The job of the College Football Playoff committee has rarely been simple, but it certainly has never been this complicated.
In the old days of the four-team playoff, the selections were often obvious. Now there aren’t just 12 teams to pick and seed, there is something else adding a degree of difficulty.
Parity.
The transfer portal and name, image and likeness payments have quickly dispersed top talent to more schools — at the same strengthening contenders and weakening favorites. The gap between great and good has closed. It isn’t quite Any Given Saturday, but it is a far cry from even five years ago, when only two or three legitimate national title contenders existed.
That means not just more teams that can now rightfully make a claim for the playoff, but more regular season losses that make differentiating between teams more difficult.
Consider trying to sort through the Southeastern Conference — which the committee tried to do on Tuesday night in its second playoff rankings (Oregon is No. 1, by the way).
The SEC has always been the biggest player in the playoff, winning six of the 10 four-team tournaments from 2014-2023. Yet the league was mostly top-heavy during that period, with select programs able to stockpile top five recruiting classes and roll season after season.
Across the previous decade, just three SEC programs reached the four-team playoff — Alabama (8 times), Georgia (3) and LSU (1). Everyone else was a pretender.
And now — especially after the SEC added Texas and Oklahoma to expand to 16 teams?
Nine SEC teams are ranked in the committee’s top 25, including four that would be in the playoff field — Texas (projected No. 2 seed as league champs), Tennessee (No. 8 seed), Alabama (No. 10 seed) and Ole Miss (No. 11 seed).
Georgia (12th ranked but out of the playoff field), Texas A&M (15), South Carolina (21), LSU (22) and Missouri (23) are on the outside looking in. For now at least. That’s the league this season. For the first time since 2007, no one in the SEC reached November without at least one loss.
How did the committee sort out the SEC? Probably they don’t even know, and it may only get more complicated. Want chaos? Consider that if the following things happen, the league could finish in an eight-way tie for first place, with each team holding a 6-2 conference record and the need for complex tiebreakers to figure out the title game matchup in Atlanta.
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All teams win the games they are favored to win, except:
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Missouri beats South Carolina this Saturday.
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Auburn upsets Texas A&M or … either Kentucky or Arkansas upsets Texas and …
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Whatever team was upset wins the Texas-Texas A&M game.
That’s it — eight teams would have a 6-2 league record.
Long odds, sure? Impossible? Not even close. And while it may not finish with an eight-way tie at the top, the likelihood for some variation of a multi-team tiebreaker needed to sort out the SEC championship game matchup is pretty high.
There are only a few games remaining featuring those potential eight teams playing each other — just Tennessee at Georgia and Texas at Texas A&M. (Side note: might be time to add a ninth league game and drop the late-November cupcake matchup).
All of this makes it a nightmare for the committee. How do they measure the pack — head-to-head, strength of schedule, margin of victory, margin of loss, flip of a coin?
And it may be recurring. While the initial fear mongering over NIL and the transfer portal centered on the “rich getting richer,” the opposite has occurred. Players are seeking playing time, content with whatever money they can get anywhere. They have little interest in sitting on the bench and burning seasons of eligibility … and earning power.
“Teams don’t have as deep of rosters as we used to,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said last week.
Earlier this season, he pointed specifically to the quarterback position, which is especially transient as signal callers seek starting jobs wherever they can get one.
“With the portal and the age of college football, anybody can get a quarterback, and it might be a niche quarterback,” Smart said. “It might be like he’s not going to be the greatest pro. … If he can make plays, and you can build your offense around him and create problems for the defense … you can beat anybody out there.”
In the SEC, that’s proven accurate. The league office might want seven or eight teams in the tournament, but that isn’t going to happen.
It’s up to the committee to look past the records and determine who is legit and who isn’t.
Then it will deal with some serious howling.
