The 10 Worst Things About the Florida State Travesty
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A t noon on Sunday, the College Football Playoff committee announced that the fourth spot in its four-team tournament , which begins on January 1, would be filled not by undefeated ACC champion Florida State but instead by one-loss Alabama, which joins Michigan, Texas, and Washington. It was a difficult decision — this was the first time there were six logical competitors for four slots, and any decision would have been met with frustration and outrage — but the path the committee chose was the worst possible one and has caused an uproar in Florida and elsewhere that shows no signs of abating. This screwup was the result of bad decisions that will lead to even bigger bad decisions in the future. It was, in every possible way, a disaster.
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Let’s keep it simple: Here are ten objectively horrible things about the committee’s decision:
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(1) They broke the one thing the playoff was invented to fix. For nearly 100 years, college football had no playoff system — it was the only major North American sport without one. During most of that time, this was not only considered no big deal but in fact part of college football’s appeal. As the Ringer recently pointed out , Walter Camp, an architect of the sport, once said football “is not a game where a great national championship is possible or desirable.” But as the sport got bigger and went more national, and the stakes got higher for everyone, the fact that teams could win every single one of their games and still not even get a chance to play for a championship became unacceptable. So the powers that be instituted a two-team playoff, then a four-team playoff, and, starting next year, a 12 -team one. But this year, Florida State, a heavyweight major conference team (for now, but we’ll get into that) with a history of success and championships, went 13-0 and still got snubbed. By choosing a one-loss team over an undefeated Power Five team, the committee went against the whole point of a playoff—the reason everybody wanted a playoff in the first place. If we’re going to leave out an undefeated Power Five team, then why are we even doing this?
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(2) They invalidated the entire regular season and devalued the playoffs.
One of the biggest concerns about next year’s expanded playoffs is that they will make the regular season — particularly the conference title games, which were all riveting this year, in large part because of the intrigue about what they meant for the playoff committee — besides the point. Alabama and Georgia played an incredible game on Saturday afternoon in Atlanta ( I was there , chewing through my lip), and the primary reason it was so incredible was that both teams knew they were playing for their seasons, with the loser surely out of the playoffs entirely. Under next year’s format, they’d both be in and merely playing for seeding.
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And what was the point, really, of a single game Florida State played this year? There’s a whole bunch of money being spent, by fans, by network executives, by universities, really by all of us — on regular-season games that we were just told don’t actually matter. This also hurts the appeal of upcoming playoffs. If an undefeated ACC champ doesn’t get to be involved, is this really legitimate? Whoever wins the playoffs will always have an asterisk next to their name. That’s not the eventual victor’s fault. It’s the committee’s.
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(3) Their explanation made no sense. Even allowing for the can’t-win nature of his assignment, Boo Corrigan, the chair of the CFP committee, did not acquit himself well. His primary explanation for choosing Florida State came down to nonsense reasoning. “One of the questions that we ask from a coaching standpoint is, ‘Who do you want to play? Who do you not want to play?’” he said. As noted by Athletic recruiting expert Ari Wasserman , this sounds dangerously close to choosing teams by their recruiting rankings rather than how they did on the field. If “Who do you want to play?” is the most important metric, you might as well just pick Vegas odds favorites, which would have left out not only Florida State but probably also fellow undefeated Washington. Georgia, who finished No. 6, would be clear favorites over both teams. (And probably even No. 1 Michigan.) By this measurement, Georgia should be in the playoffs too. But they’re not. Because “who do you want to play?” is a ridiculous measure to choose a playoff team, antithetical to the very reason we watch sports in the first place. Imagine if Eli Manning and the Giants had their Super Bowl trophy taken away because other teams were more scared of facing the Patriots than them. Corrigan and the committee couldn’t even stick to this absurd reasoning, because, well, how could they?
