Despite an undefeated season, Florida State didn’t make the College Football Playoff. Why?
Around 20 minutes away from Dallas, Texas sits the suburb of Grapevine. The city is home to DFW Airport, around 55,000 people, and it’s where one of college football’s biggest decisions was made. Every year since 2014, the College Football Playoff Committee has sat down at the end of the season to release their final rankings. They released this year’s the day after the dust had settled on a Sunday night where Florida State won handedly in a 6-16 defensive slugfest over Louisville.
The committee releases their top 25 at the same time every year. But, this year, it felt like the world was locked in on the top five. For about a decade, the top four college football teams got to compete in a playoff-style bracket in order to duke it out for a national championship. For years, the question was who got in, but this year– the true enigma was who got left out.
It was a true Armageddon scenario for the committee this year, with eight teams all vying for four spots. Ohio State, Michigan, Washington, Texas, Florida State, Oregon, Alabama, and Georgia all fighting to somehow fit in to a cramped postseason ballot. Some of the selections smoothed themselves out. Ohio State lost to Michigan, knocking them down to the seventh slot, and then Oregon was bested by Washington which naturally filtered them out. That left six.
Undefeated Georgia lost to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game, knocking them out. But one omission ended up getting the brute of the scrutiny. Florida State won its conference championship game yet still ended up being snubbed. When Jordan Travis went down with his injury against Northern Alabama, the Seminoles’ season looked all but lost.
Then when understudy Tate Rodemaker went down, a huge question began to arise. Is Florida State worthy of making the College Football Playoff? The selection committee ultimately didn’t think so, even with FSU completing an undefeated 13-0 season. In Florida State’s eyes, they’re good enough to compete with just about anybody. In the committee’s eyes, they’re not competitive enough with the rest of the teams selected to be in the playoffs.
“For many of us, today’s decision by the committee has forever damaged the credibility of the institution that is the College Football Playoff,” said Florida State University athletics director Michael Alford.
Speaking on ESPN, College Football Committee Chair Boo Corrigan said, “Florida State is a different team than they were through the first 11 weeks. An incredible season. But as you look at who they are as a team, right now, without Jordan Travis, without the offensive dynamic that he brings to it, they are a different team.”
What the committee has basically said is that despite having no losses on the season, the playoff is not just the four best teams that have performed throughout the year, but instead the four best teams at that current moment. This makes sense when you look at the committee’s other selection in Alabama. Texas beat Alabama earlier in the year by 10 points.
Despite Alabama throughout the season looking anemic and barely holding onto games like a 17-3 win over South Florida, the committee decided they were the third-best team at the time of selection. When we look at it from that point of view, Florida State’s omission seems to make sense.
This would be a completely different conversation if Travis was still healthy and under center for the Seminoles. But, the team’s three wins without their starting quarterback were far from impressive. It was the committee’s decision that Florida State, despite being undefeated, even with winning out with a revolving door at quarterback, and winning the ACC, was not fit enough to compete with the rest of the bracket.
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Some argue that this was not the committee’s decision to make, instead pitting the best overall teams against each other in lieu of the notion that it’s the top four teams at that moment in time. Well, in that case, we’d argue that that ideal ruins the back half of the season. If it’s the best team overall, the latter portion of the regular season is rendered useless, because teams can mess up all they want, lose any big game of their choosing– and in the end, they’re still chosen into the postseason because it all boils down to talent.
The committee has made it clear it doesn’t select teams that way. Instead, to see their viewpoint, we must take a look at why teams made it in. Michigan and Washington are automatic locks. Power Five schools that are undefeated with a functioning offense intact. The core elements of their team are there, and to their defense, they haven’t shown any sign of not being able to hang with the big dogs.
The playoff is not just the four best teams that have performed throughout the year, but instead the four best teams at that current moment
Alabama gets in because of their impressive win against Georgia, there’s no way around it. The Crimson Tide snapped the Bulldogs’ 29-game losing streak and ruined their undefeated season. By way of the football transitive property– known to us commonfolk as “parity”, Texas also must get in. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts.
Texas beat Alabama by 10 points earlier in the season, and is a one-loss Big 12 team that played against powerful competition. The Longhorns faced Oklahoma, Kansas, and Kansas State while going 2-1 against them. It’d be much more of an uproar and puzzling enigma if the burnt orange didn’t get in.
“That’s something you just can’t ignore,” one person said to ESPN. “At the end of the day, they scheduled them, they played them at their house, they won and they beat them — and that was big.”
That leaves one unlucky team.
Which we now know is Florida State.
