Illogical upon its inception, the four-team College Football Playoff fell victim to its structural nonsense Sunday. In its final act before expanding to 12 teams next season, it chose to make dubious history.
The selection committee omitted unbeaten ACC champion Florida State from its field, marking the first time in the playoff’s 10 years that an unbeaten team from a Power Five conference was deemed undesirable for the prodigiously miniature tournament.
“To me, this is a travesty to the sport,” ESPN analyst Booger McFarland declared on the air shortly after the announcement.
Like the committee, McFarland was in the neighborhood of right. Others would call that wrong.
To me, the whole sport is a travesty of access and competition. In this funhouse mirror, right or wrong is distorted. Fairness gets skewed in the pursuit of entitlement.
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It isn’t a true playoff if a team from a league the sport characterizes as elite goes undefeated and doesn’t make it. Florida State has a gripe for which it will never forgive those who control college football. But many teams over many eras — from the days of assumed national champions to the Bowl Championship Series to the playoff quartet compromise of the past decade — have felt a similar sting. It’s just that the Seminoles may have the most dramatic case, with the committee docking them because star quarterback Jordan Travis is injured.
For their flawless 13-0 records, Michigan and Washington earned the top two seeds. A pair of 12-1 teams, Texas and Alabama, completed the field. It was insufficient for such a loaded season. Seven Power Five squads finished with no more than a single loss. Georgia (12-1), the two-time defending champion, couldn’t get in after losing for the first time in 30 contests during the SEC championship game against Alabama. Ohio State (11-1) was locked out after losing a one-score game at Michigan. Throw in Oregon (11-2) — which appeared as complete as any team in the nation but lost two three-point decisions to Washington — and it would have been a captivating eight-team postseason showcase.
Instead, we’re left to debate another beauty pageant rather than an authentic tournament. And Florida State (13-0) was judged as pretty ugly.
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Blame the leadership that created this structure more than the selection committee. From the beginning, the College Football Playoff was susceptible to chaos and complication. Only a sport with toothless oversight would bargain its way to a system that showed more consideration for the traditional bowl game grift than a sensible playoff. With so many entities vying to protect their turf, this is the best the sport could come up with: four playoff teams, five power conferences, no room for extraordinary circumstances. Exclusion was the motivation, and in their favorite breathless defense, college football loyalists would proclaim this bite-size playoff acceptable because it preserved the value of a season-long journey in which every game mattered.
Except now it doesn’t matter. The committee had to make the difficult decision to punish the Seminoles for misfortune, not defeat. The resilience Florida State has shown the past two games while winning without Travis — and, heck, winning the ACC title game over Louisville with third-string quarterback Brock Glenn, a freshman — couldn’t measure up to the assumption that the Seminoles aren’t as good as Alabama or Texas anymore.
Sadly, if I were on the committee, I would be forced to make that same assumption. Florida State, which will face Georgia in the Orange Bowl instead, has a phenomenal defense, and with wide receiver Keon Coleman capable of a big play at any moment, this is still a quality team. But I think Texas and Alabama are better under the current circumstances. It’s absolutely stupid to have to make such a critical decision about a team with a perfect record based on the perception of fatal flaws that we have yet to see.
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“It’s unfathomable that Florida State, an undefeated Power Five conference champion, was left out of the College Football Playoff,” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said in a statement Sunday. “Their exclusion calls into question the selection process and whether the Committee’s own guidelines were followed, including the significant importance of being an undefeated Power Five conference champion. My heart breaks for the talented FSU student-athletes and coaches and their passionate and loyal fans. Florida State deserved better. College football deserved better.”
Florida State Coach Mike Norvell took the next step in a statement of his own: “I am disgusted and infuriated with the committee’s decision today to have what was earned on the field taken away because a small group of people decided they knew better than the results of the games. What is the point of playing games? ... I don’t understand how we are supposed to think this is an acceptable way to evaluate a team. ... What happened today goes against everything that is true and right in college football.”
Let’s not forget that, with rational leadership from the various conferences, the sport could have devised a better initial playoff. This one was created almost out of concession with the hope of expanding it later. The revision came one season too late, partly because the SEC poached super powers Texas and Oklahoma, starting another conference realignment wave before all parties could agree to playoff expansion. In 2021, it led the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 to nervously create “the Alliance” — an agreement to work together to save the future of the sport — but that just ended up making it easier for the Big Ten to ransack the Pac-12.
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Next season, 12 teams will make the playoff, but with 10 of the Pac-12 schools moving elsewhere, the Power Five is down to the Power Four. When the sport was desperate for equity, it doubled down on elitism. With a real tournament finally set to begin, a major conference representing the West Coast has been eliminated.
If not for the temporary formation of the Alliance, expansion probably would have been agreed upon soon enough for a 12-team playoff to be held now. So, in a sense, the ACC also failed Florida State with its gullible commitment to a partnership.
The players are left to clean up the mess on the field. Even when they do, they still suffer sometimes. Travis took to social media after the playoff announcement to say he was “devastated” and “heartbroken.”
“I wish my leg broke earlier in the season so y’all could see this team is much more than the quarterback,” he wrote. “I thought results matter. 13-0 and this roster matches up across any team in those top 4 rankings. I am so sorry.”
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He shouldn’t apologize. Neither should the selection committee for doing its best with a bad format. This is on the mathematicians and peacekeepers who created a postseason format that guaranteed at least one Power Five conference would always be left out and made it nearly impossible for anyone but independent Notre Dame to enter the championship equation. Over the past 10 years, Cincinnati in 2021 is the only program not in the Power Five or named Notre Dame to qualify.
Forty spots, one anomaly — that part of the plan worked out perfectly for the big boys.
A boxed-out, big-name undefeated team? Definitely not something college football ever envisioned.
To avoid that, the only choices would have been to leave out an SEC team for the first time or overlook Texas, which beat that SEC team earlier in the year. Somehow, Florida State’s exclusion managed to be the most controversial and palatable option. In a game of style and influence, the committee decided the Seminoles’ flawlessness isn’t as defensible as the blemishes of Alabama and Texas.
In reminiscing about the four-team playoff era, there will be no nostalgia.
Good riddance.
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