The first season of the College Football Playoff was considered by a lot of people to be a great success. It wasn't perfect, though, just as no method of selecting a national champion for college football really can be. The TCU Horned Frogs and Baylor Bears both can feel reasonably aggrieved by being left out of the field of four, and we heard from Baylor head coach Art Briles very quickly afterwards.
TCU’s Gary Patterson on missing College Football Playoff: ‘Conference championship games shouldn’t have mattered.’
It took a couple months, but the Horned Frogs head coach had a lot to say about how TCU getting left out.
Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports
Now, more than four months after the fact, TCU head coach Gary Patterson opened up to reporters about the Frogs’ snub, and surprise! He wasn’t a big fan of how things went down.
“I was told the reason we had a [selection] committee is we were going to take all that stuff out of it. [Conference] championship games shouldn’t have mattered,” Patterson said.
“Their job was to watch all this film and pick the four best teams no matter who you played, what you did. All the sudden it came down to, ‘Well, they played a championship game but they didn’t.’ That’s not what we were told. We were told they were going to pick the four best teams.”
TCU entered the final week of the regular season ranked third in the College Football Playoff rankings, and they went on to beat Iowa State, 55-3, in their final game. It wasn’t the stiffest of competition, but hardly a result that should move them down to sixth afterwards, something Patterson said he actually predicted before the game.
“You can’t say it was the body of work, then ... we beat somebody 55-3 and dropped from three to six. That means you studied everybody in the country and the body of work moved us to three. But we won 55-3. The other people’s body of work moved so much that they moved everybody up -- and us down -- in five days.”
To this point, the selection committee will only start releasing rankings in 2015 on Nov. 3, but there was talk they may not be a weekly occurrence like in 2014, something Patterson agreed with. The decision to move Ohio State ahead of Baylor and TCU wasn’t unreasonable in a vacuum, but moving the Horned Frogs from third down to sixth after a 52-point win looks horrible.
TCU went on to demolish Ole Miss, 42-3, in the Peach Bowl after there were questions whether it would show up to play in its bowl game after missing the playoff. While it's pretty clear Patterson would have rather TCU have made the field, he thinks maybe the Frogs gained something from it.
“There was that motto out there, if we would have been an Oklahoma and Texas with a larger fan base and sold more T-shirts, that we would have been in the playoffs,” Patterson speculated. “I think we gained more possibly by not being in the playoffs -- and how we handled it -- than by being in the playoffs.”
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