make it crystal clear.

The CFP’s next iteration should scrap the committee for a more decentralized selection process that produces a quantifiable rating that accounts for all (or most) of the data points now allegedly considered by the committee.

Kill the automatic byes for four conference champions because they’re not all the same. There are four SEC teams ranked ahead of an Arizona State team that gets a free pass to the quarterfinal. It’s just silly.

So much of this is arguable because the current system makes it too easy to discredit the committee’s work.

You’ll never find a method that quiets all the crybabies but you can devise one that makes it much harder to make the very convincing arguments spurned teams could make this year.

Or recycle an old one.

That or continue to waste Tuesday nights with committee word salad and Swiss cheese rankings in a system that’s so easily criticized.

They have the right idea with 12 teams, just the wrong way of picking those teams.

Damaged but not beyond repair.

Torn, but we have tape.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.