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(4) They rewarded Alabama. More than any other school, Alabama, hoe of Nick Saban, Bear Bryant, and Forrest Gump, is considered to get the benefit of the doubt on everything in college football — from scheduling to rankings to TV assignments to calls on the field. It’s bad enough that Florida State got left out; that they were left out for Alabama , the dark lord of the sport that has gotten its away in everything for several decades now, adds to the notion that the sports will always play favorites.
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(5) They made Florida State into a sympathetic victim. As bad as you feel for the Seminoles players, let us not forget that Florida State is the university of Jameis Winston, of The Hunting Ground , of the infamous days of #FSUTwitter. This is the fanbase that Slate ’s Josh Levin notoriously called “the new GamerGate.” These are the people we’re feeling bad for? Florida State has been wronged, which allows Florida State fans to comfortably slip into the new American default state of being Aggrieved Online. We’re going to be hearing about this for the rest of our lives. Thanks.
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(6) They incentivized teams to hide or ignore injuries.
The committee’s stated reason for omitting Florida State was the leg injury that quarterback Jordan Travis, the team’s best offensive player, suffered three weeks ago. That injury did not stop Florida State from winning, but Corrigan still explicitly said that the team was worse without him and therefore not good enough to make the playoff. Once again, this was speculation in the place of fact from the committee. And their reasoning will now encourage teams to be far less transparent with their injury reports (something that’s already a problem). If you think your team will be punished for an injured player — so much so that it doesn’t matter if you win without them — why would you ever admit they’ve got a problem? Or, if a player is slightly hurt, why would you rest him so he can get healthier when a group of middle-aged men in a boardroom in Texas will randomly decide your team is worse without him? College football is about to be full of dead parrots:
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(7) They may have irrevocably pushed the sport even closer to NFL-style megaconferences.
You may have noticed that the four teams that did make the playoffs, will, as of next year, belong to just two conferences: The Big Ten (Michigan and Washington) and the SEC (Alabama and Texas). This is not a coincidence. The expansion that has roiled college football the last few seasons has turned both conferences into supersized power brokers who may end up eating everything in sight and leaving everyone else just trying to stay alive. One of those newly also-ran conferences, the ACC, just watched its undefeated champion, Florida State, lose out to Alabama. Florida State had already threatened over the summer to leave the ACC itself unless it received a higher share of revenues, and this turn of events will surely turn the school against its conference even further. Wouldn’t they rather be in the SEC? If they do end up departing, it would essentially kill the ACC and bring us that much closer to two mega-conferences, like the NFC and the AFC, which is great for the schools in them but death to the ones that aren’t. True, the ACC would charge Florida State a $120 million penalty for leaving before its rights deal ends in 2036. But there may be a terrifying remedy for that …
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(8) This could introduce college football to the world of private equity. The excellent college football reporter Matt Brown has been chronicling this an existential threat to college football for a while now. If Florida State really did want to get out of the ACC, it would have trouble coming up with $120 million on its own. So it has partnered with JP Morgan to raise equity and give the giant financial firm a stake in its athletic department. As Brown points out, this could be a nightmare for college sports :
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This scenario should be highly alarming to sports fans. Private equity doesn’t have a great track record with many of the other industries it’s gotten involved in, from media companies to health care to the housing market. Selling an equity stake to a third party also means that Florida State athletics will lose some measure of control over the operations of the athletic department. What happens if JPMorgan wants to raise ticket prices, or drop the women’s soccer team? What happens if Florida State can’t secure a huge bump in their TV revenue? What assets will be stripped for parts?
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All it takes is one school to go this route for the rest of them to do the same. The CFP committee infuriated Florida State on Sunday, just enough that they may well do something drastic — and potentially ruinous.
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(9) They did it for ratings.
At the end of the day, leaving the SEC — the conference with the most dedicated, crazed fans — without a team in the playoff looks like it just wasn’t an option for the committee. For a sport that has given itself over to television executives entirely , it’s another sign that decisions will be made for reasons that have less to do with competitive fairness and more with making CBS, FOX and (mostly) ESPN happy. Suffice it to say, that puts the sport’s very credibility on the line — a particularly dangerous thing to do as the playoff expands next year.
