Georgia doesn't deserve final College Football Playoff spot despite strong showing
ATLANTA — Moments after a second gutting defeat to Alabama in 11 months in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Georgia coach Kirby Smart offered an impassioned case for his team to make the College Football Playoff.
“It boils down to one thing,” Smart said. “Do you want the best four teams or not?”
Sorry, Kirby, but prepare to be disappointed when the selection committee reveals the playoff field on Sunday because two-loss Georgia almost certainly won’t be there — and it shouldn’t be.
The Bulldogs came up short Saturday, 35-28, in an effort that should be considered highly commendable until their offense got stuck in neutral in the fourth quarter and Smart’s ill-advised fake punt on fourth-and-11 with 3:04 remaining went sideways.
But ultimately, that’s the point. For the playoff system to work for the benefit of college football; for it to be viable and legitimate, it can’t just be a beauty contest. The losses need to matter, and regardless of everything else that happened Saturday, Georgia lost the game it needed to win while others — notably Big 12 champion Oklahoma — won.
Too bad, Georgia.
“I think based on what I've seen, they're one of the four best teams in the country,” Alabama coach Nick Saban said. “And I also said I don't want to play them again, which is the ultimate compliment, I think, that I can give them.”
It is quite a compliment to Georgia that Alabama, which had blown out everyone this season until it finally matched up against a team with similar speed, physicality and skill, needed to dig deep Saturday to overcome a 28-14 deficit in the third quarter.
And the fact that this game wasn’t decided until one final Hail Mary heave from Georgia quarterback Jake Fromm gave SEC cheerleaders plenty of reason to suggest that the selection committee should make Georgia the first two-loss team of the playoff era to get in.
“#FourBestTeams @CFBPlayoff,” SEC spokesman Chuck Dunlap tweeted before the fourth quarter, a message that harkens back to the very beginning of the current postseason system and the nebulous definition of the word “best” as it applies to college football.
Back when the playoff format was being hammered out among the conference commissioners in 2012 and 2013, one of the big sticking points was whether it would include only conference champions or whether the committee would have latitude to put in an otherwise outstanding team that didn’t win its league.
Former SEC commissioner Mike Slive, who passed away in May, staunchly believed that the committee shouldn’t be restricted to conference champions, in part because he knew the SEC would be more likely than other leagues to get two teams in.
And that’s exactly what happened last year when Alabama lost its final regular-season game to Auburn but made the playoff basically by sitting at home while Auburn lost to Georgia in the SEC title game. But the reality is, it wasn’t the strength of the SEC or how good Alabama looked all season that got the Crimson Tide a free pass.
It was the fact that the selection committee lacked viable alternatives when Ohio State, a two-loss team with a blowout defeat to Iowa, won the Big Ten championship game. Had unbeaten but underwhelming Wisconsin won instead, the Badgers would have been in and Alabama would have been out — even though it was clearly one of the nation’s four best teams.
This year, there is no such problem.
With Alabama, Clemson and Notre Dame all unbeaten, there’s only room for one more team. And with Oklahoma taking care of business against Texas earlier Saturday, 39-27, and avenging its only prior defeat, this should be a no-brainer for the committee.
Is Georgia a better football team than Oklahoma? My sense is that the Bulldogs probably are. Ever since their 20-point loss to LSU on Oct. 13, they’ve blown out ranked teams in Florida and Kentucky, had a laughably easy time with Auburn and forced Alabama to play its eyeballs out to beat them. No doubt about it, they’re an impressive group.
Oklahoma, meanwhile, is undeniably an incomplete football team with a historically elite offense but a defense that can give up 40 points to literally anybody. If we were putting them on a neutral field, I’d probably pick Georgia. But how much of that is reality versus an institutional bias toward the SEC, which sometimes gets proven to be a house of cards during bowl season?
For the playoff to work, you can't rely on feeling or intuition. You have to go with the data, which says that Oklahoma went 12-1 against a good enough schedule while Georgia missed out on the opportunities it needed to cash in — including Saturday when it coughed up a two-touchdown lead. In the end, Georgia lost - yes, lost - to the two best teams on its schedule in Alabama and LSU. Its signature wins are against Florida and Kentucky. That's not good enough.
“Give that coach across the sideline a vote who he doesn't want to play,” Smart said. “He'll start with us. I promise you, you don't want to play us. It's not our decision. It's their decision. But put the four best football teams in.”
Smart isn’t wrong. Alabama probably would prefer to play someone other than Georgia again. But why should they have to?
Georgia had its chance to make that statement and blew it. Otherwise, what was the point of playing Saturday’s game in the first place?