Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a playoff.
The 12-team college football playoff has been set and, as is tradition, no one is happy. Weird how expanding it still doesn't solve that problem. The shadowy committee that arbitrarily chooses who gets in seemed to have a hard time deciding which teams are actually good, in a year when just about everyone looked flawed and susceptible in some way.
As it stands, the 12 teams are: Oregon, Georgia, Boise State, Arizona State, Texas, Penn State, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Tennessee, Indiana, SMU, and Clemson, with the top four teams getting first-round byes. That means no Miami, no Ole Miss, no USC, and, most controversially, no Alabama.
If I'm going to be fair to the committee, whom I am on the record as being against, they were in a tough position. Their allegiance to the blue-blood schools that bring in the ratings and money conflicted with their attempts to preserve the value of conference championships, which bring in a lot of money and ratings themselves. If you punish SMU for losing their conference championship too severely, you signal to other programs that they would actually be better off not playing in them, as SMU's coach Rhett Lashlee hinted recently. To reinforce the value of the conference championship, the teams that lost over the weekend were hardly penalized. As a side effect, this ended up hurting many of the teams that did win their conference championship—namely Oregon and Georgia, who now face a tougher road to the championship game than the teams they beat.
As for the Alabama of it all, who can really call it? The Crimson Tide are probably better than some of the teams in this playoff, but at a certain point, records need to matter. This is not Nick Saban's Alabama; it is an inconsistent program that is just as capable of blowing a game as they are of winning it all. Unlike Clemson, Bama doesn't even have a conference championship to show for it. So despite all the moaning and groaning SEC commish Greg Sankey will be doing for the next year, there is no compelling case for their inclusion over any of the teams that did make it. In time these kinks will be worked out, and in the coming years the committee will surely find a way to get six SEC teams into the playoff. Until then, I will enjoy Alabama fans being reduced to groveling like last year's FSU fans.
Bellyaching is part of the dumb beauty of the sport, and there will be plenty of it in the coming weeks. But in the end, we will be left with the games and what promises to be an amazing time. Ohio State vs. Tennessee, potentially for Ryan Day's job. Clemson vs. Texas: Dabo Swinney vs. Matthew McConaughey in a contest to determine who can better pantomime a shady Southern Baptist pastor. The Indiana Bowl that is Indiana vs. Notre Dame, and the How The Fuck Did We Even Get This Far Bowl that is SMU vs. Penn State. It's going to be so much fun.
