Florida State’s exclusion from the College Football Playoff has been a decision fraught with controversy, as the Seminoles became the first undefeated Power 5 team to be left out of the Playoff in its 10-season history.
Ultimately, the selection committee appeared to penalize Florida State for losing quarterback Jordan Travis to a season-ending injury, as one-loss Alabama’s defeat of Georgia in the SEC championship game was enough to jump over the Seminoles in the CFP rankings.
Many people within the college football community believe Florida State was robbed of a chance to prove it could overcome Travis’s injury, including a former Seminoles coach. Jimbo Fisher criticized the committee for judging teams on perception instead of simply using a team’s record as the most important factor.
“We’ve taken football and turned it into ice skating,” Fisher said, via Jim Henry of the Tallahassee Democrat. “It’s wrong.”
Maria Lysaker/USA Today network
Florida State won two games without Travis, but the committee wasn’t impressed by its narrow wins over Florida and No. 16 Louisville in the ACC championship game.
However, Fisher doesn’t think the committee should scrutinize how a team wins over the fact that it did win.
“Football is about what happens between the white lines,” Fisher said. “We’ve set it back because of opinions not based on truth. It’s not ice skating. It’s not [subjective] judgements. We are messing with the game.”
While many observers believe Florida State would not make it far in the Playoff without Travis, Fisher said the Seminoles deserve the opportunity.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen on the field,” he said.
Fisher was head coach at Florida State for eight years, going 83–23 and guiding the Seminoles to the 2013 BCS national championship. That was the last college football season in which a national champion was determined using the two-team BCS system before expanding to the four-team College Football Playoff the following year.
