It didn’t have to be strictly an SMU vs. Alabama debate.
From the moment Clemson’s game-winning, 56-yard field goal cleared the uprights to win the ACC championship on Saturday night, there was one prevailing storyline for the 12-team College Football Playoff on selection Sunday: Will the final at-large spot go to the Mustangs or the Crimson Tide?
There should have been more teams in that discussion. Add in two-loss Miami and three-loss Ole Miss and South Carolina. Add two-loss BYU too, which landed at No. 17 in the final CFP rankings, seven spots lower than a two-loss SMU team it beat in September. Reasonable arguments can be made for any of those teams to deserve a Playoff bid. Except for the fact that the CFP selection committee backed itself into an exclusively SMU-or-Alabama corner, courtesy of its previous batch of rankings and a loud insistence that schools not be penalized for losing in their conference championship games.
“There’s always going to be a debate,” ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit said during Sunday’s selection show. “There wasn’t going to be a right answer (this season).”
College Football Playoff Selection Committee Chair Warde Manuel explains the decision to include SMU over Alabama in the final rankings. pic.twitter.com/dcvI9rw9MZ
— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) December 8, 2024
Did SMU deserve to get in ahead of Alabama? Probably, based on the committee’s self-imposed criteria. Does that mean the best team — or teams — got in? That’s debatable, and dependent on which resume data points the committee, individually and collectively, values most. Unfortunately, the committee prevented itself from fully having that conversation. The pressure to avoid embarrassment became the most significant data point on Sunday. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
What if the College Football Playoff got rid of its weekly rankings in favor of one final end-all-be-all ranking?
On Nov. 5, the selection committee released the first of six weekly CFP Top 25 rankings live on ESPN, a made-for-TV spectacle with all the glitzy graphics and talking-head bluster a degenerate sports fan could hope for. It’s how the Playoff operated during the four-team era.
There are a few important layers to this ritual. First, ESPN pays gobs of money to televise the CFP, and it extracts plenty of eyeballs and ad dollars out of that weekly rankings reveal. So does the rest of the college football ecosystem, including the website you are reading this on.
Sure, ESPN could replace the rankings with a weekly show taking stock of the other polls and debating the Playoff horse race, but the fervor wouldn’t be the same.
There’s also the argument that providing less transparency to an already secretive and subjective process is going in the wrong direction. But the added accountability doesn’t necessarily translate into competency.
The expanded Playoff is a different beast than the four-team setup, where automatic bids and first-round byes weren’t a factor. It’s a more inclusive configuration, but also more nuanced.
Eliminating the weekly Playoff rankings won’t eliminate the debate or outrage. But a weekly, reactionary release forces the committee to stay beholden to those incremental rankings, boxing itself into decisions seven days at a time as opposed to over longer, more indicative stretches.
Consider the progression of this season’s CFP rankings. Following a Week 12 loss to Georgia, two-loss Tennessee dropped four spots from No. 7 to No. 11. The Vols were ranked one spot behind the two-loss Dawgs and two spots behind two-loss Ole Miss that had beaten Georgia the week prior — which made sense. Yet they were also four spots below two-loss Alabama, which Tennessee defeated a month earlier. That same week, BYU plummeted eight spots from No. 6 to No. 14 after its first loss of the season, one spot behind the same one-loss SMU team the Cougars defeated on the road during nonconference play.
A week later, Clemson climbed five spots after a 51-14 victory over The Citadel, a sub-.500 FCS opponent; Tennessee moved up three spots after a 56-0 win over UTEP; and SMU rose four spots after an easy win over Virginia. All of that was largely a result of road conference losses by Indiana (to Ohio State), Alabama (to Oklahoma) and Ole Miss (to Florida), each of which dropped at least five spots. Alabama fell six.
A week after that, Ohio State fell four spots after a home loss to Michigan.
Wouldn’t the selection committee benefit from comparing each team’s full body of work for the final rankings, as opposed to the requisite contortions of week-to-week results? There’s been a lot of talk this season about imbalanced schedules and the varying degree of difficulty between conferences. It makes these rankings an admittedly tough task, and having to do so weekly doesn’t help navigate those challenges.
This might be one of the rare instances where the CFP should borrow something from the NCAA and how it handles tournament selection for college basketball. The basketball selection committee provides one top-16 bracket preview in the lead-up to March Madness, but otherwise saves it all for Selection Sunday, from the top seeds to the last four in/first four out revelations. If the CFP isn’t ready to go whole hog, perhaps it could reduce to two or three rankings reveals each spaced a few weeks apart, or at the very least eliminate that final Tuesday reveal, which would make the post-conference championship rankings less constricting (and predictable). Either way, the CFP could add some intrigue to its selection-day format — and maybe make better-informed decisions as a result.
The new Playoff is likely to change. Conference commissioners will politic for more automatic bids, the seeding and bye methodology will be critiqued, and the field could wind up expanding to 14, 16 or however many teams deliver the highest revenues. There’s probably no stopping that train. But the process can be improved beyond revamping the format. Adjusting the rankings schedule is worth considering.
The most obvious (and expensive) impediment is that ESPN and the CFP covet the weekly attention the rankings command. But if that attention becomes increasingly focused on how the selection committee is going to handcuff or publicly embarrass itself week after week, is the juice worth the squeeze?
The selection committee may have gotten it right this season. Someone will always get left out, but if that someone is a three-loss Alabama that got beat 24-3 by a bad Oklahoma team, or a two-loss Miami that blew a 21-point lead to Syracuse, it makes it difficult to insist that some miscarriage of competitive justice has taken place. SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee stated it “would be criminal” if the Mustangs got left out of the Playoff following Saturday’s loss to Clemson. Well, tell the authorities to stand down. But it might not work out that way next time.
This season has been all about a bigger, better Playoff and the sense of excitement it has injected into the sport, selection Sunday included. But the SMU-Alabama debate shows why the CFP should explore how it could do better with less.
(Photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
