2023 College Football Playoff

[Crusader Husker]

I stopped watching ALL of eSECpn's content when they started the Longhorn Network.  

 

I only watch live events.  Sec crap and the behind the scenes working is real.  SEC people and their followers are all are mindless zombie's so full of their own crap they don't think it smells anymore.

[Mavric]

27 minutes ago, DevoHusker said:

 

 

 

I mean ... Florida State's helmet is up there as well.  Just cut off by the graphic at the bottom.

[Guy Chamberlin]

There are four playoff spots and five power 5 conferences. While it might have sounded fun to totally shut out the SEC, it's equally unimaginable that the winner of the SEC has to watch FSU go in their place. It's an ACC thing, and it's hard to get around FSU's 55th ranked strength of schedule no matter how we feel about them playing the big stage without their Heisman worthy QB. So maybe Texas and the Big 12 get the axe instead. Can't think of many teams I hate more than Texas and Alabama. But if it's my job to pick the four best teams for a four team playoff, knowing I'm going to be hated either way, I'm probably making the same call the committee did. 

[BigRedBuster]

7 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

There are four playoff spots and five power 5 conferences. While it might have sounded fun to totally shut out the SEC, it's equally unimaginable that the winner of the SEC has to watch FSU go in their place. It's an ACC thing, and it's hard to get around FSU's 55th ranked strength of schedule no matter how we feel about them playing the big stage without their Heisman worthy QB. So maybe Texas and the Big 12 get the axe instead. Can't think of many teams I hate more than Texas and Alabama. But if it's my job to pick the four best teams for a four team playoff, knowing I'm going to be hated either way, I'm probably making the same call the committee did. 

It's easy.  Texas beat Alabama.  Texas is in.  Alabama isn't.

[Street Novelist]

1 hour ago, BigRedBuster said:

It's easy.  Texas beat Alabama.  Texas is in.  Alabama isn't.

 

And there it is

[DrinkinwitTerrellFarley]

13 hours ago, Crusader Husker said:

LOL!  I guess I should have said "was"  Can you see the Husker fans if he was the coach?  They would lose their mind.

Well they might welcome him.  Mike Leach absolutely owned Bo Pelini

[DrinkinwitTerrellFarley]

On 12/3/2023 at 6:56 PM, Mavric said:

 

 

Eight has been my preference for years.  And it's about as clean as you can get this year.  Five conference champions plus the three most-deserving runner-ups.

 

#1 Michigan v #8 Oregon

#4 Alabama v #5 Florida State

#3 Texas v #6 Georgia

#2 Washington v #7 Ohio State

I think they went 12 so the Group of 5 gets an opportunity to possibly prevent legal issues.

[Mavric]

4 hours ago, DrinkinwitTerrellFarley said:

I think they went 12 so the Group of 5 gets an opportunity to possibly prevent legal issues.

 

You can still include a G5 team if it were 8.  I've said they should be able to be included but with some restriction such as they have to be in the Top 12 or something like that.  Same goes for any conference for that matter.

 

They went 12 for more money.

[Guy Chamberlin]

