The four-team College Football Playoff came into being in 2014 as a welcome improvement over the Bowl Championship Series. But it always was a math failure. The sport has been amazingly lucky with how rarely that has come back to bite it the way it did Sunday.
A four-team playoff in a sport with five power conferences never made sense. Getting the foot-dragging traditionalists in charge to simply accept a playoff of any kind was a massive endeavor, so everyone embraced a flawed four because it was better than a nonsensical two. But it wasn’t enough, and now we’re seeing the clearest ramifications of that to date.
Florida State, the 13–0 champion of the Atlantic Coast Conference, was kicked to the playoff curb in favor of 12–1 Alabama, champion of the Southeastern Conference. The top three selections were relatively easy: 13–0 Michigan, 13–0 Washington and 12–1 Texas, which defeated Alabama in September. Picking the fourth team was an incredibly difficult decision for the CFP selection committee to make—someone was going to get screwed regardless.
