PHILADELPHIA– The College Football Playoff selection committee found out you can’t please everyone Sunday when it announced Michigan would play Alabama in the Rose Bowl and Washington would play Texas in the Sugar Bowl in the national championship semi-finals.
Sorry Florida State.
Your 13-0 record and ACC championship don’t matter because your starting quarterback Jordan Travis is out with a season ending injury.
It seems cruel to take two one-loss teams– Texas and Alabama– over the Seminoles, who did everything they were asked to in a Power 5 conference. But the committee didn’t feel they were one of the four best teams.
And they don’t play in the SEC.
All roads to the national championship have gone through the SEC since 2014. The SEC has won six of the nine championships, including the last four. Alabama has won three. LSU one and Georgia won the last two. The SEC champion has never been out of the playoffs. Twice two SEC teams have played for the title: Alabama beat Georgia in 2017 and Georgia topped Alabama for the 2021 title.
So, when CFP eighth ranked Alabama upset the top-ranked Dawgs, 27-24, in the SEC title game in Atlanta Saturday it changed the math in the eyes of the committee.
The Tide, who has participated in eight of the 10 four-team playoffs and needed a miracle fourth- and late game 31-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Jalen Milroe to edge in state rival Auburn in the final regular season game, suddenly was the flavor of the month with the 13-member committee. And the Florida State dropped from fourth to fifth.
Alabama benefited from non- stop lobbying from Nick Saban and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, not to mention accusations of SEC bias directed toward some of the talking heads on ESPN, SEC grads who work for a network that just acquired the conference’s contract.
In reality, a competitive Michigan-Alabama matchup works much better for TV than Florida State, which looks ugly offensively when they were forced to use three- star true freshman Buck Glynn, a third stringer, during a grind it out victory over Louisville a in the ACC title game that was still up in the air in the fourth quarter.
Offense obviously resonates with the committee. If FSU had rung up 35 points and blown out Louisville, there is a good chance we could have been writing a different story. But the Travis injury made it too easy to erase the Seminoles from consideration when they didn’t put up style points when measured against a brand name program.
The irony is Florida State has the best defense in the country. The Seminoles have 13 sacks in their last two games against SEC instate rival Florida and the Ville. They have held those teams to zero or negative yards in the fourth quarter.
Florida State coach Mike Norvell went off on the committee after the reveal over what he viewed as an egregious miscarriage of justice.
“I am disgusted and infuriated with the committee’s decision today to have what we earned on the field taken away because a small group of people decided they knew better than the results of the game,” he said. “What is the point of playing games? Do you tell players it is OK to quit if someone goes down? Do you not play a senior-on-Senior Day for fear of injury? Where is the motivation to schedule challenging non-conference games?
“We are not only an undefeated P5 champion, but we also played two P5 non-conference games away from home and won both of them. I don’t understand how we are supposed to think this is an acceptable way to evaluate a team– What happened today goes against everything that is true and right in college football.”
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips added, “It’s unfathomable.”
“The argument or whether a team is the most deserving or best is a false equivalent,” FSU athletic director Michael Alford said. “It renders the season up to yesterday irrelevant and significantly damages the legitimacy of the College Football Playoff.
“The committee failed college football today. Today, they changed the way success is assessed in college football, from a tangible metric–winning on the field– to an intangible, subjective one. Evidently, predicting the future matters more.”
