Don't blame CFP committee for trying to be perfect with an imperfect system

It has been quite strange since Sunday afternoon to see so many college football fans and many colleagues in the media acknowledge that Alabama is an unequivocally better football team than the current version of Florida State while also ripping the College Football Playoff selection committee for coming to the same conclusion. 

On one hand, I completely get it.

When you see the images of how Florida State’s players reacted when they learned they got left out, when you read the searing words of coach Mike Norvell asking why the games matter at all or when you think about what quarterback Jordan Travis must have felt when he wrote on social media that he wished he had broken his leg earlier in the season, it’s devastating. 

But that’s not the fault of the committee. That’s the system that was built to do exactly what it did Sunday: If necessary, exclude a deserving team because there were only going to be four spots for five power conference champions. 

OPINION: CFP committee a joke for excluding FSU

That this kind of scenario eventually landed on the committee’s lap was not a surprise. In 2011, when the conference commissioners gathered at a fancy hotel in Pasadena, California, to hammer out some of the specifics of what would become the College Football Playoff, we asked them repeatedly about all of these possibilities: What if there were five unbeaten conference champions? What if someone’s quarterback tore his ACL in the conference title game? What if three SEC teams got in? 

The answers to all of those questions were the same: We will create the protocols to emphasize what we think is important, the committee will use them to make a judgment on teams and we will accept the results no matter what they are. 

Consider it officially reaped and sown.

Now, let's make one thing clear: The system stinks. It always has. The fact we didn’t have a Florida State situation until now was nothing more than pure luck. Even in 2014, when Ohio State was down to its third-string quarterback late in the season, Cardale Jones put on enough of a show in the Big Ten championship game against Wisconsin to show the committee that the Buckeyes, as constituted, could win the Playoff — and they did. That was pretty lucky, too, because the credibility of this system could have blown up in Year 1 had things not shaken out as they did.

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But as wrong as it seems to leave an unbeaten team from the ACC out of a four-team Playoff, the committee was never supposed to be a rubber stamp to say that zero losses was better than one loss or one loss was better than two. That’s not in its protocol. What is part of the protocol is evaluating “the unavailability of key players that could impact (a team’s) postseason performance.”

The reality for the committee is that it had limited information on which to judge the team Florida State would be taking into the playoff.

With Tate Rodemaker taking over at quarterback, the Seminoles delivered a scratchy 224-yard offensive performance against Florida in the regular-season finale. And because Rodemaker suffered a concussion in that game, it was up to third-string freshman Brock Glenn in the ACC championship against Louisville. Though Florida State’s defense played well enough to win on both occasions, generating offense was clearly a challenge.

Though this was framed Saturday night and into Sunday as a Florida State vs. Alabama choice — and anytime Alabama comes into the mix, you end up with a load of bunk conspiracy theories ranging from general SEC bias to ESPN collusion — it’s clear the Seminoles were going to be in trouble regardless of the SEC title game outcome. 

Even if Georgia had beaten Alabama on Saturday, the playoff would have simply been: Georgia, Michigan, Washington, Texas. This decision didn’t really have much to do with Alabama, other than the fact that it represented a conference champion that went 12-1 and had beaten three teams in the top-13 of the committee’s rankings. 

When you hear people screaming, “The games have to matter!” I would ask the following question: Some of them or all of them? It’s not like the committee took some bum team in the No. 4 spot. In any year of the Playoff, Alabama’s résumé would be more than good enough to get in.

As awful of an outcome as that is for Florida State, the committee should not be crucified for doing its job. If anything, it should be commended for casting aside the ridiculous notion that this playoff is a system of punishments and rewards, and acknowledging the reality that a healthy and excellent one-loss team would be a more credible participant in a national championship tournament than a no-loss team that lost its best player to injury. 

Having said all that, emotion is a powerful drug. And there’s a lot of it coming to the committee from the media, from certain fan bases and undoubtedly from the ACC, whose commissioner, Jim Phillips, called it “unfathomable” to leave out Florida State.

“College football deserved better,” he said in a statement. 

No, college football deserved better years ago when there were numerous opportunities to expand the playoff and ensure that conference champions had automatic entry regardless of the circumstances. The ACC is one of the leagues, and Phillips in particular one of the commissioners who stalled that process because of intramural squabbles over conference realignment. 

Because SEC commissioner Greg Sankey had played a key role in building the 12-team expansion plan that was released to the public in the spring of 2021, there was massive distrust of him, specifically when Texas and Oklahoma accepted invitations to the SEC a few months later. The Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC throwing sand in the gears of expansion for months and months didn’t really make much sense except as a power play to isolate Sankey and make him look like the bad guy.

It didn’t work, obviously. And that energy would have been better spent elsewhere because now we are headed into a new era of 16- and 18-team megaconferences that make no geographic sense, and a 12-team playoff that will solve some problems but create plenty of new ones. 

How CFP committee should adjust for 12-team playoff

If you think it’s going to be easy for a committee to parse teams No. 8-16, think again. It’s probably going to be tougher because the flaws of those teams will be bigger and the margins between them will be smaller. 

And if you think the rhetoric isn’t going to be just as heated and the conspiracy theories just as nutty in the future, when another Florida State/Jordan Travis situation happens because it’s for the No. 12 spot and not No. 4, you’re a fool. This will be a problem as long as a human committee is making these choices, and the CFP needs to adjust. Two simple things could help. 

First, get rid of the weekly rankings and, frankly, don't release any rankings outside of the top 12 next year.

I know ESPN wants them. I know you believe they create interest in the sport. But they are 1,000-percent counterproductive to what you’re actually trying to do.

For instance, there was no case for Georgia to get into this playoff without an SEC title. With five conference champions who were qualified to get in, you couldn’t take a team that didn’t win its conference, even if it might still be the best team in the country. But are we really to believe that losing to Alabama by three points on a neutral field should have dropped Georgia from No. 1 — a position it held for several weeks — all the way down to No. 6?

Nobody buys that. And if you’re kicking Florida State out of the playoff because of the injury, why put them at No. 5 instead of No. 8 or No. 10 or No. 12? If they’re not better than Alabama without Travis, why are they better than Georgia?

It makes no sense. Just get rid of that element to the process completely. It’s a bad look for the CFP, and it does the committee no favors. 

Second, instead of these worthless weekly media briefings, have the committee chairman appear publicly just one time after the process is over to explain what happened. Allow him to get into some of the nitty-gritty of the debate and what the actual sentiment was in the room, rather than rely on platitudinal talking points that often come off as contradictory.

If there was a big division about a certain issue, tell us. Shed some light on the real discussion, because what they’ve been doing for the last 10 years just doesn’t work, doesn't build trust in the process and makes smart people like NC State athletic director Boo Corrigan look dumb. 

College football will never have a perfect playoff because there are too many teams and uneven schedules. Hopefully going to 12 will be a step forward. But as Sunday showed, in this system, even doing the right thing can make the committee look like villains.