Fox Sports college football analyst Joel Klatt said the College Football Playoff selection committee did a “terrible” job of deviating from its own “process” to get SMU into the playoffs against the University of Alabama. I'm thinking.
The only real controversy has emerged following last weekend's thrilling college football field game. Who will the committee choose? SMU? Or Alabama?
SMU's loss to the Clemson Tigers forced the committee to choose. In the end, the committee chose SMU, which Klatt called “terrible.”
“I believe they manipulated the actual process to get SMU in this playoff,” Klatt said on the podcast. joel cratt show. “They put them in 11th place, which is one place higher than the team that actually beat them, which also makes no sense at all. But that's what they gave us. It's an artificial floor. They're pulling the levers of power to produce something that wouldn't be produced if they did it right.”
“It sounds good in theory, but it's negative for the playoffs overall. And it hurts the integrity of the playoffs. As much as what the committee presented to us is very good on paper, It seems, and I think it's defensible in theory. It sounds good on social media, and in many ways it seems like it was a play for the masses. Let them eat cake. , that emotion is SMU Because it was on my side…I don’t agree with that, except you have to manipulate to make it happen.”
Mr. Klatt's point is not without merit. Alabama had a significantly better strength of schedule, with more wins against top 25 teams than SMU, even though the Tide's non-conference schedule was Charmin-Soft.
However, Alabama was a team with three losses and SMU was a team with two losses. Additionally, two of Alabama's three losses were against heavily favored unranked teams. Needless to say, the Tide lost by 21 points in the final loss to unranked Oklahoma.
Conversely, SMU has been surprisingly consistent throughout the year, with its only loss in the regular season coming against a very tough BYU team, and the loss in the ACC Championship coming on a last-second 56-yard field goal. It was from.
Whether the committee “manipulated the process” is something only the committee and possibly Klatt know. What is known, however, is that the 12-team bracket was heavily tilted in favor of the conference championship game from the beginning. If the selection committee had chosen Bama over SMU, a team that is not in the conference championship game, it sends a message that the conference championship game is not that important because in the end they are choosing the team they want. It would have become.
Perhaps the committee's “process” is out of sync with the stated intentions of the playoffs, and if that's true, it needs to be fixed. But the committee appears to have followed the “spirit of the law” of what a 12-team playoff would look like, even if it didn't follow the “letter of the law.”
