At noon on Sunday, the College Football Playoff committee announced that the fourth spot in its four-team tournament, which begins on January 1, would be filled not by undefeated ACC champion Florida State but instead by one-loss Alabama, which joins Michigan, Texas, and Washington. It was a difficult decision — this was the first time there were six logical competitors for four slots, and any decision would have been met with frustration and outrage — but the path the committee chose was the worst possible one and has caused an uproar in Florida and elsewhere that shows no signs of abating. This screwup was the result of bad decisions that will lead to even bigger bad decisions in the future. It was, in every possible way, a disaster.
Let’s keep it simple: Here are ten objectively horrible things about the committee’s decision:
(1) They broke the one thing the playoff was invented to fix. For nearly 100 years, college football had no playoff system — it was the only major North American sport without one. During most of that time, this was not only considered no big deal but in fact part of college football’s appeal. As the Ringer recently pointed out, Walter Camp, an architect of the sport, once said football “is not a game where a great national championship is possible or desirable.” But as the sport got bigger and went more national, and the stakes got higher for everyone, the fact that teams could win every single one of their games and still not even get a chance to play for a championship became unacceptable. So the powers that be instituted a two-team playoff, then a four-team playoff, and, starting next year, a 12-team one. But this year, Florida State, a heavyweight major conference team (for now, but we’ll get into that) with a history of success and championships, went 13-0 and still got snubbed. By choosing a one-loss team over an undefeated Power Five team, the committee went against the whole point of a playoff—the reason everybody wanted a playoff in the first place. If we’re going to leave out an undefeated Power Five team, then why are we even doing this?
(2) They invalidated the entire regular season and devalued the playoffs.
One of the biggest concerns about next year’s expanded playoffs is that they will make the regular season — particularly the conference title games, which were all riveting this year, in large part because of the intrigue about what they meant for the playoff committee — besides the point. Alabama and Georgia played an incredible game on Saturday afternoon in Atlanta (I was there, chewing through my lip), and the primary reason it was so incredible was that both teams knew they were playing for their seasons, with the loser surely out of the playoffs entirely. Under next year’s format, they’d both be in and merely playing for seeding.
And what was the point, really, of a single game Florida State played this year? There’s a whole bunch of money being spent, by fans, by network executives, by universities, really by all of us — on regular-season games that we were just told don’t actually matter. This also hurts the appeal of upcoming playoffs. If an undefeated ACC champ doesn’t get to be involved, is this really legitimate? Whoever wins the playoffs will always have an asterisk next to their name. That’s not the eventual victor’s fault. It’s the committee’s.
(3) Their explanation made no sense. Even allowing for the can’t-win nature of his assignment, Boo Corrigan, the chair of the CFP committee, did not acquit himself well. His primary explanation for choosing Florida State came down to nonsense reasoning. “One of the questions that we ask from a coaching standpoint is, ‘Who do you want to play? Who do you not want to play?’” he said. As noted by Athletic recruiting expert Ari Wasserman, this sounds dangerously close to choosing teams by their recruiting rankings rather than how they did on the field. If “Who do you want to play?” is the most important metric, you might as well just pick Vegas odds favorites, which would have left out not only Florida State but probably also fellow undefeated Washington. Georgia, who finished No. 6, would be clear favorites over both teams. (And probably even No. 1 Michigan.) By this measurement, Georgia should be in the playoffs too. But they’re not. Because “who do you want to play?” is a ridiculous measure to choose a playoff team, antithetical to the very reason we watch sports in the first place. Imagine if Eli Manning and the Giants had their Super Bowl trophy taken away because other teams were more scared of facing the Patriots than them. Corrigan and the committee couldn’t even stick to this absurd reasoning, because, well, how could they?
(4) They rewarded Alabama. More than any other school, Alabama, home of Nick Saban, Bear Bryant, and Forrest Gump, is considered to get the benefit of the doubt on everything in college football — from scheduling to rankings to TV assignments to calls on the field. It’s bad enough that Florida State got left out; that they were left out for Alabama, the dark lord of the sport that has gotten its away in everything for several decades now, adds to the notion that the sports will always play favorites.