View in browser A Child Could (and Did) Know That College Football's Playoff System is Moronic Crocodile tears for Florida State JEFF MAURER DEC 4     READ IN APP     In 1993, 9-0 Florida State played 9-0 Notre Dame in football, the only college sport that anyone does or should care about. My dad was all-in for Notre Dame; Dad was raised Catholic, and cheering for Notre Dame was the only part of the religion that stuck. I backed Notre Dame because I was 13 and liked whatever my dad liked. I was pro-Notre Dame, Chevrolet, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pizza Hut, and DeWalt tools because so was my dad. People who liked Florida State, Ford, The Eagles, Domino’s, and Milwaukee tools were viewed as possible communists and likely perverts.   In that classic game, Notre Dame beat Florida State by a touchdown. But the following week, Notre Dame lost to Boston College. Notre Dame and Florida State went to separate bowl games, each won, and both ended the season with one loss. Back then, the national champion was determined by a vote by coaches and sports writers, a close cousin of today’s selection committee system. Florida State edged out Notre Dame in the vote even though both teams had the same number of losses and Notre Dame beat Florida State when they actually played each other in a game of football. 13 year-old me was furious. “This is the greatest injustice in human history!” I thought (editor’s note: It was not). Notre Dame beat Florida State head-to-head! How could a bunch of whiskey-soaked sports writers and good ol’ boy football coaches hand Florida State the title? What kind of s#!t-for-brains system was this?   As it turns out, that s#!t-for-brains system was the only tradition that college football was determined to preserve. In the past 30 years, the bowl system has been decimated and conferences have been torn to shreds, but college football is still trying to pick a champ by deferring to a Council Of The Wise. Ironically, Florida State is this year’s aggrieved party: They finished 13-0 but weren’t one of the four teams selected to play for the title. And, obviously, it would be incredibly petty of me to delight in Florida State’s suffering due to something that happened well before any of today’s players were born, and yet here it comes: f#&% off, Florida State. I guess your current coach didn’t suck off the Council Of The Wise as effectively as Bobby Bowden did.   In the past few decades, college football’s system for crowning a champion has undergone many changes but stayed fundamentally the same. In 1998, the Bowl Championship System sent the two highest-ranked teams — as determined by an end-of-the-year vote — to a winner-take-all title game. But this didn’t work well; the third-ranked team always had a strong case that they should be in the top two. So, in 2014, a four-team playoff emerged. That’s still in place, and — as we see — the fifth-ranked team is always pissed off. Next year, they’ll switch to a 12 team system, so finally — finally — we’ll have an end to the controversy…right? Except…wait a minute…what if 13 is also a number? Could the 13th-ranked team possibly b!^@h and moan? Of course they will. Don’t these schools have mathematics departments — isn’t there a college football sabermetrics geek somewhere who can prove that 13 is, indeed, a whole number adjacent to 12?   Incredibly, college football doesn’t understand that the voting — not the number of teams in the playoff — is the problem. I say “incredibly” because even when I was 13 — an age at which I thought Africa was a country and was only 60 percent sure that Yoda wasn’t real — I knew that voting for a champion was dumb. I understood that there is no fair way to compare different teams playing different (short) schedules in different conferences. I noticed that no other sport used rankings; every other sport had a play-your-way-to-the-title system. College football is the only sport that plays a short season that produces several teams with similar resumes, and then commences a weird-a$$ Hillbilly Papal Enclave to bestow blessings on a few teams deemed worthy.   Florida State has a solid case: They won all of their games. What else did the committee want them to do? Some version of this happens just about every year: There’s usually a team from a small conference — a Jim Jones University or an East Guam Barber College — that runs the table and asks “What about us?” Florida State stands out because their conference — the ACC — is semi-respectable. But the truth is that some teams are f#&%ed from the start and could never succeed no matter what they do. Which is exactly the type of harsh reality that college is supposed to shield you from for a few glorious years.   Of course, Alabama — the team that got in at Florida State’s expense — also has a strong case. They play in the SEC, which is perpetually strong; 14 of the past 20 champions came from the SEC. Alabama only lost to Texas, who went 12-1 and won the Big 12. So, Alabama would argue, should they miss out because Florida State beat North Alabama — a school that is logically 1/4 as good as Real Alabama — and a bunch of ACC basketball schools? Everyone knows that the ACC is the only conference that considers college basketball a real sport, as opposed to a casino game invented by Bally’s to drive gambling during Spring Drinking Season (St. Patrick’s Day/spring break/Mardi Gras). Alabama shouldn’t be punished for playing in the Big Boy Division, or so goes the argument that I assume was made by their white suit-wearing, brow-dabbing, old-timey southern lawyers.   How do you reconcile these two arguments? Simple: You don’t. Each argument is strong, there is no way to know which team is better. What does “better” even mean in this context? Better today or better over the course of the season? Better based on the games they actually played, or better on paper? If it’s the latter, then why even bother playing the games? No other sport even asks such an abstract question; every other sport has teams play each other until all but one is eliminated. The only other sport that uses a selection committee is college basketball, but that system works because: 1) You can get in automatically by winning your conference or conference tournament, and 2) A ridiculous 68 teams qualify, and it’s hard to argue that you should be national champion if a serious argument can be made that you’re not as good as whoever finished eighth in the Big East.   The selection committee tries to determine who’s best by looking at how teams fared against common opponents. This method is a statistician’s nightmare: It’s a small sample with no control group and a constantly changing pool of subjects. The transitive property doesn’t work in college football. To wit: Texas is currently ranked #3, but they lost to Oklahoma, who lost to Kansas, who lost to Texas Tech, who lost to Wyoming, who lost to Air Force, who lost to Army. So, according to the transitive property, poor little Army — which prioritizes dumb things like academics and service over football — could beat Texas. Which would be Army’s biggest win since Operation Desert Storm.   Voting is nonsensical and should be ditched altogether. Teams should have to play their way into the playoffs, like in every other sport. You think you’re the best team in the country? Then first, win your conference (or possibly your division within your conference, if people want to give more spots to tougher conferences). The important thing is that every team should have a path to the title. Teams in smaller conferences shouldn’t be told “haha no” at the start of the season; they should have a way to prove themselves, even if it involves playing more rounds in a playoff. When your team gets eliminated, they should be eliminated by an actual other college football team, not by the selection committee.   Next year’s 12-team system will be a slightly better, because some conference champions will be guaranteed a spot. But there will still be an almighty clusterf#&% at the bottom of the bracket. A 9-3 team that lost a conference championship game will be compared to a 9-2 team that didn’t even play one. A 13-0 Mountain West champ will be compared to an 11-2 ACC team that beat USC by 40 and lost to Vanderbilt by 70. And all of those teams will be compared to stubbornly independent Notre Dame, who I’m now old enough to admit should just join a f#&%ing conference if they want to be part of this. There will be no good way to sort things out; someone will get screwed, guaranteed. I just hope that someone is Florida State again, because, seriously, NOTRE DAME BEAT THEM HEAD-TO-HEAD!

