With the 2023 college football season just around the corner, Alabama coach Nick Saban is still angry that the Crimson Tide were left out of the 2022 College Football Playoffs.
On a recent episode of "The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football Podcast," Saban sat down with Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt and discussed a number of hot topics in today’s college football. Saban weighed in on the flaws of the College Football Playoff Selection Committee claiming that they focus on overall record instead of power ratings and strength of schedule to get the “best teams,” using his team last year as an example.
“So but the problem with the way the whole system is, there’s no accounting for that, right,” Saban said. "All we do is take the teams that win the most games at the end of the year, put them into the playoffs," Saban said. "But do you really get the best teams? When they told me that we would be favored against three out of the four teams that got in the playoff, I'm like, 'Why aren't we in the playoffs?'"
Alabama would have been easily favored and probably won a matchup against Michigan, TCU and Ohio State but an underdog to eventual national champions Georgia. Instead of making the playoffs, Alabama settled for a blowout Sugar Bowl win over Kansas State, who beat a playoff team, TCU, in the Big 12 title game.
“Does that mean they have a better team,” Saban said. “Or does it mean that those people don’t know what they’re talking about? I really don’t know that. But I’m not being critical of anybody. But if you’re going to have parity, you have to have a better way of figuring out who has the best teams, not just because you lose two games on the last play of the game.”
“That knocks you out when you may be better than somebody else who didn’t have the same circumstances that they had played," he added.
The College Football Playoff Selection Committee held the two losses Alabama had last season as a reason to keep them out of the playoffs. The two losses by Alabama were to Tennessee and LSU on final plays by a combined four points.
Vegas odds and power ratings are not always correct as upsets do happen, and win-loss records don’t always point to who the better team is, but these are good tools to combine with common sense to help determine the true best four teams in college football.
When the College Football Playoffs expand to 12 teams in 2024, hopefully, it will put to rest all of the complaints and arguments about if the right teams were selected for the playoffs, but it probably won’t.
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