Why the College Football Playoff Committee Made the Right Call

The SEC champion rarely needs defending, but Alabama’s spot in the 2023 Rose Bowl is a a fitting step toward football’s goal of finding the best team in the nation.

If you believe in providing a voice to the voiceless, in afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, in fighting the good fight against powerful forces of the establishment, you have clicked on the wrong column.

My colleague Pat Forde has you covered. He believes Florida State deserved a College Football Playoff bid, and I really want to believe that, too, but the more I examined the debate, the clearer the answer became. And so I come in defense of Alabama, which feels a bit like arguing that the bully needed the other kids’ lunch money more than they did. Alabama should not need defending. Yet here we are.

It is true that FSU is the first undefeated Power Five team to get left out of the College Football Playoff, and I feel for its players and coaches. But FSU is also the first undefeated Power Five team competing for a bid against four better teams. Michigan and Washington also went unbeaten and played tougher schedules, so there should be no debate there. The real debate came down to Texas, Alabama, Florida State and Georgia.

The most obvious argument against Florida State is that the team has not been the same since star quarterback Jordan Travis sustained a season-ending leg injury against North Alabama. In two full games without Travis, against Florida and Louisville, FSU averaged 3.6 yards per play and scored 40 total points. Over the course of a full season, those numbers would have placed dead last and 117th in FBS, respectively. You can argue that FSU played Louisville with its third-string quarterback and would probably get second-stringer Tate Rodemaker back for the playoff, but FSU’s offense looked feeble even with Rodemaker, too.

The Travis argument touches a nerve, because it is the full-team version of arguing that a player should not lose his starting job because of an injury. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is entirely about Travis’s injury.

In the last two months, Alabama has been a better team than Florida State.

Since beating LSU at home in the first week of the season, Florida State has beaten four teams with a winning record: Clemson, Duke, Miami and Louisville. Clemson is a patrician program with a plebeian team and still took FSU to overtime. Duke had a 20–17 lead and a first down at Florida State’s 11-yard line when its quarterback, Riley Leonard, was injured in the third quarter. Miami went 3–5 in the ACC. Florida State did not face its conference’s best quarterback, North Carolina’s Drake Maye, or its third- and fourth-place finishers, North Carolina State and Georgia Tech. We will grant that beating Louisville on a neutral field is a very good win. So that’s one.

Meanwhile, since losing to Texas on Sept. 9, Alabama has beaten 12–1 Georgia, 10–2 Mississippi, 8–4 Tennessee and 9–3 LSU. The Crimson Tide did need luck and the worst game-winning drive in college football history to beat a mediocre Auburn team, but they also destroyed the same Kentucky team that beat Louisville last week.

And just as Florida State is weaker because of a change at quarterback, Alabama is much stronger because of one. When Alabama lost to Texas, Jalen Milroe looked like one of those college quarterbacks who had all the tools but wasn’t really sure how to use them. Nick Saban benched him the next week. Yet Milroe earned his job back, and now he is one of the most dynamic players in college football—the kind of player who can lead a team to a national title.

As the last remaining American who pines wistfully for the old pre-BCS bowl system, I truly appreciate the argument that Florida State deserves a shot because it is undefeated. For most of college football history, national championships did not necessarily go to the best teams, or the best teams at the end of the year, but instead to really good teams that somehow managed to win all their games. There was something magical and beautiful and mysterious about that. I am wiping away tears on my official Southwest Conference handkerchief right now. But that world is long gone, my friends.

The CFP committee’s job was to choose the four best teams. It did that. Ask any fan of Michigan, Washington or Texas if they would rather play Florida State, Georgia or Alabama in the playoff, and they would overwhelmingly choose Florida State. Oddsmakers placed No. 1 Michigan as a 1.5-point favorite over Alabama; surely that spread would be a lot larger for Michigan-Florida State. Point spreads are not part of the criteria. I get it. But the reasons behind the point spreads are part of the criteria.

Hanging over all of this is the reality that a CFP without the SEC would have no credibility. The SEC has won six of the last eight CFP championships, including the last three. If you go back to the Bowl Championship Series days, the SEC has won 13 of the last 17 national championships. In that 17-year span, there has been only one championship game that didn’t include the SEC: Ohio State vs. Oregon in the first year of the CFP. That is also not supposed to matter to the committee. But in the real world, it does.

Just last week, I thought this would be another minimal-controversy year for the CFP, and I was laughably wrong about that. This sucks for Florida State. If FSU wins its bowl game, it should declare itself national champion, like in the good old days.

But the CFP is designed to identify the best team in the nation. So put emotion and sentiment aside. Ask yourself which is more likely:

1. A Florida State team that couldn’t move the ball against Florida or Louisville is the best team in the country.
2. The SEC is once again the dominant league, and its champion is better than any other conference champion.

For me, the easy answer is No. 2. The committee made the right call.