[Lorewarn]

22 hours ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

There are four playoff spots and five power 5 conferences. While it might have sounded fun to totally shut out the SEC, it's equally unimaginable that the winner of the SEC has to watch FSU go in their place. It's an ACC thing, and it's hard to get around FSU's 55th ranked strength of schedule no matter how we feel about them playing the big stage without their Heisman worthy QB. So maybe Texas and the Big 12 get the axe instead. Can't think of many teams I hate more than Texas and Alabama. But if it's my job to pick the four best teams for a four team playoff, knowing I'm going to be hated either way, I'm probably making the same call the committee did. 

 

 

 

The system should have worked perfectly this year

 

There were 5 power 5 champions. 3 were undefeated. The other two had the same record and a head to head matchup for a tiebreaker

 

 

This couldn't have been any simpler.

[Guy Chamberlin]

18 minutes ago, Lorewarn said:

 

This couldn't have been any simpler.

 

Pretty much everyone involved in the decision disagrees.

 

'Holy s---, this is really going to suck to do this,'"

 

• 
  Heather Dinich, ESPN Senior WriterDec 4, 2023, 12:26 PM ET

 

GRAPEVINE, Texas -- It was between 1:30 and 2 a.m. CT on Sunday after the conference championship games when the 13 members of the College Football Playoff selection committee finally left their meeting room. They had been sequestered for hours as they determined the top four teams in the country.

 

They knew what they could potentially wind up with -- and it didn't feel good.

 

As difficult as it was for them to remove their emotions from the process, the sinking feeling about excluding an undefeated Power 5 conference champion was tempered by the belief that they did what they were tasked to do -- vote for the four best teams.

 

"All of us had the emotional tie, like, 'Holy s---, this is really going to suck to do this,'" one committee member told ESPN. "We talked about that over and over, and we just kept coming back [to] are they good enough with what they have to win a national championship, and it just kept coming back [to] we didn't think they could."

 

There wasn't any discussion about the SEC being left out because the committee maintains that it talks about teams, not conferences. There wasn't any serious consideration to include Alabama without Texas because there was so much respect in the room for the Longhorns' Week 2 win in Tuscaloosa. There also wasn't enough support in the room to deem Georgia "unequivocally" one of the four best teams in the country -- the standard for teams that don't win their conference title.

 

Instead, the crux of the debate into the wee hours of Sunday morning centered on how to evaluate Florida State, which beat Louisville with its third-string quarterback after both Jordan Travis and his backup, Tate Rodemaker, were sidelined by injuries. While the Seminoles' defense impressed the committee -- and had all year -- there were significant concerns about FSU's offense.

 

Undefeated Michigan had won the Big Ten. Undefeated Washington won the Pac-12. Alabama knocked off the selection committee's No. 1 team, Georgia, to win the SEC, and one-loss Texas, which easily won the Big 12, had knocked off the SEC champion in September.

And now Florida State had found a way to win -- again.

It was the final layer of complication in what was already the most difficult, controversial decision any CFP committee has had to make in a decade of the four-team playoff. Never before has an undefeated Power 5 conference champion been excluded from the CFP -- but never before have seven Power 5 teams finished the regular season with one or fewer losses. "We've never had a year with eight teams at the top as good as these are, and the five conference champions 1 through 5, we've never had it come out that way," CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. "My feeling is it probably was the toughest."

 

FOR 2½ DAYS on conference championship game weekend, the CFP's selection committee hid in plain sight.

While families clad in Christmas-themed clothes infiltrated the sprawling Gaylord Texan resort for its annual ice sculpture exhibit, the most powerful people in college football went nearly unnoticed, save for one cardboard sign bearing the CFP logo that some fans paused to look at as they exited the elevator and headed to their rooms.

 

"Is Bama in?!" one man asked a security guard sitting on a stool outside the meeting rooms Saturday night after the Tide's SEC championship win against No. 1 Georgia.

 

The guard just shrugged.

 

As it turned out, one-loss Bama was in -- at the expense of undefeated ACC champion Florida State. It was an unprecedented decision that sparked outrage throughout the sport. FSU coach Mike Norvell said he was "disgusted and infuriated." ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said, "It's unfathomable." Travis, the Seminoles' injured quarterback, said he wished he had broken his leg earlier in the season so the committee could have seen that the team was still great without him.

 

The committee is steadfast in its belief it got the decision right.

 

"At the end of the day, everybody had the same goal in mind -- do we have the four best teams?" a committee member said. "And we all felt pretty good that we do."

 

It wasn't until the ACC championship game began to unfold, though, that the members' opinions began to truly take shape. The group grew concerned as it watched the Noles struggle to get a first down in the first half. There is a section in the committee's protocol that specifically refers to the "unavailability of key players ... that may have affected a team's performance during the season or likely will affect its postseason performance." That allowed the committee to do something it intentionally avoids every other week: look ahead.

