BY Mike Rifkin
The first ever 12 team College Football Playoff field has been announced. The field of 12 consists of Oregon, Georgia, Boise St., Arizona St., Texas, Penn St., Notre Dame, Ohio St., Tennessee, Indiana, SMU, and Clemson. Absent from the list are the Alabama Crimson Tide, who in their first season without Nick Saban since 2006.
Alabama finished the season 9-3 and 5-3 in conference play. Every team in front of Alabama lost two games or fewer. Alabama AD Greg Byrne said this on on non conference scheduling “ We have said that we would need to see how strength of schedule would be evaluated by CFP. With this outcome, we will need to assess how many P4 non conference games make sense in the future to put us in the best position to put us in the CFP. That is not good for college football.” So let’s look at Alabama’s non conference schedule : Western Kentucky, South Florida, Wisconsin, and Mercer were the four out of conference games the Crimson Tide played. Next season Alabama’s out of conference schedule will have Florida St, Louisiana Monroe, Eastern Illinois and Wisconsin. If you listen to Saban or any Alabama defender, the team they want out is SMU. Now SMU had one loss on the season prior to losing to Clemson in the ACC title game. The best out of conference matchup for SMU was BYU, who was a top 25 team most of the season.
Here is my hope not just for Alabama but the rest of college football even though realignment has taken place, hopefully what happened with Alabama is a warning sign to stop scheduling what I like to call stat padder games and forces them to play higher levels of competition all season long. While Alabama and their supporters can cry all they want, the truth is they shouldn’t lose to Vanderbilt or Oklahoma and the committee got this right. But even though it’s the first year of the CFP 12 team addition, people are still complaining.
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