Manuel is in his sixth year as Michigan’s Director of Athletics. Manuel returned to U-M following a nearly four-year run as director of athletics at the University of Connecticut. Prior to arriving in Connecticut, he led the athletic department at State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo from 2005-12. A graduate of U-M, where he played football under Bo Schembechler, Manuel was coordinator of U-M’s Wade H. McCree Jr. Incentive Scholarship Program from 1990 to 1993.
He subsequently worked briefly as an academic advisor and assistant athletic director for academics at Georgia Tech before returning to Ann Arbor, where he served in several roles within Michigan’s athletic department from 1996-2005, eventually becoming an associate athletic director with oversight of football, men’s and women’s basketball, hockey and operational facets of the university’s athletic department.
Manuel earned his bachelor of general studies degree with a focus in psychology in 1990, his master’s degree in social work from U-M in 1993 and an MBA from U-M’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business in 2005.
Whiteside spent 14 years at USA Today as the national college football writer and also specialized in covering the Olympics and World Cup. She has covered seven Olympic Games, nine World Cups (men’s and women’s) as well as the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and multiple college sports. Whiteside was also the first female president of the Football Writers Association of America. Prior to joining USA Today, she was a reporter at Newsday and a staff writer at Sports Illustrated. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times.
Whiteside has been an Associate Professor in Sports Media and Journalism at Montclair State University since 2014 and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Rutgers University.
She is a graduate of Rutgers University and the Columbia Journalism School.
The CFP selection committee is responsible for selecting the top four teams in the playoff and assigning them to semifinal games, as well as ranking the other top 25 teams. The committee meets in-person beginning late in the football season and produces a ranking of the top 25 teams each week leading up to its final selections. The other returning selection committee members are Mitch Barnhart (athletics director, University of Kentucky), Tom Burman (athletics director, University of Wyoming), Boo Corrigan (athletics director, North Carolina State University), Rick George (athletics director, University of Colorado), Will Shields (former All-American offensive lineman, University of Nebraska), Gene Taylor (athletics director, Kansas State University), Joe Taylor (Vice President for Athletics and Community Wellness, Virginia Union University), John Urschel (member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and former All-American offensive lineman, Penn State University), Rod West (group president Entergy Corporation and former linebacker at the University of Notre Dame).
For more information on the selection committee, visit www.collegefootballplayoff.com.