 

"People really wanted to talk about it," a committee member said. "We don't really have that conversation while we're watching games. But we've got to talk about the elephant in the room. What just happened? We talked about 13-0. We talked about the teams they beat. And they were a conference champ. All of that. It took a while."

 

Hancock rarely, if ever, shares voting results with the people in the room, though sometimes he'll mention if they were close or not. The votes are cast privately on each committee member's laptop. The committee members simply hover their mouse over a team and click to vote. If a committee member is recused from voting for a certain team, it's shaded in gray on his or her laptop, making it impossible to click on.

 

They vote on the teams in small batches and continue through the process of voting and debating in groups until the entire list of 25 is compiled. So it's not as if they begin talking about Texas and Alabama and vote around them to make it fit.

 

"People may not believe it, but we don't say, 'Oh gosh, if we vote this way, the SEC is going to be left out," one source said. "That never came up. Ever. We literally look at teams, put them up against each other, and say, 'Who did they beat? Who did they not beat? Who have they beaten on the road? What's their strength of schedule?' Look at the matrix and all the data."

 

The only time the committee members know the vote is when it's a tie, because they have to vote again. There was a sense within the room Saturday night, though, that the more they voted, the closer the group came to agreeing that Florida State should be No. 5.

 

Boo Corrigan, the chair of the committee and the athletic director at NC State, said the group voted six to eight times on the top four, and there was "never a moment of rushing it." One source said the conversations were "tense" at times. Another said it "never got heated, never got ugly," but it was "way more complicated and way more agonizing than some people may think."

 

The committee met again at 8:30 a.m. CT on Sunday morning and began discussions and voting again.

 

Because the selection committee is composed of people from different backgrounds -- former coaches, players, sitting athletic directors and a former sports reporter -- there are different perspectives in the room.

 

Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart is one of them, and he had the unique experience of having seen Alabama, Georgia and Louisville, FSU's title game opponent, in-person because his Wildcats faced them, too. He was given opportunities to share his thoughts on each of those teams with the group. Corrigan said the coaches had conversations about: "Who do they want to play? Who do they not want to play?"

 

"They've got a significant voice in the room," he said.

 

In the end, though, the difference between Alabama and Florida State boiled down to the committee's written protocol, particularly the emphasis on strength of schedule -- which gave Alabama the edge -- and the section that allowed committee members to project what Florida State might look like in a semifinal without their star quarterback.

 

Not having Heisman hopeful starter Travis "changes their offense in its entirety," Corrigan said, "and that was really a big factor with the committee as we went through everything."

 

So was the Longhorns' double-digit win at Alabama in Week 2. The committee had been consistent in honoring the head-to-head result all season and felt it was important to be consistent with that on Selection Day -- even though they believed Alabama had improved since that September loss.

"That's something you just can't ignore," one person said. "At the end of the day, they scheduled them, they played them at their house, they won and they beat them -- and that was big."

 

It wasn't just the committee's decision to exclude Florida State that drew criticism Sunday afternoon.

 

The group rewarded undefeated No. 23 Liberty with a New Year's Six bowl bid instead of two-loss No. 24 SMU, which beat a ranked team in its AAC title game. In addition to voting multiple times at the top of the ranking, the committee also voted repeatedly at the bottom, which pushed the morning meeting to its cutoff time of 11 a.m. CT. The results kept flipping between Liberty and SMU, but ultimately, the group deemed Liberty better.

American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco was fuming.

 

"For a decade, that committee used an unfair strength of schedule argument against our great undefeated UCF, Cincinnati and Houston teams, which played genuinely tough schedules with P5 opponents," he told ESPN, "and then they apply a clear double standard to this situation."

 

One former selection committee member was stunned and said the inconsistencies in this year's ranking were "glaring."

"This may need a complete reset before next year," the former committee member said. "If Liberty is a Group of 5 playoff team over others, that's a problem. No Power 5 opponents on the schedule, and the record of teams they've beaten is weak."

 

---

NOT SINCE 2014, the inaugural season of the CFP, has the committee generated anything close to this much controversy. That year, the committee dropped TCU from No. 3 to No. 6 in the final rankings in large part because the Big 12 at the time didn't have a conference championship game.

Now, in the final season of a four-team system, an entirely different group of 13 committee members snubbed an undefeated team that won its conference title. The backlash, according to multiple sources, has been significant, including some from colleagues, friends and peers, in addition to vitriol from Florida State fans.

 

This would have been the perfect season for the new 12-team playoff format to begin. Next year, the CFP will include the five highest-ranked conference champions and the next seven highest-ranked teams, assuming the proposed new format is rubber-stamped by the presidents and chancellors at their annual meeting before the national championship game in Houston. That guarantees a spot for each power-conference champ and a Group of 5 conference champion. As excited as fans might be for the more inclusive system, Hancock warned that it won't solve the problem of a talented team being left out.

