Every year the college football season wraps up with the College Football Playoff. This year the playoff consists of 12 teams instead of the usual four, allowing for many more teams to have a chance to fight for the national championship. The new format allows the top 5 ranked conference winners to get an automatic bid to the playoffs and then the rest of the spots get filled out by the other top ranked teams remaining.
Every year there’s always a debate on who the committee should vote into the playoffs and this year was no different. The main decision was whether Alabama or Southern Methodist University (SMU) should take the last spot in the playoffs. The committee eventually decided on SMU which was probably the right decision, but it is hard to look past the fact SMU has no wins against ranked opponents this year. Even though there was a bit of a debate on who should make it, the committee made the right decision and set up a great first round match up for SMU vs. Penn state.
Another conflict the committee had to deal with was which conference winner should get the 3rd seed. The candidates were ASU, Boise State and Clemson. While Clemson wasn’t really a strong candidate there was still a chance they would get that spot. The argument for ASU to get that spot was that they had more quality wins and beat more ranked opponents. They also won a more prestigious conference in the Big 12. Boise State led by heisman award runner up Ashton Jeanty, finished the season with 1 loss and that was to the #1 in the country and they only lost by a game winning field goal. Both teams have fantastic resumes, but the academy chose Boise State which was probably the right decision.
While we haven’t seen any of the games for this year’s playoffs take place this format is already better than the original just due to how many more teams have something to fight for going into the end of their seasons. If there was one main fix to the playoffs it would be that the top conference winners shouldn’t get an automatic bye week. While teams like ASU and Boise State are great teams and deserve to be in the playoffs they are getting bye weeks over teams that are better than them just for winning their conference. The conference winners definitely deserve to be in the playoffs, but there has to be a better way to do the seeding.
Overall the committee went pretty much flawless in their picks for the playoff bracket which is not usually the case. It’ll be very exciting to see how this plays out and what team takes everyone by surprise and makes it further in the playoffs then they should. Bowl and Playoff season is the best time of the college football season. Hopefully this format for the playoffs stays because even though it could use a little tweaking it makes the season so much more interesting and exciting.
