This is an opinion column.

Let’s start this by saying Warde Manuel is in an impossible position.

The Michigan athletics director is also the College Football Playoff Selection Committee chair, so like his predecessors, he’s subject to the November Tuesday night walks of shame.

The CFP loves a good sacrifice.

So, the guy who professionally defended Jim Harbaugh is appropriate in this case.

Nevertheless, this is not about Manuel’s day job. We’re here to talk about Tuesday Night Manuel and the dirty work he has to do for the CFP committee — the faux transparency of the sport’s secret judge/jury.

Because this is about TV ratings. It just is. The Tuesday night rollouts of preliminary rankings and how they’d fit on pretend 12-team brackets isn’t doing much to inform the public.

If anything, we’re left more confused and further in the dark.

And Manuel’s role as a spokesperson explaining the thought process certainly isn’t helping lend any real insight to the deliberations. Again, this is the way it’s designed and the committee chairs who came before him were just as maddening in the lack of substance provided.

The stakes are just heightened in Year 1 of the 12-team bracket. There are more mouths to feed this fall, and everyone goes to bed hungry every Tuesday night.

After Manuel’s appearance on ESPN, he heads to the phone where the pack of hungry wolves dressed as reporters are waiting. Though I’ll never say we need less time questioning those in power, these become pointless exercises if nothing insightful can be squeezed out of well-conceived questions.

When the committee won’t even disclose the strength of schedule ranking from which they base some percentage of their decision-making process, this is practically the only way to probe the hive.

Take the first question Manuel received in this Tuesday’s teleconference for example. It was about the gulf between No. 3 Texas and No. 10 Georgia in light of the Bulldogs’ 30-15 win in Austin and the fact the Longhorns don’t have any top-25 wins.

“Well, obviously Georgia has a very good win at Texas,” Manuel said, “but as the committee analyzed the body of work of Texas versus where Georgia is at the present time with two losses, even to top-25 teams, we came out that Texas was still a very strong team deserving of a 3 seed. They have a top-5 defense. Quinn Ewers is leading one of the top passing offenses in the country. We just looked at them and thought — and came out, I should say, with them at 3,”

Stated a few facts but essentially said we just think Texas is good and deserves to be No. 3. The word salad continued without anything other than we think Texas is good.

“It’s nothing against Georgia,” Manuel continued. “Georgia is a great team, but they did struggle against Ole Miss at Ole Miss but had a great win this past week against Tennessee. We will continue to monitor both teams and see how it goes in the next few weeks.”

Facts, but nothing a scoreboard couldn’t tell us.

Asked next about Georgia and the fact it moved up just two spots after beating previously No. 7 Tennessee, Manuel said they had “a long debate” and “intense conversations” about the placement of Georgia, Mississippi, Miami and Alabama.”

“… And there was a lot of consideration about where teams were ranked and why and a lot of conversation about it,” Manuel said. “It was very, very thorough. We’re dealing with very small margins in terms of the different things that we’re looking at and comparing, so I can assure you the committee went through it intensely in the last couple of days.”

Words. Words. Words.

What was discussed? What were the small margins?

We’re just saying they may have had lively discussions in the suburban Dallas hotel boardroom but these are the rankings and that’s all you’re getting.

An answer about BYU dropping after its loss to Kansas was especially fun after listing off a few wins and the end to the unbeaten run Saturday.

“Look, we give a lot of credit when teams win, and so we don’t penalize teams for winning close or winning too big in other words, but we do value wins, so that’s where we saw BYU,” he said.

Huh?

“But given some of those games that they played and the close wins that they had, it just was an indicator that some of the teams that were below them in the rankings last week should move ahead of them is how the committee assessed BYU.”

So they don’t penalize teams for winning close games but BYU won a few games that were close so the teams below them moved past the Cougars.

Got it.

Indiana is quite the story as the No. 5 Hoosiers emerged from the cornfields as the great disrupter to the natural order of things. They’ve beaten everyone but played nobody entering Saturday’s trip to No. 2 Ohio State. Manuel was asked what the committee will be watching anything specifically when ranking the winner and loser from this surprise top-5 matchup.

“We’re looking at how the offenses play, how the defenses play, what are the strengths, is there dominance in one half versus another,” Manuel said. “We are taking a look at the entirety of the game and the performance. We will then get together and assess and have conversations about what we saw in the outcome of the game, no matter who wins or loses, and assess then how to rank the teams. The team particular to the question who loses and how that impacts the rankings for next week, that is to be determined.”

They’re going to watch the offense and defense and determine if there was dominance and then look at the whole game and then get together to discuss it. Interesting.

Maybe Manuel is too nice and feels like he has to say something when nothing is really fine. Because those sentences are as hollow as they come. Impressive, in a way.

But we’re no closer to knowing anything tangible about what the committee is thinking outside of just the raw 1-through-25 ranking they release.

Why is No. 11 Tennessee the fourth of four two-loss SEC teams when it beat No. 7 Alabama?

“They have great offense, great defense. They play hard,” he said. “The committee just had a hard time. You’re talking about four really good teams, when you look at Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee. I think the committee, we debated it, as I said earlier, quite a bit as it came down to how we saw those teams.”

It just came down to how they saw it.

Just what they think.

“It is close,” Manuel said. “There’s a lot of conversations. We’ll continue to monitor the performance of all these teams as the season progresses towards the end.”

Indeed they will.

They will discuss.

They will rank.

They’ll shove Manuel in front of an ESPN camera, then a phone call.

And then they’ll leave us to our imagination for how they came up with a final product.

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