Playoff Committee got it unequivocally wrong

“The committee’s conclusion that Alabama is the fourth-best team in the nation was widespread and strong. It was unequivocal,”

Pardon me while I fill my office cubicle with laughter, only to suddenly find myself filled with rage.

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Okay, now that that’s over we can get serious.

As much as I think Skip Bayless is incompetent when it comes to sports and 99% of the time he should be locked away for his horrendous takes and complete lack of common sense, I must say that he was absolutely correct when he said, “THE BUCKEYES JUST GOT ALL-TIME ROBBED OF THE FOURTH SPOT IN THE PLAYOFFS. OHIO STATE IS BETTER THAN ALABAMA, WHICH GOT DOMINATED BY AUBURN AND WHOSE DEFENSE GAVE UP 150+ RUSHING THE LAST THREE GAMES.”

Well said Skip, well said.

Ohio State absolutely deserved to be in the playoffs over Alabama (despite what ESPN will try to tel you.) Anyone who watches college football will tell you that Alabama is hands down the most dominant college football team in recent memory, perhaps ever. But recent dominance is not an indicator of how good this year’s Alabama team really is. If you look at Alabama’s body of work in 2017 (AND ONLY 2017) what do you see? If you’re looking at them from an unbiased perspective (something ESPN is incapable of doing) you will see a team that is too scared to play a non-conference game away from home, and if they do ever leave Tuscaloosa you won’t see them in Eugene, Oregon, or Ann Arbor, Michigan, you’ll see them Dallas, Texas, or Atlanta, Georgia, playing at a neutral site still within traveling distance from Alabama. If your lucky the Crimson Tide might open the season against a fairly good team like Florida State or Virginia Tech, but more often than not you’ll see Alabama hosting a team like Mercer or Chattanooga.

And when Alabama is finally forced to go on the road or play a somewhat decent team they will rarely blow anyone away, despite preceding their annual games vs LSU and Auburn with a BYE week and a match-up against a Division II team. Alabama’s best wins this year were: an 8-point win that came against a 7-5 Texas A&M team and a 14-point win against a LSU team that lost at home to Troy. The one good team Alabama played? Auburn, which resulted in a 12 point loss for the Crimson Tide. Alabama finished the regular season 0-1 against teams that finished the season in the Top-15.

Meanwhile, THE Ohio State Buckeyes have visited Berkeley, California; Blacksburg, Virginia and Norman, Oklahoma, in recent years. Ohio State also finished the 2017 regular season with not one, but three signature wins. Ohio State defeated a playoff favorite Penn State, Michigan State by 45 and an undefeated Wisconsin team. Ohio State is 3-1 against Top-25 teams and is 2-1 against Top-10 teams. Yes, Ohio State lost a rough game against an average Iowa team, but didn’t the playoff committee say they would forgive a bad loss back when Alabama was losing to Ole Miss each year?

Perhaps Alabama is not to blame in this whole fiasco. After all, the College Football Playoff Committee has been tremendously inconsistent throughout the first four years of the playoff system.

In 2014, the first year of the College Football Playoffs, Ohio State used a 52-0 victory over Wisconsin in the BIG championship game to leapfrog TCU and Baylor in the rankings and earned a spot in the playoffs. The Buckeyes famously went on to win the National Championship but the decision to include Ohio State and not TCU or Baylor in the playoffs has sparked a debate about the playoffs in the years since.

The committee’s response to this controversy was to point towards the lack of a BIG 12 championship game at the time, neither Baylor nor TCU had won their conference championship game because there was none. Additionally, then-committee chairman Jeff Long stated that, “[the] committee noted that Ohio State’s non-conference schedule was stronger than Baylor’s.”

The initial response to the committee’s statement was that the BIG 12 was in desperate need of a championship game. The conference initially began to look towards expansion and took a long hard look at teams such as BYU, Houston and Boise State before creating a championship game without expanding.

But lost in the madness of conference expansion and the fact that Ohio State’s third-string QB had just led the Buckeyes to a National Championship is the statement by the Playoff Committee that strength of schedule matters when determining who would make the playoffs.

Yet here we stand. Despite the committee’s statement that strength of schedule matters when vying for a playoff spot, we currently look at a playoff field that includes Alabama and not Ohio State. Forget the fact that Alabama did not win their conference, teams will always make the playoff despite not winning their conference. But what the committee made painstakingly clear by including Alabama and not Ohio State is that no matter how much they might insist otherwise, beating up on Division II schools is enough to get you in the playoffs in the eyes of the committee.

So to teams who are looking to get into the College Football Playoffs, don’t worry about scheduling good teams or going on the road to face quality competition. The committee has made it clear that beating Wagner or Mercer by 80 is good enough.