Some grievances can’t wait until December 23 to be aired. The College Football Playoff committee messed up in an amazing way and they ruined a good college football season for me.
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First of all, I will say that I am okay with college football being a sport where you can’t lose to the two best teams on your schedule and win the national championship. I acknowledge that there’s an argument for Alabama to be ranked ahead of Notre Dame. I acknowledge that there’s an argument for Miami to be ranked ahead of Notre Dame.
HOWEVER
The committee completely messed this up. There’s an argument to be made that the final rankings were correct. There’s no argument to be made to say that they got there in a way that makes any sense at all. Let’s compare Notre Dame, Alabama, and Miami. Notre Dame started the season with losses to two teams that made it to the College Football Playoff by a total of four points. Then we smashed the next ten teams we played. Alabama lost their first game to Florida State by 14 points. Florida State ended up 5-7. They lost by two to Oklahoma. They finished the regular season 9-2 (I give them zero credit for beating an FCS team). And then they lost to Georgia by three touchdowns. So they went 9-3. We were ranked ahead of them going into the final week of the regular season. We beat Stanford 49-20 (in a game that wasn’t as close as the final score indicates). They beat Auburn 27-20. Stanford is bad, but Auburn wasn’t much better (they were 5-7 with wins over Baylor Ball State, South Alabama, Arkansas, and Mercer). There was no reason for Alabama to jump us based on their win against Auburn and our win against Stanford, but that’s what happened. Then they got blown out by Georgia. In the College Football Playoff era (the last 12 years), Alabama was the only ranked team to lose a conference championship game and not drop any spots in the rankings. Miami went 9-2 (they also beat an FCS team so I give them zero credit for that). They lost to two unranked teams (8-4 SMU and 8-4 Louisville). We were ranked ahead of Miami in all the rankings until the final rankings. They did not make it to their conference championship game. The only team that either us or Miami played that was playing in a conference championship game was Boise State. Boise State won so the only thing that changed between us and Miami was that our strength of schedule improved slightly. But Miami jumped us. If they were ranked behind us going into the conference championship games, there is no logical explanation for them being ranked ahead of us after the conference championship games.
Miami and the ACC were hammering the fact that they beat us in the regular season. That is true and I am sympathetic to using head to head as a tiebreaker. We should absolutely claim the 1993 National Championship that we were cheated out of (Florida State won it after we beat them head to head). That was a little different. We both had one loss that year. I think when you start getting more losses than that, there’s too much other information that needs to be considered (I’m on record on the blog saying that Arizona State should have been ranked ahead of us in 2013 when we had the same number of losses). Also, the College Football Playoff teams are determined by rankings, not standings. In the NFL, it makes sense to use head to head as a tiebreaker because the teams play schedules that are fairly similar. That is definitely not the case in college. Miami played eight home games (including one against an FCS team) and four road games. They played three games outside the state of Florida (SMU, Virginia Tech, and Pittsburgh). We played no FCS teams, the same number of Power 4 opponents, and road games against Miami, Arkansas, Boston College, Pittsburgh, and Stanford. For our non-Power 4 opponents, we played Boise State and Navy. They played Bethune and South Florida. South Florida was similar to Navy, but Navy beat them. Boise State won the Mountain West. Bethune was a 6-6 FCS team. So head to head matters, but you can’t ignore everything else that happened in the season.
Besides the complete lack of any reasonable logic from the playoff committee, I have grievances with the sport of college football in general. These conferences and their championship games are so stupid. Why didn’t Miami play in the ACC Championship Game? They were in a five-way tie for second place and some tiebreaker determined that Duke made the game. How did Miami do against the two teams that made it to the ACC Championship Game? They went 0-0. The conference championship games made sense when they had divisions and you played everybody in your division. But now you don’t play so many teams in your own conference and it’s ridiculous. Ole Miss, Alabama, and Texas A&M made it to the College Football Playoff. How did they do against the rest of the top seven teams in the SEC in the regular season? Ole Miss and Alabama were 1-1 and Texas A&M was 0-1. Ohio State went 1-0 against the rest of the top six in the Big 10 in the regular season. Indiana went 2-0 against the rest of the top six in the regular season. What is the point of these conferences if the best teams don’t play each other? And then they play these conference championship games and they don’t matter. Indiana beating Ohio State meant nothing. As stupid as it was last year when Arizona State and Boise State got byes for being conference championship games, at least that meant the conference championship games meant something. Now Indiana and Ohio State both get byes and Ohio State might have gotten an easier path by losing (actually I think Ohio State would have been better off if they had dropped another spot to 3 behind Georgia). Alabama gets blown out in their conference championship game and they just stay where they are in the rankings.
It’s one thing when you get left out of the NCAA basketball tournament. I would always rather be in the tournament than not make it, but when you get left of the the basketball tournament instead of getting an 11 seed or something, you know you weren't going to win it anyway. But with the football team this year, we could have won the whole thing. Going into today, we were the fourth favorite to win the whole thing (behind three teams that got byes in the first round while we should have had a road game). We have played at a national championship level pretty much since the second half of the third game of the season. We should have been the 9 seed. We would have played Oklahoma, who has a good defense, but a bad offense. That would have been a very winnable game. Then we would have had Indiana. They’re good, but they’re not unbeatable (we beat them solidly last year). If we got past that game, anything could have happened. If we had been ranked behind Alabama and Miami the whole time, I could have accepted that. But there was no reason that we should have been ranked behind either of them based on where we were ranked going into this weekend and what happened yesterday. Hopefully this will just motivate Marcus Freeman and the team to come back and dominate next year. If Marcus Freeman sticks around, I believe he will win a National Championship at Notre Dame. It could have been this year. Hopefully it will be next year.
It’s days like this that I remind myself that the Dodgers have won the World Series the last two years.
Go Irish.
