By: Robert Craft

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

All this College Football Playoff arguing will be moot with the CFP expanding to 12 teams next year.

Arguing over 3- 5 is very different than 10-13. You lose your benefit of the doubt when you lose games. Even in the SEC.

But this year is still a four-team field, and with so many variables factoring into the decision, there is a lot to dissect. And to state it plainly: the College Football Playoff committee got it wrong.

College football has, or at least it used to have up until right now, the best regular season in sports because the games mattered most. We have a smaller sample size in this sport than any other.

To leave out an undefeated 13-0 Florida State in a Power 5 ACC was the wrong decision.

Michigan and Washington, both undefeated with top-10 wins, were the easy ones. The problem for the College Football Playoff committee was that there were three teams with legitimate arguments for the final two slots.

Sorry, Georgia. You didn’t win your conference title, and in this format, that has to count for something.

Alabama and the SEC are the proverbial elephant in this room. Nick Saban is the greatest coach of all time, and to me, this year was the greatest coaching job he’s ever done.

His team got whipped at home by Texas in Week 2 and didn’t look any better struggling with South Florida the following week.

But Jalen Milroe kept making big strides and when it mattered most, the Tide made enough plays to knock off a Bulldog team that wasn’t anywhere near as dominant in their previous two title seasons.

The problem for Alabama and the SEC is Texas. They beat Alabama convincingly in Tuscaloosa. That happened, and there was nothing fluky about it.

The Longhorns went 12-1, but there wasn’t a second-best team in the Big 12 this year. Here’s how it broke down: Oklahoma State beat Oklahoma, and Texas unsurprisingly hammered OSU Saturday.

Remember, this was an Oklahoma State team that went 9-3 and had lost by a combined score of 78-10 against South Alabama and UCF. That wasn’t going to help Texas’ cause.

With that, do we forget that a week ago Alabama barely escaped against Auburn? Auburn got blown out at home the week before by New Mexico State, 31-10.

The bigger issue this year was Florida State, at 13-0 from the ACC. As we all know, FSU’s star quarterback Jordan Travis received a season ending injury near the end of the season. The Seminoles’ backup Tate Rodemaker didn’t look great at arch-rival Florida. He also sustained a concussion.

FSU’s third-stringer, Brock Glenn, had a shaky outing in the ACC Championship Game, but their defense was dominant.

Braden Fiske and Jaden Verse led the Seminoles with 14 TFLs and 7 sacks. Not so coincidentally, that same FSU defense began the year by dominating LSU and the SEC’s biggest star, Jayden Daniels. Florida State held the nation’s No. 1 offense to its worst performance of the season.

FSU was the only team that held Daniels under 60 percent passing in a game. Daniels ran for almost 100 yards less (99) against the Noles than when he played the Crimson Tide.

I get it. The SEC has been the most dominant conference in college football for the past two decades. But this year is not like those other years. Have you been paying attention?

It’s a down year for the SEC. The ACC actually went 6-4 against the SEC in 2023. If this was a one-loss FSU, I’d say they didn’t earn their way in, but they won, so they did.

In the same argument, Texas should not have been left out for a team they beat.

What’s the point of winning if the CFP will  rationalize them away?