If SEC tries to game CFP with easy non-conference schedules, it will fail

It took about three nanoseconds after the College Football Playoff bracket was announced for ESPN’s production truck to throw it over to Nick Saban so that the former Alabama coach could spill some sour grapes all over the selection committee’s decision to pick SMU over the Crimson Tide for the last spot in the field.

“If we don’t take strength of schedule into consideration, is there any benefit to scheduling really good teams in the future?” he said. “Here at Alabama, we’re supposed to play Notre Dame, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Florida State in the future outside the league. Those are great games for fans to see, and that’s what I think we should be doing in college football is creating more good inventory for great games that people are interested in.

‘But do you enhance people wanting to do that – what’s the athletic director going to do? He may go cancel all those games now, knowing the SEC is tough enough.”

Get ready, because this is the talking point that will reverberate inside the SEC as it comes to terms with getting only three bids in the inaugural 12-team CFP. This is the justification commissioner Greg Sankey will use to pull all kinds of power plays on his fellow commissioners as he tries to strong-arm changes to the format that will benefit the SEC. This is the excuse athletics directors and coaches will use for the simple fact that they lost games they should have won.

But there’s one massive problem with Saban’s screed: It’s completely illogical.

Alabama didn’t miss the CFP because its schedule was too hard. If anything, Alabama missed the CFP because its schedule was too easy.

Easier than SMU’s? No, of course not. If you believe that Alabama’s 9-3 record was more deserving of the last CFP bid than SMU’s 11-2, that’s fine. Reasonable minds can disagree on that particular judgment, but the committee’s decision was not unusual or surprising given that the Mustangs lost the ACC championship game on a last-second, 56-yard field goal while Alabama sat at home Saturday and risked nothing.

These are conundrums the committee will face every single year in a 12- or 14-team format. When you get that far down in the rankings, there will be difficult choices between flawed teams without clear differences between them.

But instead of thinking about what kind of treatment SMU deserved, let’s consider what Alabama could have done to make a better argument over SMU.

Well for one thing, it could have simply beaten either Vanderbilt or Oklahoma. A 10-2 Alabama with only one bad loss almost certainly gets in. But beyond that, the only other thing Alabama could have done was to go outside the conference and beat a good team. Instead, its non-conference wins over Western Kentucky, South Florida, Wisconsin and Mercer did not boost either Alabama’s or the SEC’s image enough to erase two losses that playoff-worthy teams should not have on their resume.

The idea that Saban and other SEC-affiliated propagandists are trying to peddle is that the way to offset or compete against teams like SMU, Notre Dame and Indiana cruising into the Playoff this year is to make their own schedules easier.

Though that sounds good, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Because at the end of the day, Alabama’s fate – and Ole Miss’ for that matter as another three-loss team that believes it got short-shrift – had nothing to do with non-conference games. It had everything to do with losing to mediocre SEC teams. And guess what? There are going to be mediocre SEC teams on their schedule in 2025, 2026, 2027 and however many years the conference exists.

If the argument is that SEC teams have it so much tougher than everyone else and should be afforded grace for bad losses, the question should be: How many losses are acceptable to make the playoff? Three? Four?

And if what you want out of this system is total impunity to lose 24-3 to the worst Oklahoma team of the 21st century or, in Ole Miss’ case, to be the only SEC win all year for a bottom-feeder like Kentucky, there is only one way you can convince the public to buy it. You have no choice but to go beat the hell out of other power conferences and earn that benefit of the doubt.

The frustration is understandable. People who support Alabama, Ole Miss, South Carolina, etc., believe their team is better than several teams that got into the playoff. And they’re livid that Indiana, which didn’t have a top-25 win and got hammered by Ohio State, didn’t really face much scrutiny for its bid.

Maybe that’s true. But where is the actual evidence?

The only team among those three who actually had a real argument was South Carolina, which just last week went to Clemson and beat the ACC champions. But South Carolina’s problem was that it lost head-to-head to both Ole Miss and Alabama, and you couldn’t have reasonably expected them to jump the Gamecocks over the other two.

What, was the committee supposed to take all three? No chance. Not when Ole Miss and Alabama had records littered with questionable losses and both blew clear opportunities late in the season to secure their place in the field.

Part of having a 12-team playoff is accepting that margins are going to be thin and circumstances will change every year. This time, the cards didn’t fall the right way for the SEC because of just a couple of easily reversible results. Next time, it might work in their favor. But if the SEC tries to game the system by dumbing down non-conference schedules, it will fail.

If you believe the SEC is so tough that you’re going to lose a couple of games no matter what, the only answer is to beat up on other power conferences and earn that benefit of the doubt. The SEC had remarkably few quality non-conference wins this year, and two of them were Georgia beating Georgia Tech and Clemson. Had the Bulldogs lost the SEC championship to Texas on Saturday, those games would have undeniably helped them stay in the field and probably with a pretty good seed.

That’s the formula for SEC teams to convince the committee that their 9-3 is better than someone else’s 10-2. But if they want to take their ball and go home, they’ll deserve whatever happens to them.