Oller: College Football Playoff committee jobbed Florida State, damaged sanctity of game
Florida State is not one of the best four college football teams in America. How do we know? Because 13 people say so.
That’s it. That’s how it works. By a committee comprised of a baker’s dozen. The Heisman Trophy winner is picked by 928 voters. Too many, but much better than 13. I disliked the BCS computer rankings, but it is time to reintroduce some data-driven objectivity to the proceedings. Can someone please give Jeff Sagarin a call?
What does “best” even mean? Simple. What those 13 members of the College Football Playoff selection committee want it to mean, and they define “best” as the four top teamsat the moment. Not three weeks ago. Not two months ago. What a team did in September has nothing to do with it. Or maybe something to do with it.
Even the committee members aren't sure, but they’re pretty confident all that matters is now.
A small part of me has no issue with this. It’s sorta how the NFL works, with the best teams at the end of the season advancing in the playoffs. But the pros earn their playoff spots on the field, by winning games during the regular season. A .500 wild card can win the Super Bowl because it was the best team when it mattered most, but nothing happened by committee vote.
A bigger part of me wonders what in the world (money) the committee was thinking (money) when it dropped FSU from fourth to fifth and out of the four-team playoff (money), despite the Seminoles being 13-0. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you can’t do any better than to win all your games.
What’s that? You can? Oh, right. You can be 12-1 Alabama and jump past the Seminoles, who became the first undefeated Power Five conference champion to miss the playoff.
How does that happen? Because, again, the Crimson Tide was deemed to be better than the Noles, who are without their top quarterback, Jordan Travis. Never mind that FSU defeated No. 14 Louisville with its third-string QB − can you say Cardale Jones? − the committee opted to implement a tiebreaker bylaw that takes injuries into consideration when slotting teams, thereby diminishing an entire season of work by players and coaches. Nice message you're sending there, SEC kiss-ups.
The decision between Florida State and Alabama did not come down to which team deserved to No. 4 based on full-season performance. As CFP executive director Bill Hancock stressed, “Most deserving is not anything in the committee's lexicon.”
My problem with Hancock’s view is that “deserve” is easier to define than “best,” and I’ve been on enough committees to know the closer you come to choosing the clearest black and white definition, the better off you will be. The alternative is to rely on an either/or proposition that is swayed by bias and, well, money.
Let’s play this out to see what I mean.
We’re all familiar with the phrase that goes something like “if Team A and Team B played 10 times, Team A would win eight of the games.”
But what about Team A’s two losses? Team B was better two out of 10. But would you include Team A or Team B among the four best in a playoff? It’s tricky, because “settling it on the field” is fundamental to sports competition; Team B was better on that day. But does one game make Team B “best?”
The above scenario helps explain why I struggle to understand the committee’s logic in excluding Florida State, except of course for the money issue (Alabama-Michigan will draw better ratings for ESPN than FSU-Michigan).
To wit: if the committee determined Georgia was bad enough to drop five spots (No. 1 to No. 6) after losing by three points to Alabama, why was Bama good enough to jump four spots (No. 8 to No. 4) after upsetting the Dawgs?
Even more perplexing is how the committee chose to punish Florida State for its 16-6 win against No. 14 Louisville in the Atlantic Coast Conference title game. The Seminoles won by two scores,. Yes, their offense looked anemic, but it still gained more yards than Michigan did against Iowa in the Big Ten championship game. More importantly, Florida State’s defense held a Louisville offense averaging 33 points to single digits. So much for defense winning championships.
The most distressing part of the committee faux pas, though, is the message it sends about the totality of the regular season no longer mattering as much. True, in 2024 the regular season won’t matter as much, because the 12-team playoff softens the fallout from losses. But we’re not there yet. Even then, downgrading the regular season will cut into the very fabric of what makes college football special.
Former Michigan tight end and Pickerington North graduate Jake Butt, who works for the Big Ten Network, expressed it well when he posted on social media: “Football is the greatest sport because of the minimal amount of games. Basic economics tells us scarcity drives value. In football every game matters. Every play, every quarter, every moment … The beauty of football is there is minimal margin for error. That’s why the joy of victory and the heartbreak of loss are so extreme, because you understand how few chances you get. When you do what the committee did yesterday, you undermine the foundation of what makes football so special.”
We’re having a collection of people who may or may not be “experts” on football subjectively choose who they *think* the best 4 teams are.
How often are “experts” completely wrong? Oregon was favored by 10 points over Washington. Those are experts. Couldn’t have been more…— Jake Butt (@Jbooty88) December 4, 2023
My 2 cents is that by treating the CFP like a made-for-TV invitational rather than playoff, the committee made a mockery of Saturday afternoons in the fall, which are the lifeblood of the sport. All based on how it defines “best.”
Is Alabama one of the best? Maybe it was against Georgia, but definitely not a week earlier when the Tide needed to convert on fourth-and-goal from the Auburn 31-yard line to defeat the unranked Tigers. If Bama’s touchdown pass instead would have fallen incomplete, I guess the committee would have had to agree that Auburn was one of the best teams in the country that day.
Preposterous? Of course, but so is an 0-13 committee leaving 13-0 Florida State out of the playoff.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: College Football Playoff committee botches job by redefining 'best'
