Did the committee get it right?

Before I get to my rationale on the College Football Playoffs, I first want to take a victory lap and receive my roses for calling Travis Hunter the Heisman Trophy winner back in October when Ashton Jeanty looked like he was a lock for the most prestigious trophy in collegiate sports. I’ll pat myself on the back for getting that one right — whether you agree with it or not, it still happened.

Now, onto more recent business: did the CFP committee get things right?

This is a two-fold question. Firstly were the 12-team playoffs the right move? Should they be bigger? Smaller? Secondly, did they put the right teams in for this inaugural expansion?

While I took my victory lap for the ‘Hunter for Heisman’ parade I held, I will not take one on behalf of the Buckeyes. While I still hang the scarlet and gray flag in my office, don my Buckeyes beanie (‘toboggan’ for you Southern folk) when the temperature dips below 50 degrees, and even make delicious candy buckeyes with my daughter as a holiday treat, I haven’t watched a game since they lost to Oregon. I have completely flipped on Ryan Day and his $20 million roster that mismanaged the game and clock so terribly against the Ducks, that I wasn’t even surprised when they did nothing but run the ball right at Michigan’s defensive line — one of the best in the country. I’m not here to brag on Ohio State, because frankly, I don’t deserve to do so.

However, it’s clear that they deserved to be in the playoffs. Did they deserve such a low spot? Yeah, probably, just due to their two-loss record and lack of appearance in their conference championship game. Did Tennessee deserve to be there? Absolutely they did. I have no qualms with the Vols, even when they tried to take over the 614 (Columbus’s area code, for those that don’t know). I think they had one of the best defensive lines in the country this year and they absolutely deserved a playoff spot… against a team that wasn’t THE Ohio State Buckeyes on a warpath. I think if they played an SMU, Penn State, Clemson, Indiana, or Arizona State, they have a better chance at making it deeper. I’d even argue they could hold their own against Notre Dame, Boise State, or Georgia. Essentially, they could have a better shot at making a deeper run if they played anyone that wasn’t Texas, Ohio State, or Oregon in the first round.

But, the powers that be have to find a way to get the SEC and BIG 10 into the conversation as much as possible. And I’m a BIG 10 fan, so if I see an issue with it, they are really messing up.

Let’s back up for a second. It’s not just the SEC and BIG 10 bias I have an issue with. It’s the entirety of this whole thing. Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely love that they expanded the playoffs. I had been calling for it for years. And I know that they will work out the kinks eventually. But this year is a horrible example that, in five or 10 years, we will look back and laugh at.

The four-team playoff didn’t work very well, either. Cincinnati and TCU were prime examples of that. So, at least we’re headed in the right direction.

I think the committee puts too much emphasis on the conference championship games. The four highest-ranked conference champions get a bye in the first round. But the five highest-ranked conference champions are guaranteed a spot, with at least one coming from a Group of Five conference (AAC, CUSA, MAC, Mountain West, and Sun Belt). This means that teams who play in tougher conferences must, at some point, forfeit one or more of their spots, just because another team plays in a weaker conference?

Boise State, with their first-round bye, has played absolutely daunting competition this year. Portland State, San Diego State, Nevada, Wyoming, and Georgia Southern are surely the same competition as Georgia playing three playoff teams during the regular season, including Texas twice. They also played No. 11 Alabama and No. 14 Ole Miss (they lost to both, but that isn’t the point here).

It wouldn’t be fair to exclude the Broncos’ game against Oregon, one in which they lost by just a field goal in week two.

In my opinion, and I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this, the top 12 teams in the final rankings should comprise the playoffs. I don’t care if there are 12 teams from the Ohio Valley and Mid-American Conferences who fill out the playoffs. Give me a Peach Bowl of No. 3 Western Michigan taking on No. 12 Charleston Southern. That is still more deserved than this funky, weird, chaotic and confusing mess that we currently have.

Penn State lost to Ohio State and lost the BIG 10 Championship but somehow ended up as the higher seed because of just making the conference championship? I haven’t begun to talk about the atrocity that is Notre Dame yet, either. Put them in a conference or no postseason for the Fighting Irish. It’s simple. They skirt around the ultimate qualifier, apparently in the eyes of the committee — a conference championship game — and yet they somehow are always in these postseason talks.

SMU is this year’s TCU or Florida State — a team that just didn’t belong from the get-go, but they were given a spot because they were the Atlantic Coast Conference champions… from Texas. A lot of things don’t make sense with that one, but it is what it is.

There are people out there, amongst the rest of the population that we interact with every day who don’t see an issue with the way things are. You pass them walking down the street without knowing. They’re your coworkers. They might even be some of your closest family members. And this whole time, you’d never know that they could be oh-so-wrong.

I don’t know what the fix will be. I know what I want it to be, but I highly doubt that will ever happen. We will still the playoffs expanded to 16 and maybe even 20 or 24 teams before the committee recognizes that conference championships don’t carry the same weight that they did in the BCS era.

For now, I’ll get ready to watch the Peach Bowl, in which the No. 5 Longhorns are 14-point favorites over No. 4 Arizona State and the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl (which, it should be a crime to not have it sponsored by Tostito’s anymore), where No. 6 Penn State is favored by 10.5 over No. 3 Boise State.

And, in a Rose Bowl rematch that we see every year, the PAC-12 and BIG 10 will be facing off (because that’s what the Rose Bowl always is) as the No. 8 Buckeyes are 2.5-point favorites over the No. 1 Oregon Ducks — oh wait, the PAC-12 doesn’t exist anymore and these are just two BIG 10 teams that somehow didn’t play for the conference championship.

Then there’s the Sugar Bowl between the No. 2 Georgia Bulldogs and No. 7 Notre Dame, but the ‘dogs are favored by 1.5 there. It could be the best game of the quarterfinal round, but it doesn’t fit the narrative that I’m trying to present.

I called Travis Hunter winning the Heisman, am I going to successfully predict the re-write of how the playoffs work?