SMU is in the College Football Playoff. Alabama is not. Thanks to those two facts, people concerned with college football maintaining the illusion of partial meritocracy do not have to give up the ghost just yet.
The dirty secret about the playoff selection committee is that most of the time, it does a good job. For the first nine years of the tournament, up through 2022, the committee had not (in my opinion, anyway) blown a single pick among the top four teams each year. The committee was robust at picking the correct four teams and seeding them in a defensible order, year after year.
2023 caused a crisis of confidence, though. The selection committee finally biffed out, making the outrageous decision to exclude undefeated Atlantic Coast Conference champion Florida State in favor of a one-loss Alabama team that had won the vaunted Southeastern Conference. It really was a rotten move, one the committee justified with the late-season injury to Florida State’s starting quarterback. An FSU team without that QB was not the same team that had won all year long, and Alabama had won the best conference in the sport, so the committee told itself it was doing the right thing by invalidating a 13–0 record.
The move to exclude FSU was so offensive not just because an undefeated power conference team got left out, but because it fit into a concerning sports business trend. The SEC and Big Ten had been usurping more and more of the sport’s biggest brands and winningest programs. Whispers had already started to abound of a “superleague” breakaway involving those leagues. And here was the playoff committee, telling an undefeated team from the ACC that it wasn’t good enough. The committee did that in favor of a very good team, but a team with a loss, which happened to play in the SEC.
Many feared as recently as Sunday morning that a version of this decision was about to play out a second time. Rather than selecting four teams, the committee was picking 12 for the first year of the college game’s expanded playoff. But when the committee unveiled this season’s bracket on Sunday afternoon, SMU of the ACC was in, ranked at No. 11, slotted into the final at-large placement not reserved for a conference champion. Alabama was out of the new 12-team field altogether. The idea that non-SEC and Big Ten teams could be rewarded (beyond the realm of technicalities) for a special season has survived, for now.
Reasonable people can always quibble about seeding and first-round byes—there are four byes in this format—but the “in or out” decision was certain to come down to SMU and Alabama. The decision would be an ideological one, with committee members forced to decide what should fundamentally matter in a sport as big and unruly as college football. The differences between SMU and Alabama were stark:
● SMU had just one regular season loss, compared to Alabama’s three, though SMU added a second loss (on a last-second field goal) in Saturday’s ACC Championship against Clemson.
● Alabama plays in the SEC, SMU in the ACC. The Tide played much better teams throughout the year, and their best wins (over Georgia, South Carolina, and Missouri) were superior to SMU’s victories over the likes of, uh, well, nobody of any note.
● SMU’s only losses, however, were to No. 17 BYU and playoff-bound No. 16 Clemson, which got an automatic bid. Alabama lost a game by 21 points to a mediocre Oklahoma team that finished 6–6. That wasn’t even the Tide’s only loss to a .500 team. They also had one at Vanderbilt, long an SEC punchline and still not the sort of team that should ever beat Alabama.
Alabama’s entire case sprang from one root: It played in the SEC.
In a vacuum, that’s not illegitimate. The SEC and Big Ten have most of the best teams, and their teams deserve (and get) special consideration because of it. Teams in the SEC and Big Ten are allowed to lose more games than everyone else and still get at-large playoff consideration, as 9–3 Alabama demonstrated when it was ranked 11th last week, one spot ahead of 10–2 Miami from the ACC.
The SEC does not have committee members on its payroll, nor is there any evidence that ESPN executives put their thumbs on the scale in the selection room on behalf of their valued conference partner. But the SEC does have a massive narrative machine that runs year-round, and that information ecosystem has been effective at nudging more people to treat SEC teams more charitably come playoff pickin’ time. Every conference lobbies for itself, and the SEC does a steroidal version of it.
You can see how this might sometimes become a big problem. The playoff has become the whole point of the sport for dozens upon dozens of teams and fanbases, probably because it has for a decade been the central focus of ESPN’s coverage of the sport. More games matter more when they have playoff stakes, and that’s been a lovely part of this year’s expansion to 12 participants. But it’s a delicate balance. If fans of non-SEC or Big Ten schools begin to think the deck is so rigged for those leagues that even deserving teams like SMU will get shafted, then the rest of the season quietly loses luster year after year.
The playoff committee says that its remit is to pick the “best” teams. That is not so, regardless of what its literature says. Committee members have always sought to pick the teams that present the best blend of being “the best” (looking like they can win games in the playoff) and also being “the most deserving.” You need the second piece, too, because otherwise games cease to matter. This was the most galling piece of FSU’s exclusion in 2023, and it would have been the chief crime of taking Alabama over SMU this year. Alabama gets dog-walked by three touchdowns against a lousy Oklahoma team? No big deal, because the Tide appear “better” than SMU. The Mustangs lose just one game all year before falling narrowly in a bonus championship game? Doesn’t matter. Alabama’s players look scarier getting off the bus.
You might rather have a playoff with Alabama in it. SMU has almost no chance to win four games in a row, while Alabama would have a small but real one, owing to its deeper roster with more elite talent. But the playoff committee, whether it ever admits it or not, has a more serious burden on it than just seeding 12 teams in a bracket. The committee is in charge of the sport’s marquee event, the sun that every game all season now revolves around. These bureaucrats are now custodians of the whole sport, and their decisions have the power to make everything else matter more, or less. SMU will play for a national championship, and fans of more teams can at least dream up a world in which their school does too.
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