After that thriller of an SEC Championship game, the drumbeat began from across the college football world: Georgia belongs in the College Football Playoff.
5 years show it’s gonna be really, really hard to make the Playoff with 2 losses
Georgia’s the latest to prove it.
Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports
It came from UGA coach Kirby Smart:
“It boils down to one thing: do you want the four best teams in or not? It’s that simple. They sat at home last year and got to go in the game while everyone else was beating each other up, and they had a good football team. Give that coach across the sideline a vote who he doesn’t want to play. It will start with us. I promise you he don’t want to play us. It’s not our decision, it’s their decision.”
It came from various talking heads:
Hell, it even came from Nick Saban:
But when the field was unveiled, none of that mattered, in large part because of something really simple.
At some point, there will be a two-loss Playoff team. Auburn could’ve done it in 2017.
But for that to happen, there’s likely going to need to be some 2007-style weirdness. This year — with three undefeated teams and two one-loss conference champions — the Dawgs erased much of the margin to get in the Playoff with that second loss.
Committee chair Rob Mullens said after the decision that the committee thought Georgia, Ohio State, and Oklahoma were really close. That means OU’s status as a conference champ helped it top the Dawgs.
If Georgia had lost to LSU by two instead of 20, maybe the Dawgs could’ve ranked ahead of Oklahoma and gotten yet another shot at the Tide, but regardless, these two losses proved one too many.
Honestly, that Georgia was ranked fifth should tell you something.
They were really close to making the field, closer than some top two-loss teams.
2014: The first No. 1 team in CFP history, Mississippi State, got beat by Alabama and Ole Miss in November. They didn’t even win their division, but did finish No. 7 in the CFP ranking.
2015: Stanford’s ugly loss to Northwestern in the beginning of the season really came back to bite them. Despite winning 11 of their next 12 games and beating USC in the Pac-12 title game, they would only finish sixth in the committee’s final rankings, behind the Iowa that lost the Big Ten title to Michigan State.
2016: The Nittany Lions lost a squeaker against Pitt and got blown out against Michigan. But then they beat Ohio State and Wisconsin to come close to making the Playoff. They got trumped by a one-loss Pac-12 champion and the Ohio State they’d beaten. Huh? It’s simple:
Ohio State (which for the umpteenth time has only one loss) has a close, quality loss to the Nittany Lions and wins over Nos. 6, 7 (Oklahoma), and 8. If we want to talk about trump cards, Penn State could have a few with a 13th data point, a conference title, and a head-to-head win. But those don’t kick in when the most basic criteria in the Playoff hierarchy isn’t met. Having two losses doesn’t even let you enter in a legitimate conversation about which resume is better, because your win-loss cover letter has a major typo on it.
2017: We didn’t end up with the total anarchy that would have been a two-loss Auburn against a Bama team it’d beaten. But we did get a pissed-off Ohio State fanbase that had an argument and was sitting right there at No. 5. Guess how many losses those Buckeyes had, though.
And that brings us back to 2018.
Through all the screaming and the resume parsing and all that good stuff, Georgia isn’t in the field. Its two losses are a big reason why.
The committee says it wants to get the four best teams in the dance. On paper, Georgia probably is one of those teams.
But they’re not the only good team, and that win/loss record has to matter.
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