 

"People look for perfection, and there will be some teams that don't quite make it in 12 who are going to be asking some serious questions," said Hancock, who will retire after this season. "I laugh because the easy answer is to say, 'Yeah, I wish we had 12.' But that's not going to be the panacea that some of us might think it might be. It's going to be great, don't get me wrong, but it won't be perfect."

 

[BigRedBuster]

15 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

Pretty much everyone involved in the decision disagrees.

 

'Holy s---, this is really going to suck to do this,'"

 

• 
  Heather Dinich, ESPN Senior WriterDec 4, 2023, 12:26 PM ET

 

GRAPEVINE, Texas -- It was between 1:30 and 2 a.m. CT on Sunday after the conference championship games when the 13 members of the College Football Playoff selection committee finally left their meeting room. They had been sequestered for hours as they determined the top four teams in the country.

 

They knew what they could potentially wind up with -- and it didn't feel good.

 

As difficult as it was for them to remove their emotions from the process, the sinking feeling about excluding an undefeated Power 5 conference champion was tempered by the belief that they did what they were tasked to do -- vote for the four best teams.

 

"All of us had the emotional tie, like, 'Holy s---, this is really going to suck to do this,'" one committee member told ESPN. "We talked about that over and over, and we just kept coming back [to] are they good enough with what they have to win a national championship, and it just kept coming back [to] we didn't think they could."

 

There wasn't any discussion about the SEC being left out because the committee maintains that it talks about teams, not conferences. There wasn't any serious consideration to include Alabama without Texas because there was so much respect in the room for the Longhorns' Week 2 win in Tuscaloosa. There also wasn't enough support in the room to deem Georgia "unequivocally" one of the four best teams in the country -- the standard for teams that don't win their conference title.

 

Instead, the crux of the debate into the wee hours of Sunday morning centered on how to evaluate Florida State, which beat Louisville with its third-string quarterback after both Jordan Travis and his backup, Tate Rodemaker, were sidelined by injuries. While the Seminoles' defense impressed the committee -- and had all year -- there were significant concerns about FSU's offense.

 

Undefeated Michigan had won the Big Ten. Undefeated Washington won the Pac-12. Alabama knocked off the selection committee's No. 1 team, Georgia, to win the SEC, and one-loss Texas, which easily won the Big 12, had knocked off the SEC champion in September.

And now Florida State had found a way to win -- again.

It was the final layer of complication in what was already the most difficult, controversial decision any CFP committee has had to make in a decade of the four-team playoff. Never before has an undefeated Power 5 conference champion been excluded from the CFP -- but never before have seven Power 5 teams finished the regular season with one or fewer losses. "We've never had a year with eight teams at the top as good as these are, and the five conference champions 1 through 5, we've never had it come out that way," CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. "My feeling is it probably was the toughest."

 

FOR 2½ DAYS on conference championship game weekend, the CFP's selection committee hid in plain sight.

While families clad in Christmas-themed clothes infiltrated the sprawling Gaylord Texan resort for its annual ice sculpture exhibit, the most powerful people in college football went nearly unnoticed, save for one cardboard sign bearing the CFP logo that some fans paused to look at as they exited the elevator and headed to their rooms.

 

"Is Bama in?!" one man asked a security guard sitting on a stool outside the meeting rooms Saturday night after the Tide's SEC championship win against No. 1 Georgia.

 

The guard just shrugged.

 

As it turned out, one-loss Bama was in -- at the expense of undefeated ACC champion Florida State. It was an unprecedented decision that sparked outrage throughout the sport. FSU coach Mike Norvell said he was "disgusted and infuriated." ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said, "It's unfathomable." Travis, the Seminoles' injured quarterback, said he wished he had broken his leg earlier in the season so the committee could have seen that the team was still great without him.

 

The committee is steadfast in its belief it got the decision right.

 

"At the end of the day, everybody had the same goal in mind -- do we have the four best teams?" a committee member said. "And we all felt pretty good that we do."

 

It wasn't until the ACC championship game began to unfold, though, that the members' opinions began to truly take shape. The group grew concerned as it watched the Noles struggle to get a first down in the first half. There is a section in the committee's protocol that specifically refers to the "unavailability of key players ... that may have affected a team's performance during the season or likely will affect its postseason performance." That allowed the committee to do something it intentionally avoids every other week: look ahead.

 

"People really wanted to talk about it," a committee member said. "We don't really have that conversation while we're watching games. But we've got to talk about the elephant in the room. What just happened? We talked about 13-0. We talked about the teams they beat. And they were a conference champ. All of that. It took a while."

 

Hancock rarely, if ever, shares voting results with the people in the room, though sometimes he'll mention if they were close or not. The votes are cast privately on each committee member's laptop. The committee members simply hover their mouse over a team and click to vote. If a committee member is recused from voting for a certain team, it's shaded in gray on his or her laptop, making it impossible to click on.

