by JOHN-MARC NUTT
The first NCAA football playoff bracket has been announced and of the most shocking questions, was the omission of the BIG 12. I’ve said from the beginning that i thought that the committee was more like a soap opera where they would throw a curve ball out to the public on who was in the top four.
I’ll start by saying Alabama, Oregon, and FSU all deserve to be in the playoff. While I don’t agree with the order, I believe they are the top three teams in the nation. Now the issue comes down to Ohio St and the two BIG 12 schools.
The college football committee made a huge mistake last week when they moved TCU up to the number three spot. There’s a chance this was done more so for the drama effect and the fact that FSU is winning but not winning by enough. It gives you the sense that we watch all these games and penalize teams by not wining by 47654638746738 points (that stat right there is slightly inaccurate).
First of all, I never though TCU should be at number three because one – FSU hasn’t lost a game and two – Baylor Beat TCU. But aside from those mine boggling stats, there is no way in God’s creation that a team who was ranked number three just five days ago, can blow out their opponent and drop 3 spots. That is unheard of. It shows me that the playoff committee, one – Doesn’t know college football and two – Just wanted to let teams think they were relevant.
For the college football committee to wait until the last week to put Baylor over TCU because of the head to head matchup ,makes no sense. Did they say “hey did you realize that Baylor beat TCU this season? Why has TCU been ahead of Baylor in these ranking all season? Let’s fix that in the last week…..”
Baylor is a good team, but that cupcake scheduling will get you no where in life. Even with the loss to West Virginia they put up a strong case to be in the top 4. They did play and beat a couple of ranked teams this season, and let’s be real, the BIG12 was no walk over.
(Side Rant) Sometimes i think people forget that conference games are much harder than they think. Everyone love to say the SEC is the hardest conference day in and day out blah blah blah. I Think that the top 2-3 teams from each power 5 conference can contended in any conference in America.
Ohio State became the darlings of ESPN and you know that the analyst who work there, no names need to be called because they know who they are, lobbied their hearts out to see their alma mater get in.
Now I did say above that the College Football playoff committee may not know anything about college football, but this last ranking they got the teams right. The order could be different, but the most important thing is the teams who should be there are there.
Alabama won their conference title game. They had a slip-up against a hot Ole Miss team, but proved that they were deep and talented enough to win the remainder of their games.
Oregon lost to Arizona early in the season, but they played lights out the rest of the season. They were also able to redeem themselves by beating Arizona in the PAC12 championship game.
I can care less how you win your games, just win them and that’s what FSU did all year. At the end of the day they play in a conference that is notorious for upsets and play tough against fellow conference mates. They also beat a red hot Georgia Tech team in the ACC championship game, a team who just beat Georgia last week.
Ohio State lost their starting quarterback, lost a close one to Virginia Tech, won the remanding games in the regular season. On top of that, they lost their second string quarterback and with the third string under center, blew out Wisconsin, a top 25 team 59-0 in the BIG 10 championship game.
See the pattern with the four teams who made it: they all played an extra game against a TOP 25 team to become SOLE champions of their conference.
The BIG 12 spent all season saying that because of their schedule they would have one true champion. That really came to bite them in the ass as the commissioner declared CO-TRUE CHAMPIONS.
I think if you want be with the big boys you need to play by the same rule as the big boys. The committee sent a strong message to the BIG 12 that the reason why these teams got in, is because of that one extra game.
Though TCU and Baylor are great teams in their own rights, the BIG 12 dropped the ball for them, and the only way to fix it is to expand like and get their Championship game.
And as much as we hated those damn BCS computers, they would have produced the same teams in the College Football Playoff.