The College Football Playoff selection committee has a very tough job.
Choosing four teams only to compete for a national championship when as many as nine or 10 schools can often make some sort of reasonable argument to being included is difficult bordering on impossible.
But if your humble scribe might offer Oregon athletic director and CFP committee chair Rob Mullens a helpful suggestion today, the CFP folks should stop blathering, as Mullens did Sunday, about the committee’s charge being “to get the four best teams.”
Because the four best teams probably are Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and Ohio State.
Or to briefly turn this column over to Georgia coach Kirby Smart regarding his Bulldogs: “It boils down to one thing: Do you want the four best teams or not? It’s that simple. I promise you, you don’t want to play us.”
Yet if the committee would begin to frame the playoff as being played by the four most deserving teams, now that’s a different matter.
In that case, there’s little argument that Bama, Clemson, Notre Dame and Oklahoma – the four teams selected Sunday by the committee to participate in this year’s playoff – are the correct four.
So why embrace “deserving” instead of “best”?
After all, at least until the conclusion of the championship game, aren’t best and most deserving equally subjective concepts? Alabama has spent almost this entire season being viewed as the best, but the Crimson Tide looked like anything but the best team in the country for the first three quarters of Saturday’s Southeastern Conference championship game against Georgia.
But let’s say at the start of Saturday’s fourth quarter you’d decided that Georgia was proving itself more, uh, deserving than Bama because it was leading the Tide on a neutral field with everything on the line.
Yes, the Bulldogs had stumbled rather badly earlier in the year at LSU, falling by 20 huge points.
They had clearly improved, however. Against Alabama the Great they were winning not only the hearts but the minds of every college football fan who doesn’t bleed crimson. And there are a lot of those out there these days, probably more each year as Bama coach Nick Saban tightens his stranglehold on his sport in the same way the late UCLA basketball coach John Wooden dominated his sport in winning 10 NCAA crowns in 12 years from 1964 to 1975.
Alas, Georgia couldn’t hold on in much the same way it failed to hold on last January in falling to the Tide inside the same Mercedes-Benz Stadium in the CFP title game.
Still, no one else had come within 21 points of Bama all season, and here were the Dawgs losing by only seven points at 35-28.
So if you were looking to select one of the four best teams, it would be hard to ignore Georgia.
Then there’s Ohio State. Yes, the Buckeyes lost by 29 at Purdue. And they probably should have lost at Penn State and Maryland. They struggled against woeful Nebraska and had to fight from behind late to knock off a very mediocre Texas Christian team on the road.
But they also crushed then-No. 4 Michigan by a 62-39 score that might have been the single most impressive performance of the college football season. And that’s where this “best” versus “most deserving” thing gets tricky, because when The Ohio State University is fully engaged and hitting on all cylinders, it’s not much of a stretch to see it going toe-to-toe with Alabama for a full four quarters.
OSU knocked Bama out of the first college football playoff in 2014, and Buckeyes boss Urban Meyer probably could devise a game plan to do it again.
But does a team that fell by 29 points at 6-6 Purdue really deserve that chance? Especially when you’re choosing only four teams and every game over the entire season is supposed to count somewhat evenly? By that same token, does Georgia deserve a playoff spot with two losses when one of those was a blowout defeat at LSU?
Moreover, should Notre Dame – despite its perfect 12-0 record – deserve a spot when it probably would lose to either Ohio State or Georgia?
Yes, the Irish beat every team on their schedule, and they played four ranked opponents. They also crushed No. 12 Syracuse 36-3 and knocked off Michigan at the start of the season. But almost no one believes the Irish would have gone undefeated in a Power Five conference format. They have the smallest victory margin of any of the playoff teams, and they didn’t participate in a conference title game because they’re not in a league during football season.
They’re just Notre Dame, and if they go undefeated they’re presumably always going to make the field.
That said, all four of the teams chosen were deserving of selection. Three are undefeated and Oklahoma avenged its three-point loss to Texas by defeating the Longhorns by 12 in Saturday’s Big 12 title game with perhaps the best display of defense they’ve shown all season.
Nevertheless, all of this would be better with eight teams. Cut one game off the regular-season schedule, place every Power Five conference champion in the playoff field and allow the presence of one non-Power Five conference team if it finishes with a perfect record, which would put Central Florida in the mix. That also guarantees two wild-card spots, which could have been used by Notre Dame and Georgia this season.
Just imagine a playoff consisting of Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Washington, Notre Dame and Central Florida.
Win that tournament and you’d not only know the best team in college football this season, but also the most deserving.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.