 

They vote on the teams in small batches and continue through the process of voting and debating in groups until the entire list of 25 is compiled. So it's not as if they begin talking about Texas and Alabama and vote around them to make it fit.

 

"People may not believe it, but we don't say, 'Oh gosh, if we vote this way, the SEC is going to be left out," one source said. "That never came up. Ever. We literally look at teams, put them up against each other, and say, 'Who did they beat? Who did they not beat? Who have they beaten on the road? What's their strength of schedule?' Look at the matrix and all the data."

 

The only time the committee members know the vote is when it's a tie, because they have to vote again. There was a sense within the room Saturday night, though, that the more they voted, the closer the group came to agreeing that Florida State should be No. 5.

 

Boo Corrigan, the chair of the committee and the athletic director at NC State, said the group voted six to eight times on the top four, and there was "never a moment of rushing it." One source said the conversations were "tense" at times. Another said it "never got heated, never got ugly," but it was "way more complicated and way more agonizing than some people may think."

 

The committee met again at 8:30 a.m. CT on Sunday morning and began discussions and voting again.

 

Because the selection committee is composed of people from different backgrounds -- former coaches, players, sitting athletic directors and a former sports reporter -- there are different perspectives in the room.

 

Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart is one of them, and he had the unique experience of having seen Alabama, Georgia and Louisville, FSU's title game opponent, in-person because his Wildcats faced them, too. He was given opportunities to share his thoughts on each of those teams with the group. Corrigan said the coaches had conversations about: "Who do they want to play? Who do they not want to play?"

 

"They've got a significant voice in the room," he said.

 

In the end, though, the difference between Alabama and Florida State boiled down to the committee's written protocol, particularly the emphasis on strength of schedule -- which gave Alabama the edge -- and the section that allowed committee members to project what Florida State might look like in a semifinal without their star quarterback.

 

Not having Heisman hopeful starter Travis "changes their offense in its entirety," Corrigan said, "and that was really a big factor with the committee as we went through everything."

 

So was the Longhorns' double-digit win at Alabama in Week 2. The committee had been consistent in honoring the head-to-head result all season and felt it was important to be consistent with that on Selection Day -- even though they believed Alabama had improved since that September loss.

"That's something you just can't ignore," one person said. "At the end of the day, they scheduled them, they played them at their house, they won and they beat them -- and that was big."

 

It wasn't just the committee's decision to exclude Florida State that drew criticism Sunday afternoon.

 

The group rewarded undefeated No. 23 Liberty with a New Year's Six bowl bid instead of two-loss No. 24 SMU, which beat a ranked team in its AAC title game. In addition to voting multiple times at the top of the ranking, the committee also voted repeatedly at the bottom, which pushed the morning meeting to its cutoff time of 11 a.m. CT. The results kept flipping between Liberty and SMU, but ultimately, the group deemed Liberty better.

American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco was fuming.

 

"For a decade, that committee used an unfair strength of schedule argument against our great undefeated UCF, Cincinnati and Houston teams, which played genuinely tough schedules with P5 opponents," he told ESPN, "and then they apply a clear double standard to this situation."

 

One former selection committee member was stunned and said the inconsistencies in this year's ranking were "glaring."

"This may need a complete reset before next year," the former committee member said. "If Liberty is a Group of 5 playoff team over others, that's a problem. No Power 5 opponents on the schedule, and the record of teams they've beaten is weak."

 

---

NOT SINCE 2014, the inaugural season of the CFP, has the committee generated anything close to this much controversy. That year, the committee dropped TCU from No. 3 to No. 6 in the final rankings in large part because the Big 12 at the time didn't have a conference championship game.

Now, in the final season of a four-team system, an entirely different group of 13 committee members snubbed an undefeated team that won its conference title. The backlash, according to multiple sources, has been significant, including some from colleagues, friends and peers, in addition to vitriol from Florida State fans.

 

This would have been the perfect season for the new 12-team playoff format to begin. Next year, the CFP will include the five highest-ranked conference champions and the next seven highest-ranked teams, assuming the proposed new format is rubber-stamped by the presidents and chancellors at their annual meeting before the national championship game in Houston. That guarantees a spot for each power-conference champ and a Group of 5 conference champion. As excited as fans might be for the more inclusive system, Hancock warned that it won't solve the problem of a talented team being left out.

 

"People look for perfection, and there will be some teams that don't quite make it in 12 who are going to be asking some serious questions," said Hancock, who will retire after this season. "I laugh because the easy answer is to say, 'Yeah, I wish we had 12.' But that's not going to be the panacea that some of us might think it might be. It's going to be great, don't get me wrong, but it won't be perfect."

 

Well pretty much everyone involved in the decision f#&%ed it up.

[Mavric]

26 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

Pretty much everyone involved in the decision disagrees.