(5) They made Florida State into a sympathetic victim. As bad as you feel for the Seminoles players, let us not forget that Florida State is the university of Jameis Winston, of The Hunting Ground, of the infamous days of #FSUTwitter. This is the fanbase that Slate’s Josh Levin notoriously called “the new GamerGate.” These are the people we’re feeling bad for? Florida State has been wronged, which allows Florida State fans to comfortably slip into the new American default state of being Aggrieved Online. We’re going to be hearing about this for the rest of our lives. Thanks.
(6) They incentivized teams to hide or ignore injuries.
The committee’s stated reason for omitting Florida State was the leg injury that quarterback Jordan Travis, the team’s best offensive player, suffered three weeks ago. That injury did not stop Florida State from winning, but Corrigan still explicitly said that the team was worse without him and therefore not good enough to make the playoff. Once again, this was speculation in the place of fact from the committee. And their reasoning will now encourage teams to be far less transparent with their injury reports (something that’s already a problem). If you think your team will be punished for an injured player — so much so that it doesn’t matter if you win without them — why would you ever admit they’ve got a problem? Or, if a player is slightly hurt, why would you rest him so he can get healthier when a group of middle-aged men in a boardroom in Texas will randomly decide your team is worse without him? College football is about to be full of dead parrots:
(7) They may have irrevocably pushed the sport even closer to NFL-style megaconferences.
You may have noticed that the four teams that did make the playoffs, will, as of next year, belong to just two conferences: The Big Ten (Michigan and Washington) and the SEC (Alabama and Texas). This is not a coincidence. The expansion that has roiled college football the last few seasons has turned both conferences into supersized power brokers who may end up eating everything in sight and leaving everyone else just trying to stay alive. One of those newly also-ran conferences, the ACC, just watched its undefeated champion, Florida State, lose out to Alabama. Florida State had already threatened over the summer to leave the ACC itself unless it received a higher share of revenues, and this turn of events will surely turn the school against its conference even further. Wouldn’t they rather be in the SEC? If they do end up departing, it would essentially kill the ACC and bring us that much closer to two mega-conferences, like the NFC and the AFC, which is great for the schools in them but death to the ones that aren’t. True, the ACC would charge Florida State a $120 million penalty for leaving before its rights deal ends in 2036. But there may be a terrifying remedy for that …
(8) This could introduce college football to the world of private equity. The excellent college football reporter Matt Brown has been chronicling this an existential threat to college football for a while now. If Florida State really did want to get out of the ACC, it would have trouble coming up with $120 million on its own. So it has partnered with JP Morgan to raise equity and give the giant financial firm a stake in its athletic department. As Brown points out, this could be a nightmare for college sports:
This scenario should be highly alarming to sports fans. Private equity doesn’t have a great track record with many of the other industries it’s gotten involved in, from media companies to health care to the housing market. Selling an equity stake to a third party also means that Florida State athletics will lose some measure of control over the operations of the athletic department. What happens if JPMorgan wants to raise ticket prices, or drop the women’s soccer team? What happens if Florida State can’t secure a huge bump in their TV revenue? What assets will be stripped for parts?
All it takes is one school to go this route for the rest of them to do the same. The CFP committee infuriated Florida State on Sunday, just enough that they may well do something drastic — and potentially ruinous.
(9) They did it for ratings.
At the end of the day, leaving the SEC — the conference with the most dedicated, crazed fans — without a team in the playoff looks like it just wasn’t an option for the committee. For a sport that has given itself over to television executives entirely, it’s another sign that decisions will be made for reasons that have less to do with competitive fairness and more with making CBS, FOX and (mostly) ESPN happy. Suffice it to say, that puts the sport’s very credibility on the line — a particularly dangerous thing to do as the playoff expands next year.
(10) They were just cowards about the whole thing.
It’s been a common refrain that under next year’s 12-team playoff format, this whole situation would have been avoided. But this strain of thinking ignores the fact that a 12-team playoff would result in the same conflicts of interest as a four-team one. Again, the SEC and Big Ten will get every break to make TV networks happy. Which raises the question: If the new format weren’t debuting next year, would the committee have actually made this decision? If they had to live with this system, would they have torn it down like they did by omitting Florida State? It’s almost as if the committee decided that they’d wring more money out by choosing Alabama, and could withstand the criticism because next year promises a supposedly fairer shake for everyone. It feels like a store being looted before a going-out-of-business sale. Which seems about right. This is the final season of college football as we know it, before it gives itself over to its worst demons. Everything must go. And thus everything has.