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(10) They were just cowards about the whole thing.
It’s been a common refrain that under next year’s 12-team playoff format, this whole situation would have been avoided. But this strain of thinking ignores the fact that a 12-team playoff would result in the same conflicts of interest as a four-team one. Again, the SEC and Big Ten will get every break to make TV networks happy. Which raises the question: If the new format weren’t debuting next year, would the committee have actually made this decision? If they had to live with this system, would they have torn it down like they did by omitting Florida State? It’s almost as if the committee decided that they’d wring more money out by choosing Alabama, and could withstand the criticism because next year promises a supposedly fairer shake for everyone. It feels like a store being looted before a going-out-of-business sale. Which seems about right. This is the final season of college football as we know it, before it gives itself over to its worst demons. Everything must go. And thus everything has.
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The committee would not leave the SEC out. There is a good chance that even if the Florida State QB was healthy and playing the committee would have left them out. It is in fact a travesty.
theathletic.com /5108140/2023/12/03/college-football-playoff-florida-state-alabama/
Why college football’s identity crisis resulted in Florida State being cheated
Ari Wasserman 6-7 minutes 12/3/2023
This sport’s identity crisis has existed since the inception of the College Football Playoff a decade ago, but never before have we had to come to terms with it the way we did on Sunday.
That identity crisis? Whether the teams that play for the national championship should be the best or the most deserving. In the nine years before this season, the best and most deserving seamlessly became one, resulting in cut-and-dried decisions on which teams would make the field.
In the final season of the four-team era — before it expands to 12 in 2024 — the CFP committee was charged with a very difficult decision that was guaranteed to result in a worthy team feeling cheated. The committee, for the first time, was actually going to have to choose what it values more — the teams that earned it or the teams that look the best on TV.
Florida State , the most deserving, became the first unbeaten Power 5 conference champion left out of the field. The Seminoles were the ones left feeling cheated.
And with that one decision, the committee didn’t just choose teams in a given year. It revealed to the world the ugly truth about college football — this sport is a beauty contest where decisions on which teams can win the national title are sometimes made as much in a cozy hotel boardroom in Grapevine, Texas, as they are on the actual field.
The Playoff field is as follows: 1. Michigan , 2. Washington , 3. Texas , 4. Alabama .
Michigan and Washington made it through the season unscathed. Texas lost a nail-biter in its rivalry game to Oklahoma , and the Longhorns, wait for it, beat Alabama.
We wouldn’t be having this discussion if Florida State’s star quarterback, Jordan Travis , didn’t break his leg two weeks ago. But the Seminoles team that just beat Louisville 16-6 in the ACC Championship Game was relying on a third-string quarterback. The win was far from impressive.
The committee, knowing it was going to unjustly break someone’s heart, decided to break Florida State’s. In that room on Saturday night, the committee members decided the Seminoles weren’t good enough for us.
That’s not what sports are supposed to be about. And with the four-team CFP era ending after this season, fans will be viewing it as a broken system that needed to be changed rather than the first frontier of the modernization of the sport.
It’s very easy to fathom why the committee couldn’t choose between Alabama and Texas. Alabama is a one-loss SEC champion that beat Georgia on Saturday, ending the Bulldogs’ 29-game winning streak. Texas, a one-loss Big 12 champion, beat Alabama by 10 points in Tuscaloosa in September.
Many fans were hoping that the SEC would be left out entirely for the first time, but the committee — charged with picking the “best teams” — couldn’t ignore what the ultra-talented Crimson Tide accomplished. But if Alabama goes, how could the committee leave the team out that beat it?
It couldn’t.
This is probably the path of least resistance. Outside of Florida State fans, the general population will move on convinced that the Playoff semifinals will be more entertaining with more high-level teams. The best teams, as they say, won out.