 

'Holy s---, this is really going to suck to do this,'"

 

• 
  Heather Dinich, ESPN Senior WriterDec 4, 2023, 12:26 PM ET

 

GRAPEVINE, Texas -- It was between 1:30 and 2 a.m. CT on Sunday after the conference championship games when the 13 members of the College Football Playoff selection committee finally left their meeting room. They had been sequestered for hours as they determined the top four teams in the country.

 

They knew what they could potentially wind up with -- and it didn't feel good.

 

As difficult as it was for them to remove their emotions from the process, the sinking feeling about excluding an undefeated Power 5 conference champion was tempered by the belief that they did what they were tasked to do -- vote for the four best teams.

 

"All of us had the emotional tie, like, 'Holy s---, this is really going to suck to do this,'" one committee member told ESPN. "We talked about that over and over, and we just kept coming back [to] are they good enough with what they have to win a national championship, and it just kept coming back [to] we didn't think they could."

 

There wasn't any discussion about the SEC being left out because the committee maintains that it talks about teams, not conferences. There wasn't any serious consideration to include Alabama without Texas because there was so much respect in the room for the Longhorns' Week 2 win in Tuscaloosa. There also wasn't enough support in the room to deem Georgia "unequivocally" one of the four best teams in the country -- the standard for teams that don't win their conference title.

 

Instead, the crux of the debate into the wee hours of Sunday morning centered on how to evaluate Florida State, which beat Louisville with its third-string quarterback after both Jordan Travis and his backup, Tate Rodemaker, were sidelined by injuries. While the Seminoles' defense impressed the committee -- and had all year -- there were significant concerns about FSU's offense.

 

Undefeated Michigan had won the Big Ten. Undefeated Washington won the Pac-12. Alabama knocked off the selection committee's No. 1 team, Georgia, to win the SEC, and one-loss Texas, which easily won the Big 12, had knocked off the SEC champion in September.

And now Florida State had found a way to win -- again.

It was the final layer of complication in what was already the most difficult, controversial decision any CFP committee has had to make in a decade of the four-team playoff. Never before has an undefeated Power 5 conference champion been excluded from the CFP -- but never before have seven Power 5 teams finished the regular season with one or fewer losses. "We've never had a year with eight teams at the top as good as these are, and the five conference champions 1 through 5, we've never had it come out that way," CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. "My feeling is it probably was the toughest."

 

FOR 2½ DAYS on conference championship game weekend, the CFP's selection committee hid in plain sight.

While families clad in Christmas-themed clothes infiltrated the sprawling Gaylord Texan resort for its annual ice sculpture exhibit, the most powerful people in college football went nearly unnoticed, save for one cardboard sign bearing the CFP logo that some fans paused to look at as they exited the elevator and headed to their rooms.

 

"Is Bama in?!" one man asked a security guard sitting on a stool outside the meeting rooms Saturday night after the Tide's SEC championship win against No. 1 Georgia.

 

The guard just shrugged.

 

As it turned out, one-loss Bama was in -- at the expense of undefeated ACC champion Florida State. It was an unprecedented decision that sparked outrage throughout the sport. FSU coach Mike Norvell said he was "disgusted and infuriated." ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said, "It's unfathomable." Travis, the Seminoles' injured quarterback, said he wished he had broken his leg earlier in the season so the committee could have seen that the team was still great without him.

 

The committee is steadfast in its belief it got the decision right.

 

"At the end of the day, everybody had the same goal in mind -- do we have the four best teams?" a committee member said. "And we all felt pretty good that we do."

 

It wasn't until the ACC championship game began to unfold, though, that the members' opinions began to truly take shape. The group grew concerned as it watched the Noles struggle to get a first down in the first half. There is a section in the committee's protocol that specifically refers to the "unavailability of key players ... that may have affected a team's performance during the season or likely will affect its postseason performance." That allowed the committee to do something it intentionally avoids every other week: look ahead.

 

"People really wanted to talk about it," a committee member said. "We don't really have that conversation while we're watching games. But we've got to talk about the elephant in the room. What just happened? We talked about 13-0. We talked about the teams they beat. And they were a conference champ. All of that. It took a while."

 

Hancock rarely, if ever, shares voting results with the people in the room, though sometimes he'll mention if they were close or not. The votes are cast privately on each committee member's laptop. The committee members simply hover their mouse over a team and click to vote. If a committee member is recused from voting for a certain team, it's shaded in gray on his or her laptop, making it impossible to click on.

 

They vote on the teams in small batches and continue through the process of voting and debating in groups until the entire list of 25 is compiled. So it's not as if they begin talking about Texas and Alabama and vote around them to make it fit.

 

"People may not believe it, but we don't say, 'Oh gosh, if we vote this way, the SEC is going to be left out," one source said. "That never came up. Ever. We literally look at teams, put them up against each other, and say, 'Who did they beat? Who did they not beat? Who have they beaten on the road? What's their strength of schedule?' Look at the matrix and all the data."

 

The only time the committee members know the vote is when it's a tie, because they have to vote again. There was a sense within the room Saturday night, though, that the more they voted, the closer the group came to agreeing that Florida State should be No. 5.

