Taking up the case for Alabama and the SEC feels like fighting for Apple or Amazon. It’s fighting for a tax break for Elon Musk or Warren Buffet. It’s a rush to defend the biggest bully on the block as soon as someone gets a shot that brings them to their knees.
Still, I’m here rooting for the Crimson Tide as the team that was bumped out of the first field of twelve teams by the College Football Playoff selection.
I like having an ally in the best coach of all time. ESPN’s Nick Saban, wearing a crimson jacket during the selection show, tried to avoid sounding like a shill for the program he ran for 17 years, but his stance came through loud and clear.
“All wins are not the same as other wins,” Saban said during ESPN’s excruciatingly long run-up to the bracket announcement Sunday. “In other words, what we have always done publicly at the university is look at the facts. We don’t look at the strength of the schedule. We don’t look at all that stuff.”
This is a matter of the left hemisphere (analytical thinking) and the right hemisphere (emotional processing).
If the committee had actually looked at “stuff like that,” if this was more of a data-driven process, Alabama would be in the Playoff instead of SMU.
GO DEEPER
College Football Playoff 12-team debut season verdict: The football is good, my friends
The strength of the schedule statistics varies, but most come to a similar conclusion about Alabama and SMU. The Crimson Tide’s schedule was more rigorous. At ESPN’s FPI, Alabama plays the 18th toughest schedule and SMU the 57th toughest.
Most power rankings, which are forward-looking analyses, have Alabama ahead of SMU. The Athletics‘s own modeler, Austin Mock, would have Alabama as a six-point favorite on a neutral field against SMU.
Years of recruiting rankings will tell you that Alabama has one of the most talented rosters in the country and that the SEC is where the best football players can be found. The SEC got three teams (Georgia, Texas, Tennessee) in the race, one fewer than the Big Ten and one more than the ACC.
“As someone with access to college tape and a staff of 11 former NFL scouts who spent hundreds of hours evaluating this CFB season, it’s easy to understand why SEC coaches are upset about the final round of playoffs,” wrote Senior Bowl director Jim Nagy on
I get it. Alabama always seems to get the nod from the selection committee. When in doubt, go with the team that made the CFP eight times in ten years when it was a four-team team – and won it three times.
Even last year, the committee bypassed undefeated Florida State — losing star quarterback Jordan Travis to a season-ending injury — in favor of one-loss Alabama.
Should we really give the benefit of the doubt to the worst Alabama team in nearly two decades, a team that lost games to Oklahoma and Vanderbilt, both of which would have been ineligible to bowl if they hadn’t beaten the Tide? Most Alabama fans don’t even think their team had a good year.
Left brain or right brain?
How much did the gathering around SMU have more to do with the Mustangs’ story — a four-decade climb back from the NCAA death penalty — than with their resume? It certainly would have felt awful to keep them out of the Playoff after losing the ACC Championship Game in what will go down as one of the biggest, most consequential kicks in college football history by Clemson’s Nolan Hauser.
“When the announcement happened, I honestly got emotional just because I’m so happy for our kids,” SMU coach Rhett Lashlee said on ESPN. “They worked so hard. They have won 22 games over the past two years. They risked it all last night. We lost heartbreakingly at the end to a great opponent.”
The Mustangs put the committee in a difficult position and exposed a glaring flaw in the system, providing even more reasons why the CFP should do away with the weekly season rankings during the final month of the season.
So much of the talk during conference championship weekend was about how much a team should be punished for losing a title game. The committee’s answer was resounding: not much. Texas, Penn State and SMU all lost their conference title games. They were all very competitive. None fell more than two places from last week’s rankings.
The rankings show is just that: a show. Content that will get people talking about the Playoff in November. There is value in that. Understandably, the conference commissioners running the CFP would want to control the process rather than let fans use the AP Top 25 to speculate on what the Playoff race will look like down the road.
“I believe it is good for us to release our rankings because our rankings are well known and compete with two others, the AP and the coaches,” said committee chairman Warde Manuel. “So I think it’s important, as they put out a weekly rankings, that at the right time in the season … we release how we’re thinking so that people aren’t surprised when they’re analyzing and trying to figure out how the committee thinks about things . .”
The chairman says the committee starts each week with a blank sheet of paper when it begins ranking teams.
But Manuel also said last week that teams that did not play on championship weekend had completed their evaluation. They could move based on the movement of other teams playing for national titles, but the order of teams like Alabama, Miami, South Carolina, etc. was fixed.
Saban pointed out the problem with SMU and Alabama was that SMU entered the upcoming weekend in the first place, and he may be right. SMU should have played its way onto the field instead of playing its way out in the ACC Championship Game, he said.
“Playing in (the SEC), and I’ve played in this conference for over 20 years, and if you have to play Tennessee, you have to go play LSU, and then the team you play next, now you maybe more vulnerable,” Saban said.
Saban, Greg Sankey, the SEC and Alabama are not the most sympathetic of victims, nor should they be viewed that way.
Defending them all feels like demanding that the spoiled child who seems to have all the toys also gets a pony – or in this case, the ponies’ spot in the Playoff.
But it’s hard not to admit that when you look at the numbers, they have a point.
(Photo: Todd Kirkland/Getty Images)