I had a bad day with my college football picks Saturday, going just 2-3. The College Football Playoff selection committee had an even worse day Sunday.
These cloistered geniuses broke precedent by excluding an unbeaten champion (Florida State) from a power five conference – in this case the Atlantic Coast Conference – and put a pair of once-beatens (Texas and Alabama) into its four-team field.
These two join unbeaten Michigan of the Big Ten and unbeaten Washington of the about-to-be-dissolved Pac-12 in making the cut.
And thereby we have removed yet another argument that college football is anything more than a semi-pro feeder system for the NFL, designed to make mammoth profits for schools, constantly realigning conferences and many other parasites.
Student-athletes? Yeah, right. Success on the field rewarded? It’s hard to be better than unbeaten.
This has been a long-running trend. Witness how many college teams selectively recruit key cogs in the transfer portal. To argue this is anything more than athletic restocking is a joke.
Previously, such widespread transfers were held in check by rules requiring transferring players to sit out a season.
Now, it’s just another recruiting session; free agency for experienced players. Not only do schools have to land athletes coming out of high school or junior college, now they have to battle to keep them from honing their skills at one school and then moving on to greener pastures if one of the big-time operations has a glaring need at one position or another.
The right thing at this point would be just to pay the athletes in revenue-making sports and drop the charade that this about playing for good, old State U.
Florida State was penalized because all-everything quarterback Jordan Travis suffered a season-ending leg injury. Without him, the Seminoles offense was not as potent. His backup was sidelined with a concussion for the ACC title game, leaving an untested, third-team freshman to start. The Seminoles still beat a good Louisville team for the title, and had won previous games without Travis.
The reward was also-ran status in the playoffs.
Also left on the outside looking in was a once-beaten Georgia team, the two-time defending national champions who had a 29-game winning streak snapped by Alabama in the SEC title game.
The winning margin was three points. It very easily could have gone the other way but for a missed Georgia field goal attempt and an Alabama freebie field goal coming off a turnover by Georgia deep in its territory.
It was clear the fix was in for Alabama when expert after expert treated the outcome as if it had been an Alabama domination.
Part of the explanation for that is Alabama coach Nick Saban, who shows up on national commercials much more frequently than on the sidelines and is a larger-than-life figure pandered to by many, including the selection committee.
You don’t need to be wearing a tinfoil hat if you see a conspiracy in that the committee needed to get Alabama in, but couldn’t ignore the loss to Texas. So, Texas had to be in, too. Sorry, Florida State, as an unbeaten you were passed over not once, but twice.
Nonstop reverence for Alabama is a variation of the way Notre Dame is ranked highly every football season until the Fighting Irish absolutely, positively prove they do not deserve the acclaim by losing enough games.
To the credit of Saban and Alabama, they don’t often lose. But, when they do, they always seem to get the second chance that, say, Georgia doesn’t.
Yes, Alabama beat Georgia on a neutral field. But Texas had beaten Alabama by a larger margin, on Alabama’s home field, earlier in the season.
And Chokelahoma had beaten Texas in their annual Red River Rivalry game.
No one had beaten Florida State.
At this point why even have a regular season? Just let the committee sit around eating donuts and tell us how it all would have played out.
Sports, by their nature, are full of surprising outcomes that don’t go according to the resumes.
Consider that defending NCAA Men’s Basketball national champion, UConn, was ranked 10th in the final poll before the NCAA Tournament.
Were that championship a four-team playoff field, decided by the geniuses, the eventual champion would not even have made the party.
Florida State did all that it should have needed to do to make the football playoff final four. That the playoff field expands to 12 teams next season, something to which playoff selection committee apologists point to as some sort of saving grace, matters little to this year’s Florida State team.
Or to Georgia.
College football stinks with hypocrisy and, as with fish, it rots from the head down.
Sam Ross Jr's site 