The problem with choosing the best is that it’s entirely subjective and ultimately misleading given this is a sport that routinely features unpredictable results and unforeseen runs. The last time a team was relying on a third-string quarterback heading into the College Football Playoff — Ohio State in the inaugural season of the four-team field — won the national title.
The difference between those Buckeyes and this Florida State team was that Ohio State won the Big Ten title game that year 59-0. Florida State was in a close game with Louisville that was, quite frankly, not an enjoyable watch for people who love the excitement of big-time offense. Perception, wrongly, became reality.
“Florida State is a different team,” CFP committee chair Boo Corrigan said after the field was revealed. “You look at who they are as a team without Jordan Travis — they are a different team.”
That’s a well-informed opinion that’s probably true. It, however, is not a fact. You could make the case that Florida State is so good that it won a Power 5 conference championship game with a true freshman quarterback. In the CFP, Florida State would have gotten second-string quarterback Tate Rodemaker back with a month to prepare for a semifinal game.
Florida State was robbed.
And its head coach didn’t hide his disappointment.
“I am disgusted and infuriated with the committee’s decision today to have what was earned on the field taken away because a small group of people decided they knew better than the results of the games,” Mike Norvell said in a statement. “What is the point of playing games?”
As difficult as it would have been, the right thing for the committee to do would have been to leave Alabama out. Most of us know in our gut that the Crimson Tide — the most talented team, on paper, in the sport — are one of the four best teams. Alabama is certainly equipped to win the whole thing.
But Alabama — like peers Georgia and Ohio State, teams with a wealth of raw talent on their rosters — lost a game (at home). Better teams have been left out in the past than this Alabama team because losses had consequences.
Alabama’s loss to Texas didn’t have a consequence because we’re enamored with the SEC and what it means to beat Georgia. It didn’t matter that Alabama — though perceived to be an entirely different team in September — lost to the Longhorns. That game could have been a Playoff game in September. It turns out it was an exhibition.
There are plenty of people who are against the expansion of the field to 12 because of the sanctity of the regular season. But if the games in the regular season aren’t going to matter when it comes to picking the final four, then there are no consequences for expanding to 12.
The regular season didn’t decide who made it this year. Thirteen people did.
The games mattered. The results didn’t.
Just a terrible choice. It's impossible to defend as anything other than "we need an SEC team".
They would rather piss off Florida State fans than Alabama fans.
Trouble for them is now a lot more than just Florida State fans are not happy with this.
I generally root for whoever is play FSU, and this doesn't sit well with me. I didn't read the entirety of the article, but I generally agree with the caption of each paragraph. FSU earned a spot in the playoffs.
The irony, in all of this, is that all analysts I have heard discussing Texas, believe that Texas would not beat Bama if they played now. My assumption, going into last Saturday, was that if Bama beat Georgia, Bama leaps into the playoffs with Washington and Michigan. The question, in my mind, was whether or not they'd drop Georgia out and move FSU in. Color me shocked. Not only did they leave Georgia out, they put Texas in, when the gurus all agree that Texas can't beat Bama now. You'd think they at least give FSU a shot at the giant.
Our crackpot governor, DeSantis is planning on laying off 1,000 state employees and is asking for $1 million to sue the committee that made the decision to eliminate Florida State.
At least he's consistent. Consistently stupid about everything.
Remember a few months back when the right wingers on here declared that DeSantis was their candidate and proclaimed him a certain winner?
I sure do, three in particular with one commenting on my article on DeSantis screw ups that I, and dems were attacking him because was such a winner and another that argued that his history of blacks that was accurate that a major article agreed it was except on sentence was totally different than the DeSantis orignal which changed everything but they kept glossing over it...
LOL, dumb asses.
Totally.
They don't seem to talk about him anymore.
should be ONE sentence not ''on sentence.
Nope, why talk about a loser?
I thought this was about the college football playoffs
Looks like I was wrong.