Sure, to Seminoles fans it might seem like a betrayal of what the College Football Playoff even stands for.
“I am disgusted and infuriated with the committee’s decision today to have what was earned on the field taken away because a small group of people decided they knew better than the results of the games,” Mike Norvell said in a statement. “What is the point of playing games?”
One could realistically make the argument that the committee isn’t a fortune teller and can’t drop a team this late in the season for winning. You could also make the argument apropos to the fact that Florida State might’ve been so good they could still win a conference championship sans their starting quarterback. Either way, the committee decided that wasn’t the path they were going to take.
Someone was going to get hurt, and the world was going to riot in some way. This brings us to a fork in the road. One path leads to the fact that this proved that the four-team format was broken. Switching to a 12-team system next year eliminates a high probability of this happening. Eight solid teams at the top of college football is nearly every year. A higher number like 16, maybe isn’t.
“We’ve never had a year with eight teams at the top as good as these are, and the five conference champions 1 through 5, we’ve never had it come out that way,” CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. “My feeling is it probably was the toughest.”
Did Florida State really get snubbed? There’s two trains of thought as we’ve mentioned. The answer depends on who you ask. Did the committee do America a favor by not treating us to what was probably going to be a blowout game on New Year’s Day? Or did the Playoff committee set a dangerous precedent for college football going forward essentially saying that games don’t matter, but only their viewpoint does?
This was the type of message the establishment of the College Football Playoff set to eradicate in the first place. Prior to 2014, the national champion was voted on, leading to heated debates about who got snubbed. Now, we’re back to the same issue, with some pointing to the idea that the committee won’t even let the Seminoles prove themselves for a national championship.
At the end of the day, Florida State had their prove it games against Florida and Louisville. We hate to say it, but close wins against unranked opponents while not having a semblance of offense doesn’t bode well when you’re trying to make a case to the committee amongst a stacked pool of teams.
While Alabama was beating the number one team, Florida State was averaging an abysmal 3.4 yards per play against Louisville in the ACC Championship Game and the score was tied at three in the third quarter.
That’s the cold, hard truth.
“All of us had the emotional tie, like, ‘Holy s—, this is really going to suck to do this,'” one committee member told ESPN. “We talked about that over and over, and we just kept coming back [to] are they good enough with what they have to win a national championship, and it just kept coming back [to] we didn’t think they could.”
Somehow, fate seems to have impeccable timing. This would’ve been the year to start the 12-team playoff, but hey, maybe this was the way the four-team format was meant to bow out. What’s college football without some controversy? This isn’t the first time it’s happened either. In it’s fledgling days, the Playoff excluded TCU, dropping them from No. 3 to No. 6 because of the fact the Big 12 didn’t have a conference championship game.
So, the start and the finish are some of the most hotly contested decisions to date. We wouldn’t want it any other way. The committee has truly now set the precedent that a team can be undefeated and still not make the playoff. But for piggybackers of that argument, that shouldn’t matter. When the format shifts to a dozen teams next year, very slim are the odds that 13 teams will be undefeated, and at that point, an undefeated team should be able to sneak in granted the fact they’ve played some formidable competition.
All of us had the emotional tie, like, ‘Holy s—, this is really going to suck to do this’
However, the committee has stated that this might not be a true remedy for the issue of strong teams with solid resumes being left out.
“People look for perfection, and there will be some teams that don’t quite make it in 12 who are going to be asking some serious questions,” said Hancock, who will retire after this season. “I laugh because the easy answer is to say, ‘Yeah, I wish we had 12.’ But that’s not going to be the panacea that some of us might think it might be. It’s going to be great, don’t get me wrong, but it won’t be perfect.”
This takes us back to the 2021 season where Cincinnati made the Playoff only to be stuffed by No.1 Alabama– losing 6-27 in what was the Crimson Tide’s game for most of it.
Cincy might’ve deserved to make the playoffs that year, but they were clearly not one of the best four teams in the landscape for that season. That might’ve been what the committee this year was trying to avoid. After all, the name of the game is to make the parity as close as possible, especially when these are nationally televised games with millions of eyes gazing upon the committee’s decision.
Either way, it might be the last year the committee has to deal with this. A 12-team playoff means that more teams get to even themselves out during the span of the postseason, leading to a true winner, or in some cases losers. But, this year, Florida State gets to pack their bags and head south to Miami Gardens to play Georgia in the Orange Bowl. Even the Governor of Florida’s pleas go unanswered as some are set to call this the Snubbed Bowl. But that’s what makes college football… college football.
