Drellberg, the committee ditched the ‘conference champion’ criteria a few years back when Bama didn’t even play in their conf championsip game and still made the playoff. They used to lambast the Big 12 for not having a conference game at all, the “extra data point” as they called it, like it mattered to them, until it didn’t matter to them.
Other criteria that used to matter to them but no longer matters, game control, quality wins, quality losses, my favorite was “big boy football”. AKA, defense. But you don’t hear that one anymore ever now that SEC teams give up big points to any quarterback with a pulse. Turns out all those mighty SEC defenses were just playing against inferior quarterbacks for years. About the time Texas A&M and Johnny Manziel and Missouri came into the SEC. Manziel was roasting SEC defenses, and I think Mizz played in the SEC conference championship game their first year in the conference.
It’s not just this years Bama/LSU shootout, but going back several years now. Oklahoma alone put 34 on Bama last year, 48 on Georgia in 2017, 35 on Auburn the year before, 45 on Bama in 2014. No more “big boy football” as they called it.
The committee and their ever changing criteria.
JohnC,
Thanks for responding. It is growing increasingly evident that the CFP is ruining college football. Alabama has a great football team even without TT — and I “hate” Alabama and the whole SEC. It should not be the case that one close loss against another top 5 team ends their season — no playoff and no playing for the conference championship.
But more to the point, the playoff is the ruin of conferences more generally. And if I were the conference commissioners of the Big10 and Pac12, I would be talking very seriously about going back to the old Rose Bowl arrangement to pit the two conference champions, and to heck with the CFP. More specifically, I would invite into the Big10 these teams: either Miami or FL (not both), GA Tech, Pitt and one other eastern large market team (Boston College?); and into the PAC12 I would invite: Texas, A&M, Baylor, and Houston. The two conferences would then command >40 of the top 50 metropolitan markets in the country — not just for football of course but across the board. What markets would the SEC have? OKC?
I guess my point is that this CFP nonsense can go on only so long before common sense prevails. ESPN makes an obscene amount of money off of their relationship with the SEC and so of course they over-hype the SEC. Why does everyone else put up with this foolishness, which isn’t even good for the SEC?????