The specific asinine nature of the College Football Playoff selection process has come out over the past week, and no, it’s not just because they’re going to leave Vandy out of it. Okay, partly because of that.
But not completely.
As conference championship weekend unfolds, we have two games serving as proof that the conference championship games are mostly pointless cash grabs that I’m surprised no conference has elected to move to Riyadh yet. This afternoon, Georgia beat Alabama 28-7 in the SEC Championship Game, in a game that was actually not as close as the final score makes it look: Alabama was never in that game whatsoever. As I’m writing this, meanwhile, 7-5 Duke might actually cost the ACC a playoff bid entirely if they hold on to beat Virginia and the committee elects to put 12-1 Sun Belt champ James Madison in rather than the Blue Devils.
The first, well, a lot of people are arguing shouldn’t count based on an alleged precedent set when 11-1 SMU lost last season’s ACC title game on a walk-off field goal and stayed ahead of some three-loss SEC teams. Which is true in that SMU still made the playoff, though they did drop two spots in the playoff ranking because of it. That precedent, obviously, should hold when an SEC team that was 10-2 entering the game utterly shit the bed, lost by three touchdowns, and is being compared to other two-loss teams (Notre Dame and Miami, specifically) that were not playing this weekend.
Miami, of course, is not playing because the Hurricanes finished in a five-way tie for second place in the ACC at 6-2, and Duke won a complicated tiebreaker to claim the spot opposite 7-1 Virginia in the ACC Championship. This is the other side of the coin for the pointlessness of conference championship games in the post-divisional era: when Virginia actually finished the regular season in sole possession of first place, uh, why exactly should the Cavaliers be required to play an extra game to be the conference champions? At least Alabama and Georgia were the two teams picked out of a hat of a four-way tie for first place. Virginia should just… be the ACC champion, right? I’m not taking crazy pills here, am I?
This has ended up being a very stupid way to decide a conference champion. It wasn’t always this way, of course: former Vanderbilt athletic director and SEC commissioner Roy Kramer, who died on Friday at 96, found a little-known loophole in the NCAA rulebook that allowed a conference to play a championship game if it had at least 12 members and split into divisions, with all teams in a division playing common opponents. Hey! That actually made sense!
But then, the Big 12 felt it got screwed out of a spot in the four-team playoff because it had ten teams and no divisions and played a round-robin schedule, so they decided to get the NCAA to change the rules to allow them to play a championship game on top of completely deciding things on the field before that. And then when mega-conferences came along, weirdos on the internet decided that it was more important that we go to Oklahoma once every four years than have a logical way to determine a conference champion, and here we are.
And now, Alabama fans (and a surprising amount of pliant media) are effectively arguing that today’s game shouldn’t count because they lost. It should be also pointed out that the committee created this controversy by moving Alabama ahead of Notre Dame when they didn’t have to, when Notre Dame had taken care of business against Stanford and the committee chairman actually went on television and argued with a straight face that Alabama should get credit for beating 5-7 Auburn on a late touchdown. When your logic for ranking them where you did is that stupid, well, you really shouldn’t have an equally dumb rule not to penalize a team for vomiting on national television when others are watching at home because of absurd conference tiebreakers (or not being in a conference at all, in Notre Dame’s case.)
And meanwhile, Vanderbilt is out because the Commodores don’t have any ranked wins, which is true only because Vanderbilt beat Tennessee so badly that the Vols are no longer ranked. But that logic assumes that if you’re going to go 2-2 in four SEC road games, it’s better to beat one of Alabama and Texas and then go shit the bed at South Carolina than to just, well, take care of business in the games you were supposed to win.
This logic also assumes that “Tennessee at Neyland” is a game that Vanderbilt is just supposed to win, a statement so profound in its absurdity that you have to wonder whether this also applies to the College Football Playoff committee.
