I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking about this new system and I am not optimistic. My concerns rest with the selection committee and how it will function. Although the details are yet to be settled, it is clear that it will be a smallish number of humans who will make decisions "a posteriori", or after the fact. The current system makes at least some of it's decisions "a priori", before the fact. That is, the computers are programmed with some algorithm, the games are played, and the ranks are spit out in December. The polls are an a posteriori component of the current system but involve a large and wide pool of voters. Although they may have their own agendas, they are all different agendas and what emerges from the ooze is probably a pretty good reflection of "the truth".
To get to the point, my biggest concern is that the committee system can make huge impacts by bumping teams up or down a notch. Such small variances are common in the polls that we already employ and no one bats an eye when the coaches have it Stanford-Oregon and the media have it Oregon-Stanford. But when a selection committee does it's work it can decide that a big east team is 4 over an SEC team that is 5 just so there won't be two SEC teams. They can look at top four that includes a number 2 SEC team and a number 4 SEC team and bump the number two team to number 1, eliminating the possibility of an all SEC NCG. Since these important and politically motivated influences can be achieved by moving teams both up and down, and only a single position, there will be no way prove that the ratings are being influenced by illegitimate criteria. Even with the inevitable comparisons points of the polls and computers (which are so popular they will not go away just because they are no longer being used to set the top four) the small variances that can cause the SEC trouble won't look blatantly biased.
Infinitesimal tampering can lead to infinitely large impacts.
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