The four-team College Football Playoff came into being in 2014 as a welcome improvement over the Bowl Championship Series. But it always was a math failure. The sport has been amazingly lucky with how rarely that has come back to bite it the way it did Sunday.
A four-team playoff in a sport with five power conferences never made sense. Getting the foot-dragging traditionalists in charge to simply accept a playoff of any kind was a massive endeavor, so everyone embraced a flawed four because it was better than a nonsensical two. But it wasn’t enough, and now we’re seeing the clearest ramifications of that to date.
Florida State, the 13–0 champion of the Atlantic Coast Conference, was kicked to the playoff curb in favor of 12–1 Alabama, champion of the Southeastern Conference. The top three selections were relatively easy: 13–0 Michigan, 13–0 Washington and 12–1 Texas, which defeated Alabama in September. Picking the fourth team was an incredibly difficult decision for the CFP selection committee to make—someone was going to get screwed regardless.
Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat/USA TODAY Network
For it to be the Seminoles, who were downgraded due to an injury to star quarterback Jordan Travis in a throw-away game against North Alabama on Nov. 18, is especially cruel. An undefeated champion of a Power Five conference has never been left out of the playoff until now. The benefit of the doubt, as usual, went the way of a team from one of the two most powerful leagues, the SEC and Big Ten.
The Alabamas and the Ohio States get their way. That’s how this sport works.
The argument that aided Ohio State in making the playoff in 2014—that the Buckeyes kept winning despite multiple late-season quarterback injuries—was rebuffed this time. “Florida State is a different team than it was the first 11 weeks,” committee chair Boo Corrigan said Sunday. But the committee made that judgment based on a small sample size.
With backup Tate Rodemaker expected to return from a concussion by the time FSU would have appeared in the playoff, the Seminoles’ slog past Louisville Saturday night in the ACC title game with third-stringer Brock Glenn should be a toss-out. Winning the game was enough, and Glenn wouldn’t be in the lineup again thereafter. Rodemaker’s only start was a win over rival Florida, of the SEC. His numbers were not overwhelming, but he did enough for FSU to win, 24–15, on the road.
If that performance was a disqualifier, how about what Alabama did earlier that day in its rival game? The Crimson Tide needed a fourth-and-31 miracle (made possible by a fumbled punt and enabled by a horrible defensive alignment) to escape past 6–6 Auburn. That’s the same Auburn team that lost by 21 points the previous week to New Mexico State. If looking shaky in victory counted against Florida State, it certainly wasn’t held against the Crimson Tide.
If anything, the committee rewarded the SEC for past performance more than present-day prowess. It kowtowed to tradition, not current excellence. More than anything else, Alabama’s playoff berth was a product of reputation—its own, and the league’s.
The historical record is undeniable: The SEC has been in every playoff; it has won the previous four championships with three different programs; and it has won 13 of the past 16 titles. It has been the best conference in the country more often than not for a long time.
But was this year’s SEC really that good? No. Its best non-league win was Kentucky over Louisville on Nov. 25. Its second-best was Missouri beating Kansas State on a 61-yard field goal at the final gun. There is no other meat on that bone.
The SEC’s non-conference record was an acknowledged embarrassment in September, and yet conveniently forgotten in December: The league was 7–9 against Power Five competition, which includes a 4–6 record against the ACC. There were losses to Utah, BYU, Clemson, North Carolina, Miami, Wake Forest … and Florida State. The Seminoles bookended their regular season with victories over SEC opponents. There was the win over the Gators at the end, but also a 21-point beatdown of LSU in Orlando over Labor Day weekend. (Alabama beat LSU by a touchdown less on its home field.)
The scenes from Tallahassee were gutting Sunday as the Seminoles learned they were left out; players and coaches were in stunned disbelief. The words from there and ACC headquarters were brimming with outrage.
Mike Norvell used the words “disgusted” and “infuriated” in a statement. “What’s the point of playing games? … I don’t understand how we are supposed to think this is an acceptable way to evaluate a team.”
Said athletic director Michael Alford: “For many of us, today’s decision by the committee has forever damaged the credibility of the institution that is the College Football Playoff. And, saddest of all, it was self-inflicted. They chose predictive competitiveness over proven performance; subjectivity over fact. The have become a committee of prognosticators. They have abandoned their response slitty by discarding their purpose — to evaluate performance on the field. … The committee failed college football today.”
Added ACC commissioner Jim Phillips: “(The Seminoles’) exclusion calls into question the selection process and whether the Committee’s own guidelines were followed, including the significant importance of being an undefeated Power Five conference champion. My heart breaks for the talented FSU student-athletes and coaches and their passionate and loyal fans. Florida State deserved better. College football deserved better.”
All that said, both FSU and the ACC played self-sabotaging roles in what transpired Sunday.
Alford, the school president and its board of trustees fomented revolution against the ACC throughout the spring and summer, essentially arguing that the rest of the league simply wasn’t good enough for the Seminoles. They put their conference colleagues down in an attempt to lift themselves up as worthy of uneven revenue sharing. That’s now going to happen, but they damaged the perception of the conference as a whole during that process. Maybe winning the league didn’t mean as much as it should have after Florida State put so much effort into trashing the place?
Then there is this piece: A 12-team playoff is coming in 2024, but it could have and should have arrived in 2023. The reason it did not: The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 formed an ill-fated “alliance” that roadblocked the expansion for more than a year. So the ACC basically worked against its own best interests.
It has been reflexively pointed out that the alliance was formed in response to the SEC poaching Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12. While that is indeed true, the response was a nonsensical one. It never made sense, serving only to puff out a few chests and push back at the SEC’s power play. It assuredly did not help any of the allied leagues, most glaringly the obsolete Pac-12, and, now, the snubbed ACC.
A bigger and better playoff is on the way next year. There will still be arguing and invective then, too, when the 13th-best team is left out of the bracket, but teams will not be excluded after doing everything asked of them. Teams that win the Power Five conferences will all get in, as college football finally fixes its math problem. Florida State will go down in history as the last true injustice of the four-team playoff era.