 

Boo Corrigan, the chair of the committee and the athletic director at NC State, said the group voted six to eight times on the top four, and there was "never a moment of rushing it." One source said the conversations were "tense" at times. Another said it "never got heated, never got ugly," but it was "way more complicated and way more agonizing than some people may think."

 

The committee met again at 8:30 a.m. CT on Sunday morning and began discussions and voting again.

 

Because the selection committee is composed of people from different backgrounds -- former coaches, players, sitting athletic directors and a former sports reporter -- there are different perspectives in the room.

 

Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart is one of them, and he had the unique experience of having seen Alabama, Georgia and Louisville, FSU's title game opponent, in-person because his Wildcats faced them, too. He was given opportunities to share his thoughts on each of those teams with the group. Corrigan said the coaches had conversations about: "Who do they want to play? Who do they not want to play?"

 

"They've got a significant voice in the room," he said.

 

In the end, though, the difference between Alabama and Florida State boiled down to the committee's written protocol, particularly the emphasis on strength of schedule -- which gave Alabama the edge -- and the section that allowed committee members to project what Florida State might look like in a semifinal without their star quarterback.

 

Not having Heisman hopeful starter Travis "changes their offense in its entirety," Corrigan said, "and that was really a big factor with the committee as we went through everything."

 

So was the Longhorns' double-digit win at Alabama in Week 2. The committee had been consistent in honoring the head-to-head result all season and felt it was important to be consistent with that on Selection Day -- even though they believed Alabama had improved since that September loss.

"That's something you just can't ignore," one person said. "At the end of the day, they scheduled them, they played them at their house, they won and they beat them -- and that was big."

 

It wasn't just the committee's decision to exclude Florida State that drew criticism Sunday afternoon.

 

The group rewarded undefeated No. 23 Liberty with a New Year's Six bowl bid instead of two-loss No. 24 SMU, which beat a ranked team in its AAC title game. In addition to voting multiple times at the top of the ranking, the committee also voted repeatedly at the bottom, which pushed the morning meeting to its cutoff time of 11 a.m. CT. The results kept flipping between Liberty and SMU, but ultimately, the group deemed Liberty better.

American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco was fuming.

 

"For a decade, that committee used an unfair strength of schedule argument against our great undefeated UCF, Cincinnati and Houston teams, which played genuinely tough schedules with P5 opponents," he told ESPN, "and then they apply a clear double standard to this situation."

 

One former selection committee member was stunned and said the inconsistencies in this year's ranking were "glaring."

"This may need a complete reset before next year," the former committee member said. "If Liberty is a Group of 5 playoff team over others, that's a problem. No Power 5 opponents on the schedule, and the record of teams they've beaten is weak."

 

---

NOT SINCE 2014, the inaugural season of the CFP, has the committee generated anything close to this much controversy. That year, the committee dropped TCU from No. 3 to No. 6 in the final rankings in large part because the Big 12 at the time didn't have a conference championship game.

Now, in the final season of a four-team system, an entirely different group of 13 committee members snubbed an undefeated team that won its conference title. The backlash, according to multiple sources, has been significant, including some from colleagues, friends and peers, in addition to vitriol from Florida State fans.

 

This would have been the perfect season for the new 12-team playoff format to begin. Next year, the CFP will include the five highest-ranked conference champions and the next seven highest-ranked teams, assuming the proposed new format is rubber-stamped by the presidents and chancellors at their annual meeting before the national championship game in Houston. That guarantees a spot for each power-conference champ and a Group of 5 conference champion. As excited as fans might be for the more inclusive system, Hancock warned that it won't solve the problem of a talented team being left out.

 

"People look for perfection, and there will be some teams that don't quite make it in 12 who are going to be asking some serious questions," said Hancock, who will retire after this season. "I laugh because the easy answer is to say, 'Yeah, I wish we had 12.' But that's not going to be the panacea that some of us might think it might be. It's going to be great, don't get me wrong, but it won't be perfect."

 

 

It only sucked because they put more weight on the perceived strengths of conferences over actual results on the field.

[Crusader Husker]

I felt like this all happened because Bama beat Georgia.  But now, I guess had Georgia had won, Texas would have been #4 and FSU would still have been out.

[Mavric]

3 minutes ago, Crusader Husker said:

I felt like this all happened because Bama beat Georgia.  But now, I guess had Georgia had won, Texas would have been #4 and FSU would still have been out.

 

I'm not really sure about that.  It seems to me that they would have gone with the undefeated team over the one-loss team.

 

Texas beating Alabama (then Alabama beating Georgia) put them in a bind.  They couldn't just totally ignore head-to-head on teams ranked right next to each other.  So they couldn't put Alabama in and leave Texas out.  Had that game not occurred (and Texas lost to someone else), I bet Texas would have been out and FSU in.  

 

If Georgia would have won, I would guess it would have been Georgia-Michigan-Washington-FSU.  Four undefeated teams.  QED.